This is how I knew it was gonna be a bad trip: A few days before our scheduled visit, while I was still blissfully sitting in my own damn house, Mom didn’t pick up her phone on either of my attempts. Which usually means 1) her phone has died or 2) it’s a bad day.

“I just couldn’t call you back yesterday,” she said when I got a hold of her. “It was just one of those days where I would’ve cried and…” Here she started crying a little. “I was abusive toward the gardener.”

She quickly walked back ‘abusive’ to ‘I yelled at him.’ And during the actual blow-by-blow recounting, didn’t seem to yell at him so much as demand to know why he’d agreed to set up a play structure in her back yard and then spent a few hours not doing very much at all.

She’d wanted the structure up in time for my kids to get there and play on it. Finding this guy picking his butt in her back yard at the end of the day, job undone? Something snapped.

“It seems reasonable to be angry, and to ask the guy why he hadn’t done anything,” I said, wondering if she was drastically minimizing her reaction in the retelling, which is one kind of worrisome, or if she was inappropriately wracked with guilt over something that wasn’t too bad, which is another.

“Well, he’s not very smart, and I knew that going into our relationship,” she cried harder at this admission. “And after I yelled at him, he told me he hadn’t understood how to put the structure together. He was too embarrassed to say anything. So he just stood out there all afternoon, not knowing what to do.”

Longtime readers will know my mom had an older brother with severe physical and mental disabilities. You might guess how lashing out at him has some deep and painful roots for her.

“I just have to do better,” Mom said. “Remember (gardener) can’t do complicated tasks, get someone else to do the difficult stuff, keep (gardener) for the stuff he can do. I shouldn’t have gotten so angry. It’s just that I wanted so badly to be the fun grandma when your kids got here.”

“GIVE THAT GUY TO THE UNIVERSE,” I announced over her litany of plans to rearrange her whole life to accommodate the gardener. “I’m sure there’s someone with extra energy who can take care of him. Your plate’s full.”

She went shocked-quiet, then laughed. “I know it’s wrong to get in a position that you’re taking care of me. But it’s wild to see my own self come raging at me in the form of my child’s voice.”

I understood. When I’d had my come-apart in the midst of childcare, she’d told me to give lots of people to the universe, in that same sassy-but-not-messing-around tone of  Move over. I am here at Jesus’ request to take your wheel.

And honestly, I was so glad to hear her agree. Mom’s unrelenting need to care for my Dad is intertwined with her brother’s life and death at home. At the beginning of the phone call, it seemed possible Mom would be unable to let go of the gardener either. But she did! Or at least she said she would.

I didn’t say anything about her ‘fun grandma’ comment, but JFK, my kids are pretty aged out of backyard swing sets as the height of cool. Her notion she’s in the running for the Fun Grandma title pushed me off balance for it’s sheer lack of reality testing. Once, she wore the crown. She is so far from it now.

That was the last bit of conversation we had. My mother spent the next 40 minutes talking. A stream-of-consciousness onslaught, so pressured and fast there were no pauses or chance to exchange information. I sat on the other end nearly silent as she spoke, struck with how she’s entered a depth of isolation so dark that her speech pattern has passed the limits of social acceptability.

You know the stereotype – the person who grabs your arm as they’re talking so you can’t get away. You can’t process the content because the manner in which it’s delivered is so desperate you find yourself inching backwards. My mother talks like that now.

Midway through her rant, and only tangentially related to what she’d said directly previous, she began crying again, this time over an early childhood memory.

How strange, to witness my nearly 70-year-old mother weep over a slight from her own mother, something so far in the past that all the other participants are long dead. Those words still have the power to inform her current behavior, to break her heart all over again. God, that scared me about my job as a parent.

After talking at great length, she switched abruptly to the HEY HOW’S YOUR LIFE? line of questioning.

I found I couldn’t even make shit up. My brain, fried from stress and lack of typical conversational framework, zero’d out.

OK, truth. It was uglier than that. I didn’t want her to know anything about me.

My mother obviously has enough on her plate. She doesn’t have the energy to process my life. It’s practical kindness to not to strain her system with my life when she’s barely managing the basics of her own.

Maybe that’s true? I do fear getting halfway through a story and having her say, “I gotta go,” which has happened more times than not over the past few years. The abrupt disconnect hurts worse than never taking the risk of telling her anything.

But if we’re completely honest, she feels dangerous somehow.

It feels as if my old mother is teeming under the skin of her current self, desperately sending me coded messages, like some sort of prisoner.

Her strange confession about abuse, paired with the story of her own mother’s harsh words, are pinpoints of a cryptic prophecy about her inability to contain cruelty under duress, how her mother did it before her. As if my mother is warning me that the person she’s become  cannot afford to let me go. But maybe the person she used to be needs me to protect myself.

Anyway, I got off the phone in a daze. She called back later in the evening, sounding energized, and wanted to make a bunch of vacation plans, peppering me with a hundred questions about what I thought the kids would want to do at her house.  By the end of the night, it felt as if we had switched places, and I was the exhausted caregiver.  I probably should have known to stay home.

But I didn’t, and we got in the car the next morning and drove to visit.