This is so long, rambling and grim, I hereby give you a pass on reading it. I just had to document for my own sanity.

We left the house early, with the plan to meet my mother at a near-to-her shopping mall around noon. We’d meet for a lunch get-together and then do some school shopping for the kids.

Some pre-planned details for you:

1. We live in a semi-rural area sans mall, and my teen and tween kids were aglow at the notion of wandering a giant building with shops dedicated to their tween/teen clothing preferences and Orange Julius style fantasies.

2. The mall in question is situated en route to my parents’ house, so that if we went there first, we’d have to double back. Plus, my mom lives to shop for other people. Why not meet there and start our visit?

3. Mom asked that we call her when we were an hour out, so she could leave my father with a caretaker and get going herself, and we’d all arrive at roughly the same time for lunch.

4. Mom had the caretaker come from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm.

Simple, right?

We hit a little traffic, and so I didn’t call until 11:20.

“I’m already on my way,” Mom said in her Plans have changed! tone I remembered so well from childhood.

I laughed, giving into the helplessness of the situation (can’t get there any faster) and said, “OK, but you might be there a while. We’re an hour out.”

“Well, can you look up the menu on your phone, and tell me what you want, and I’ll order it, so it’ll be ready when you get there?”

My mother has never had a great grasp of time. I don’t mean that as an insult. Some people are like that. Having been her daughter all my life, I could see she believed she could somehow plan it so that our food would arrive at the table, freshly made, just as my family and I breathlessly flew through the restaurant doors.

Because the place in her brain where my mom keeps the information I AM CLINICALLY UNABLE TO MASTER TIME MANAGEMENT is completely separate from the place she keeps the belief I CAN TOTALLY DO THIS, with nary a neurotransmitter to connect the two.

What I didn’t understand was why she would want to do this. Why had she left her house early, and what was the pressure to eat so quickly?

Later, I found out Middle had gone step-by-step with her on how 11-5 is actually no time at all, when you factor in driving 45 minutes each way, and traffic patterns, and the time it takes to serve 6 people in a chain restaurant at lunchtime.

Or at least, it is no time at all for a person who is so desperate for a break they need every moment away and then some.

I refused to send an order via phone with my mom. And spent the rest of the trip toggling eyeballs between the speedometer and the dash clock. We missed our exit! But managed to arrive at 12:30, after getting very lucky finding a parking space.

When we arrived, my mother had pre-ordered four appetizers which (to her credit) did arrive promptly as we sat down. Stress reduced? HAHAHAHA. *best Tyrion Lannister voice* If you wanted your stress reduced, you’ve come to the wrong place.

My kids and husband observed the swirl of waiters-with-appetizers  with what I must grudgingly identify as age-appropriate levels of WTF is this nonsense? Because I guess it’s weird to eat food someone else ordered for you that you may or may not like? And of course, the tell-tale pinch faced “What is this?” by kids, and the single nibbled bite out of something then abandoned on the plate.

I ended up shoveling in obscene amounts into my gullet to smooth things over as my kids and husband looked at their menus and planned on ordering their own meals. Which of course: ordering regular food completely negates whatever my mom was trying to do by ordering food ahead of time.

The stress, people.

This tiny part of me was thinking about health and my preferences on not eating 14 tiny fried/sauced things as a meal. It’s only as I’m writing now that I’m sucker punched at the power play: my refusal to phone in our order simply resulted in her ordering for us.

At the time, the overwhelming feeling: somehow the stakes for the day were already so high, my mother couldn’t take a rejection or it all might fall apart.

Mom paid for the meal, which is typical, and really generous. In doing so, she realized she’d lost the credit card she buys food with (some discount by the card that favors food purchases, I guess) that morning, sometime after buying groceries.

We headed in to the mall by 1:45, the ordering of real meals having indeed eaten up lots of time.

Mom gave my older kids cash, which made their eyes go round – unchaperoned in a mall to buy whatever school clothes they wanted?! After thank yous and hugs, they jetted off, practically skipping with excitement to be on their own. My mother was able to pull Fun Grandma out of her hat, despite my reservations.

Mom and I took my youngest kid to Justice, where her bruised ego over being left with adults was soothed by one-on-one attention from her grandmother.

I could feel my mom’s spirits lifting as the afternoon wore on. The novelty of shopping with a bunch of kids, the texts back and forth about where everyone was in the mall and what they were doing. Even my husband’s delight in finding a tech store. You know, the energy made by new experiences and spending money and treating yo’self. Her victory at finding a way to be Fun Grandma, despite her misery about it the day before.

After we’d been shopping about ninety minutes, my mom said, “I have to leave if I want to get back by 5:00. Because of traffic.”

That’s when I found out what Middle had told her about time, so that Mom wouldn’t piss off the only caretaker she has for my dad. Also the beginning of my understand re: the clench-fisted stress coloring the day. My mother wasn’t ready to go home, not by a million years.

The teen and tween wanted to stay a little longer, so I left my husband with the kids and our car, and I departed with my mom. With every mile closer to home, she deflated.

As soon as we arrived home, the caregiver squirted out the door, leaving me alone with my parents. Everything about my mom’s body language reminded me of those times when I was a teenager – when I’d gotten in big trouble, and she was just holding back a scream-fest until I made the mistake of asking her if something was wrong: clanging dishes, no eye contact, a no-nonsense briskness to every move.

So I did what kids do in that situation: stayed the fuck outta her way. My dad sat in front of the TV, talking about Gandhi, a movie he’d enjoyed as a younger man. But it didn’t seem like he was talking to me so much as talking, so I ignored him in favor of giving my mom wide berth.

Maybe twenty minutes later, my husband and kids arrived. Husband took the Gandhi bit, saying, “So is it on? You want to watch it?” Which it turned out my dad did. He also wanted someone to sit right next to him as he narrated the events. Because it turns out for some bizarre reason, my dad remembers the plot line of that movie, and so he can explain it to you like a wizened professor. Who wants to guess how desperately my dad wants to explain anything these days?

As soon as my husband sat down and flipped on the TV, my mother’s shoulders came down from around her ears and she actually whispered, “Thank you, (husband’s name)” like a prayer.

I’d missed the cues of Dad getting increasingly agitated over wanting to narrate Gandhi to someone. If my mother had been alone in the house, I guess she would have had to forgo dinner in favor of sitting with him for the duration of the movie.

My mom served dinner to my kids, who lurked in the dining room for the remainder of the evening, seeming both bored and stressed to be left to their own devices. My mom refused to eat with us, instead getting on the phone to cancel that missing credit card. When she finally sat down with me in the dining room, she unloaded  about everything my father does now that gets on her nerves.

1. He always has the TV on, day and night.He knows how to work the +Volume button on the remote, but not the –Volume, so sometimes she’ll wake up and he’s got the TV on +60 Volume. There is no place in the house she cannot hear the TV. (I told her I remembered a story about the military using this as a torture technique.)

2. He always touches her. She thinks this is because he only knows she’s real if he touches her. But he’ll shadow her through the house, his hand resting on her shoulder. Constantly. (This made me think of how sore my nipples used to get breastfeeding, that phrase ‘touched out’ bantered about so many mommy sites. Let me tell you how uncomfortable I was thinking about my nipples and my dad in the same thought process: VERY!)

3. When she’s in the bathroom, he’ll realize she’s gone and start shouting her name. Since he cannot navigate the layout of their house, he won’t shout and search for her. He’ll just stand wherever he is and scream her name until she comes to him. (“It’s not easy to take a shit, I’ll tell you that,” she informed me.)

As she was unloading , the volume in the next room did indeed start to go up and uP and UP.  Some war scene, with screaming and gunfire.

I worried my kids or me or my poor husband in the other room might actually get hearing damage, the loudness hurt my ears. Inexplicably worse: my mom just kept talking right through it, as if she could tune it out somehow. I  covered my ears to go into the TV room.

“You have to turn this down!” I said to my father.

“What?” He replied.

“YOU HAVE TO TURN THIS DOWN!” I grabbed all the remotes and threw them at my husband in a panic. I mean, it was like a smoke alarm going off in there.

A moment later, my husband got the volume down.

My dad, very pissed off: “Well that’s how it really happened!” (I guess he meant war is loud and painful?)

Returning to my mother, I felt like two people. On one hand, an adult who understood the venting aspect of caregiving. There are so many parallels between taking care of babies and taking care of my dad, and knowing you are not alone and not crazy for wanting to walk out on those cute little fucks in a bad moment has some pretty healing qualities.

On the other hand, (and this was very distant and disconnected, as if it were happening to another person entirely) this was my mother shit-talking my father, making me a first degree witness in the destruction of her love for him. It left me with a very strange sense of duality, of knowing it was both those things at the same time.

She said all this not just in front of me, but in front of my kids. Thus not only losing her accumulated Fun Grandma points, but making me wonder if her house is a good environment for them to visit anymore.

No handy wrap up, except OMG, this was just the first day, and all the days were like this, which is why we left early and I don’t know if I can go back there again.