After visiting Friday evening, I’d invited my mom to go to Starbucks with me the following morning.

Middle and her husband don’t keep coffee in the house, and honestly, introverts like me enjoy scheduling as many impromptu exits from society as possible. Plus, Mom had seemed so happy/sad about the mall, I figured I’d remind her what it’s like to just get out and go.

Mom’s hesitant acceptance: I needed to text, not call. She might go if Dad was asleep, or awake and OK, but not if she thought he might wake up while we were gone, or if he wasn’t doing well.

So sort of to my surprise, she hauled ass out of the house to my waiting minivan the next morning, grinning like crazy. She was so giddy! Like a teen sneaking out of the house on a Saturday night for the adventure of a lifetime. Except it was morning, the goal was coffee, and she’s a grandma not a co-ed.

When we drove up, there was a line wrapped around the corner Starbucks. “I know a better place anyway,” she declared, directing me back onto the road.

Turns out her better place was way the hell across town, turning our ten minute escape into a thirty minute excursion. Topics covered while we drove: Mom’s new plan to hire a bevy of other caretakers. “I love (current caregiver) but I need more help, and it’s smarter to have several people, so we don’t get too reliant on one person.”

I was so happy! She was saying everything I needed her to say. Which should be good right?

Except this time I had a Charlie-Brown-With-Lucy-&-Football relief that faded quickly into suspicion. Because hadn’t we been here before? Like every time I arrive to find things desperado, and Mom assures me she gets it, and she’s ready to change things up, and she’s gonna accept help. Which? Technically she does. I mean, now she has one caregiver instead of none. But somehow we are still always in this place.

“When are you hiring?” I asked as we drove to the outermost limits of town for coffee.

“I posted an ad, and have some real promising college students coming in. One wants to go into psychology and is looking for as much clinical experience as possible, so they’re actually excited to spend time with your father. I’m hoping to get three or four people.”

We got coffee. It was minimally hard to corral my mother, who wanted to stop and buy melons from a local stand, even though she had two of the exact same melon sitting in her cold storage. On the way back, Mom lamented that she still really wanted my daughter to come stay for a week.

“But maybe that’s not a good idea anymore, with your father,” she added in a hopeful/downcast way that highly suggested she thought it was possible and wanted me to jump in and contradict her assessment.

Honestly, I was so flabbergasted I completely dropped the social ball, letting the conversation fall into an aghast silence. Maybe that’s not a good idea?! How could she not know her home is Chernobyl?

My mom sulked a bit, staring out the window. As I drove her back home, she asked we instead stop by Middle’s. We drank our coffee there around my family and my sister’s family, enjoying the time, until finally Middle piped up nervously that Mom had been gone a long time, and Dad was alone in the house, and did he even know where she’d gone?

It seemed clear my mother did not want to go, and said, “Well, would (My Middle Daughter, the one my mother covets for spending a week together) like to come over and walk the dog?”

Which, walking dogs and petting dogs and playing with dogs and eventually owning 18 dogs herself is only my middle child’s favorite thing ever! And Middle Child was happy to go.

But when we got to my parents’ house, my mother said, “OK, come on, (Middle Child). Natalie, I’ll just drive (Middle Child) home when we are done.” And closed the car door on my face, escorting my happy-go-lucky kid into her house.

And here is where I need to tell you I don’t suspect my mother of any kind of abuse. She never abused me as a kid. I’m not even sure why I was so scared.

Maybe just that I knew the purpose of the visit was to meet my mother’s needs, not my daughter’s. Haven’t we all been in that situation as children – where we know that the adult is leaning on us a little, that we were caring for them instead of the other way round? I knew my daughter was there to alleviate the misery in that house, and that my mother would dawdle her ass off, and it might be more than an hour before I saw my child again.

I sat in the car in front of their house. Did I go in and drag my daughter out, stealing a precious moment from my mother, perhaps teaching my daughter an ugly lesson about caring for others?

One of the bigger divides between me and my mother is that she believes in caring for/taking care of others, of living what she calls a ‘clannish’ life. Everyone falls on hard times, and my mother believes down in her core than no one survives without the love of their family. To withhold that support is tantamount to wishing death upon them. She has often looked askance at my choices, muttering that I take after my patrician/emotionally distant paternal grandmother, that I don’t understand clan mentality on some fundamental level where my heart attaches to my brain.

This is old ground for longtime readers. Sorry for repeat content.

In this situation, I felt again split down the middle, as if I were two people instead of one. My guts screamed that to let my daughter walk into that house made me a bad mother, a woman not strong enough to protect her child from a bad situation. Just like my mother had failed me, I would fail my daughter.

The other part of me reasoned that ‘protecting’ a child from an adult who was leaning on them a little was ridiculous; Was I going to cut short a relationship between a grandmother and a grandchild? Teach my child that the only relationships worth having were ones centered on her needs? Possibly scare my child by yanking her out of a situation probably no worse than a pitiful and lonely old woman made happy by youth? Bottom line: Was I the kind of person who could condemn my mother to isolation for the crime of needing us more than we needed her?

In the end, I drove away, reminding myself that unrelated to this visit, I’d already had several conversations with my kids about how to leave a situation in which they’d been left alone and felt uncomfortable.

“Tell them you feel bad, like you’re gonna puke,” I always suggest, among other options. “Nothing will get you sent home faster than that.”

I did go straight back to Middle’s house and tell my husband all my fears, using him as a sounding board. He thought it reasonable to leave our daughter with my mother, even if it was somewhat upper handed behavior on my mother’s part to ditch me in the driveway.  An hour was not a week, he reminded me.

While I waited, nervous, Middle informed me she’d come to a decision of her own. “Mom gets to handle Dad while she’s alive. But once she’s gone, it’s going to be entirely up to us. So I went ahead and put Dad on the wait list for three residential programs. As far as I’m concerned, this has nothing to do with Mom, since we’ll only need it if she’s dead.”

Middle seemed relieved by her decision, and I was proud of her for taking action. I think she was really worried, that strangeness and apparent boundary violation of signing Dad up for something Mom refuses. She also mentioned that she’d discovered the government might pay for Dad to be in daycare through a Veteran’s program. Middle was really excited about this idea. Me too, as Mom is a stickler about money, and I thought perhaps if that was taken out of the equation, she might be more open to daycare. But! Middle was super stressed because of course she would have to ask Mom about Dad’s very limited military records to get the paperwork going.

About ninety minutes after I’d dropped them off, Mom and my kid arrived back at Middle’s house, both seeming happy. I found the first opportunity to quiz my kid on what exactly had gone down when she’d been alone with my mother.

They’d looked at an award my kid won on the internet – my mother knew about it weeks ago but couldn’t navigate the site to see it in person. They looked at more school clothes online. They walked the dog. My dad had been asleep. The caregiver came.

Seeing my kid so blasé about the events left me deeply unsettled. Not with her, but because in asking, I had to face the depth of my fear/mistrust/unease toward my mother. What were all these… not just bad feelings, but real fear something terrible would happen… based on? I couldn’t even say what I was afraid might happen. Only that it felt visceral.

Which, of course – being afraid of something and not even knowing what you are afraid of is a GREAT way to spend the day.

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By mid-morning, all the families and my mother headed out to the local park to play ball. Everyone else walked the short distance, but Mom and I drove so she would have a car in the event of a call from Dad’s caregiver.

Mom broke the silence, saying cheerfully, “Are you having a good time? What could we do to make these visits fun for the kids and (my husband)?” Which is a standard thing she’s said over the years.

I felt dark as death at her question, wrung out from the past two day’s events, how there had not been a waking moment in which I wasn’t engaged in some terrible, stressful conversation from six in the morning until ten at night. How at odds I was with myself over my kid spending time with my mother. Middle’s fears. My mother’s tone, like this was all cotton candy and fair rides, horrified me.

And then horrified me some more at the realization her life is so grim that this trip probably is cotton candy and fair rides by comparison. Looking over, she was almost a shimmering version of her old self, plumped up and pink from two back-to-back days of caregiver help, and family, and excitement.

“That’s not what these trips are about,” I said. Not to hurt her, but because when someone’s reality is so far from your own, you’ve got to establish what’s true for you. Or else live in their lie and good luck figuring out any truth from that. “There’s no way to make this a ‘good time’. This is grief work.”

Mom drew away from me like I’d punched her. She was silent for the rest of the drive, on the walk through the parking lot, until we got to the ball game.

“Did you really not know that?” I finally asked her, shocked by her shock, that I’d dealt her some blow she hadn’t seen coming.

“No, it’s fine,” she said, but stayed quiet until Middle came over and started talking about how the berries on the trees over our heads might be edible, and in her no-nonsense way, slapped a berry right out of my mother’s hand. And in that moment, things were as close as they ever got to being a good time.