This Must Be What It’s Like

It was another obligatory Thanksgiving with Mom. I much prefer the alternate years when I spend the holiday with my father’s side of the family and my siblings and their significant others and kids. Every other year Thanksgiving is joyous and warm and bustling with conversation and touching moments and old stories and great food and wishing there were more hours in a day. But this. This was not one of those years.

This was one of those other years where my husband and I sat and listened to my mother prattle on about how she learned to walk again after her brain surgery (Not True At All) and how the divorce from my father affected her (forty years ago) and how I made enough food for at least six people and how she guessed we weren’t on a diet by the looks of things and don’t we get on our dogs’ nerves by talking to them all the time and can she have dessert right now with extra whipped cream and no her lactose thing hasn’t been a problem for a long time now but need to lay down because I just feel so tired I miss my cat (she’s crying now, like always) and we are back on the divorce and maybe she’ll stay a few days she’ll change into her pajamas now

JEN.......CAN YOU HELP ME????

She is in the bedroom now. Still crying. Her wig fell off. She has dropped a pill on the floor and in trying to pick both the wig and the pill up, she guesses she bent over and “had an accident”. She figures the lactose IS still a problem. Huh. Maybe she should just go home she decides at ten p.m. when she lives an hour away and needs a ride.

(My God. This must be what Hell is like.)