"May Be the Last Time, Children, I Don't Know"

I spent this whole day in the hospital with my mother, who we thought might have had a stroke. She didn't; she has instead something minor called Bell's Palsy. My daughter took her to her more-important-than-the-Second-Coming hair salon appt. this morning, and because her mouth drooped on one side and "felt funny" I made my daughter call an ambulance. (Being loaded into an ambulance in the parking lot of the Hair Cuttery pissed her off more than any stroke ever could.)

So: all day in the ER, the first doctor. saying she would be admitted for evaluation, the second (the neurologist whom I swear modeled herself on Lillith, Frazier's wife, down to the black hair and scowl) saying it was Bell's Palsy, an inflammation of a facial nerve that would clear up fairly soon, then spitting out a string of increasingly detailed and reality-divorced instructions and contingencies including patching her eye if her eyelid wouldn't close. (Excuse me, doctor, but the affected eye, is the only one of just the two she has that actually sees). At the end of her spiel I asked her if what she had just told me would be given to me in written form because I would never recall it, and she looked at me as if a particle of dirt had just spoken, and enigmatically replied "I should hope so."

So then after shouting myself hoarse repeating the medical questions and explanations put to her, and answering the same damn questions and pointless ramblings and random observations (reiterated practically rhythmically) from HER, we finally took my mostly deaf, more than half blind mother home, got her Rx, left her in front of the TV and (in my case) sprinted to the car muttering loudly to myself, expletives predominating. We drove home, my home.

(No, she doesn't live alone. My sister, no one understands how, lives with her but is away for a few days.)

You just don't know, gentle reader. You just don't know. It's a special hell reserved for those of us with "difficult" mothers, the kind that are "funny," "charming," "with-it" "spunky" and what-have-you when considered in a stranger's gaze for less than 5 minutes -- but morph into something altogether different, more intolerable and sanity-challenging when allowed to spend more than say 30 minutes alone with one of her own children.

Yeah, we're all probably going to hell for feeling it, thinking it, showing it and saying it -- especially saying it on a global social media platform! -- but the truth will out. And damn it, she'll probably join us down there.
If you've got one of these mothers, god bless you. I hope you will find a quiet unpopulated wooded area to scream your bloody lungs out unperturbed now and then.

When I did get home, my CD of the Blind Boys of Alabama had come in the mail. The last song had me yelling and crying along. Any day could be the last time, and that's both bitter and sweet.