It’s Thursday morning and I have lots of work to do. I still haven’t read the writings my mother gave to me and I’m meeting her for lunch. I don’t want to read her writing and I know I have to.
I’ve already read the happy ones, the mini-memoirs of the happy events of her childhood. Now, I’m looking at a longer piece of “fiction” filled with her made-up code words that describe the experience of her mental illness.
I’m back where I was years ago when she used to send my all kinds of delusional writings through the mail. I read them every time. She deserved to have someone read her writing, I thought, to validate her experience. I needed to at least know what was going on with her. Until she sent me 18 pages worth, that is. At page two, I decided it was too much and I wasn’t going to read anymore.
That was years ago, before she was homeless, before she lost her phone and her post office box, before I lost touch with her for four years.
Now, it’s back, the writing, and I don’t want to read it. It’s enough that I have to deal with her illness in person.
Yet when I was happy to receive her little memoirs around Mother’s Day, she wrote more memoirs and more of what I never want to read again.
Wish me luck. I’m going in.