I had my T appointment last week, first time in a month. Now another month until the next. T told me I could come sooner than a month if I wanted and to let him know. This weekend something came up, and now I wish I could talk with T about it. I know he would help me make sense of it. It is on one of his favorite topics--adult children reconciling with their parents.

What happened is I went to visit my parents this weekend. I am trying to visit whenever I can, as their health is poor, my father is near deciding to end his life (he has the medical means to do this), and my mother has suffered a lot of cognitive decline in the last year. They are hanging on to living independently--just barely.

We were talking about something or other and suddenly I remembered something from my childhood and it seemed odd so I shared it with my mother. I told her how when I was in kindergarten (I was only 4 1/2 years old), I used to walk to school on my own. It was about a mile away, through winding neighborhood streets, at the top of a hill. It was easy to find getting there in the morning, as it was right next to a big water tower that crouched on the top of the hill like a big spider--hard to miss. But walking home, I would often get lost, take some wrong turns, and have a lot of anxiety about whether I would be able to find my house or not. All the streets looked kind of the same to me and I often took 2 or 3 attempts to find my house. In present day, I cannot imagine turning one of my daughters loose at that age to navigate her way to a school a mile away all by herself--crossing roads all alone, making the right turns correctly, etc. So I told my mother how I used to get lost on the way home and now that I was thinking back on it, I realized I should have told her back then but I hadn't.

My mom said to me, "you were too scared of me to tell," and she looked impossibly sad and remorseful. My Dad said, "you were probably scared she would beat you if you told," or something rather blunt like that. I realized he was so right. I would never tell my mom about getting lost because she would yell and scream at me and beat me up. I was terrified of her; my job as a child was to keep a very low profile so I wouldn't accidentally anger her into violence. I read what I just wrote and know it sounds extreme--perhaps a child's exaggeration of how bad things were or selective memory?--but my mother's sad, sad face tells me it is very true. My mom said something again, like "yes, you were scared of me." She didn't deny what my father said and just looked so very very sorry and remorseful. She said, "I should have come to the school to meet you." My dad said, "why didn't you walk home with the boy who lived across the street?"

Last week, in class, one of my professors had been listening to a student who was telling about a clinical case in which a child suffered brain damage at a hospital, and was left with gross deficits in mobility, cognition, etc. She just looked so very, very sad upon hearing this child's story, like she wanted to change the outcome for that child, even though of course that was not possible. That face she made reminds me so much of how my mother looked. It was hard for me to look at those faces--professor or mom.

I don't know what to make of all this. I am not sure I responded well when my parents said these things. We have never talked about how things were back then.