CARING (INTENSIVELY)

Michaelene is downstairs complaining to our father.  I can hear her and you know what?  I actually think she knows I can hear her.  It's just like her to not give a fuck.  And it's not even out of any plot, you know, like an attempt to manipulate me by making me overhear her bullshit and even making me hear my father agreeing that I'm a fuck up, which is really the only hard part about it.  Like I'm going to somehow "come to grips" with her complaints and with my own "bad behavior" and "change my ways" and suddenly "be there for our mother," by which Michaelene, of course, means "be there for Michaelene."  


I'm sitting at the window on the third floor of M.'s giant house, in her "office," the place she presumably does all her big thinking in.  I rolled the desk chair over to the window and from this angle I can see my father's car parked in front of M.'s.  They're both identical (in all but color) "green" cars, you know, environmentally low-impact cars.  My father purchased his right after hearing M.'s enthusiasm with her own and with her influence presumably.  He always pretty much went along with whatever she said.  My old 15 MPG Wrangler's a horror show presumably, another symbol of my self-indulgence, like the frowned-upon extra glass of wine, and the request for the dessert menu, or the display of ANY emotion at our mother's hospital bed.  


Mom's out of surgery and M.'s plotting hospital shifts--when we'll all take our turn being there (the timing of course being M.'s decision because "someone has to decide"), expected to hold Mom's hand and be "a presence" for the nurses.  M. assumes everyone's a fuck-up, like her sister, and if given the chance to slack-off will take it, so her theory is that if someone's always there then the nurses won't have a choice and Mom'll get better care.  She's got it all figured out is what I mean to say ultimately.  


When I asked Angie, the ICU nurse assigned to Mom last night, where she was from I got the inevitable look of betrayal from M. like I had shown our collective hand or something, shown a weakness.  My father defended me later in the car ride home but only with a tactical argument along the lines of saying that if we make friends with THEM they're more likely to help us out, at which M. snorted and chuckled to herself shaking her head.  She has an amazing ability to register contempt even when viewed in profile from the back seat.  I wondered if she was only showing that expression on the side of the face I could see since it was directed only at me.  Like the dark side of the moon, I imagined the other side of her face being expressionless and impassive.  Or maybe the other side of her face compensated for the ugliness of the side facing me so that her expression over-all would be some kind of zero-sum game.  Once in awhile I still sorta wished that the loving side would face me once in a while, but the moon never did show her dark side, and Michaelene always did.  Anyway, I was really just wondering where Angie came from, that was all.    


I could really hear her going at it now down there.  When you get right down to it I think what I find most amazing is how she could just make her mind up about everything so easily, including me.  She's just locked in as they say.  And I know now that I'm definitely leaving today, no matter what her plan is for bedside vigils.  I can't be here anymore, no matter how sick my mother is. There's always one, isn't there?  The kid who leaves their parent in the hospital and never comes to visit.  I think I get it now.  Sometimes you just can't compete.  And when the game is "who loves Mommy more" who even wants to play?