Bad Images

Today, as I fixed the bandage on Mom's tailbone bedsore, Mom informed me, "You know, based on what I was taught, I truly believed that anal sex would tear me asunder. So you can see how I had it coming from both ends. But at least you and your sister weren't in the room, so you don't have that visual image." Uh, gee, thanks, Mom, no, I didn't used to have that visual image.

Now Mom is telling me about an argument we didn't have this morning, which has upset her greatly. She tells me that I refused to let her leave the house on a trip she had planned with her social worker, even though her social worker is trained to transport patients. I apparently also insisted that she could only walk a couple of steps when she had certainly walked all the way to the door with a cane and gone to the downstairs bathroom all by herself.

This argument that my mother had continued into something about my sister drinking too much Passover wine, and how frustrating it was that I would not validate her perceptions, and why am I asking her questions instead of answering her questions? (She didn't state any question out loud.) How do you respond sensitively to someone who has invented an argument with you and accuses you of evasion when you try to validate her feelings? And if I tell her she's completely incorrect, she will feel like I am denying her reality again.

Oh, and she is refusing a Haldol. Never thought I'd be trying to push drugs on my own mother.