If my mother ever, ever, EVER learns how to use a computer and God forbid, enter the 21st...no make that just the 20th century (21st will be 20 years down the line for her), remind me to never, never, NEVER send her an email with my blog link in the signature. She will probably never know what a blog is, but if it's related to me and she thinks it'll bring us closer together, she'll find it and pour over it, looking for the one iota of information that she can grasp and use to Save My Daughter! This entry is a direct reason why she should never read this blog.

Even with multiple personalities, bi-polar disorder, and a memory shortening by the day, my mother is genuinely a compassionate, sweet, giving woman who only wants the best for her family. When I was in high school, she went back to community college and then nursing school, in hopes of making a career for herself outside of being a career stay at home mom and wife.

Since the time of her studies and graduation with great grades, she has done absolutely jack shit with her knowledge, other than to annoy the piss out of us, except where piss is warranted. Then it won't come out, even with waterfall noises and running tap water as inducers. Tonight is a prime example.

My father and mother live next door. Unless you are entirely sure that your parents do not have major psychological deficiencies and problems to attend to, don't move next door to your parents. It's been great with my dad, not so wonderful with my mom. She turns a simple discussion of how to reduce my dad's fever and discomfort into a forum for her to expound on subjects she has not delved into for over ten years. She tells stories about her being a student nurse, and how they didn't teach hardly anything when she was a student nurse. In the next breath, she is detailing the chemical makeup of Tylenol and Advil, nodding her head in a bobble-head rythym, up and down, up and down, as if the nodding will convince us that she does indeed have powers to heal somewhere in there next to the cukoo and the dim bulb.

I love my mom. I really do. I know it is part of her psychological problems that the Medical Genuis comes out when anyone is remotely not feeling well. She doesn't know what day it is or who is Vice President of the United States, but by golly, mention not feeling well and she gets a gleam in her eye like an alcoholic on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. It happens to be an incredibly distasteful aspect of her problems for us, similar to fingernails on a chalkboard. In the midst of trying to figure out how to restore health to my dad, who has a litany of medical problems he struggles with, we have to play the game of, "Is she full of shit, or not?"

In her way, she is trying to: 1) help explain how the body operates, how it failed, and how to return homeostasis, 2) prove that she isn't just a Dr. Phil/ General Hospital/ QVC addicted couch potato, and 3) pay my father back for all the times she feels he has slighted her. It's like Mower when he puts the toilet paper roll on backwards, knowing that my head will explode if it does not go OVER, and I know that he cannot stand when I change out my feminine napkins with him in the bathroom. Duh, I went in there for privacy--if you intrude, I am not going to stop what I am doing for your delicate man eyes. I digress. My mom gets her digs into my father in the most inappropriate times, while at the same time, trying to appear to take the high road by providing information that will surely Save Her Husband!

Getting ready to leave, at the door, she said he won't listen to her. I rolled the dice in my head and decided I felt lucky, so I entered into conversation with her disorders. She's mentally and emotionally down in 1972 somewhere where she was free to wear miniskirts and red lipstick, and she left her physical representative to carry on the crazies here in 2006. I told her that when he talks to me, not that I am any more a mom than she is, but I just talk normal about these things like I would about my kids. She annoys him by saying medical jargin that he doesn't need to understand what to do right then. She nods her head emphatically.

"But you can take the info with you for your kids, can't you?" she insists, giving me her gift of wisdom via the World Wide Wackies. I nod emphatically too. Crazy in her disorders or not, she loves us and just wants to feel a part of things, even if she distances herself by bringing up long-unused but usually correct bits and pieces of her nursing stint, in the most out-of-the-blue and unreachable way.

"Yes, Mom, I can. Thanks." That's my gift to her, not arguing. I then let myself and, accidently, a cat out of the front door. I go to pick him up, and she stops me and says she will. And she does. In her underwear, under the porch light, for the neighbors to get an eyeful of the Just My Size panties she is wearing with a black blouse. That's my mom. I love her, undies and changing personalities and all.