Bitter Pill

"You've turned into the cruelest kid," my mother said to me today on the phone. In advising her to call around to therapists to interview potential doctors, she commented that "it seemed wrong to be calling around for her 34 year old son."

"At least the doctor will know why he needs therapy," I said. I was trying to lighten the mood, not being interested in rehashing my brother's "condition" as my mother so liked to do.

"You've turned into the cruelest kid," she said. The immediacy of the retort is what took me back in the beginning. I'm not even sure I registered what had happened when I began speaking to her. Telling her that I didn't think it true and asking her to back up her claim.

The following conversation is full of old hurts of family business, resurrecting things that are done and gone and I'll recover from this conversation pretty quickly, discarding the venom of the comment and moving on with my life as I normally do.

The thing that sucks about it, in the long run, is that I'll remember those words for the rest of my life. I'll remember the hurt and shock inside my mother that sparked them, I'll remember my revulsion to the thought of them and, in the end, I'll just remember that they were said of me, by my mother.