'so just remember...'

It is my father's desire to return home this Friday, having had two days of successful therapy. Two days out of seven weeks and he is convinced it is time for him to come home, not knowing that the same obstacles that forced him out of his home still remain as my mother made the decision to change nothing to make life easier for him, instead stating it was his responsibility to 'deal with it'.

And as I watched my Aunt work harder than any migrant worker, doing house work for my mother, I wondered why she was allowing my mother to treat her so poorly and I realized she was doing it not to help my mother, but for the sake of her brother, knowing his life here will be harder than it is in rehabilitation, my mother controlling what he will and will not do by her right of refusal, the same right she uses with me to trap and keep us tangled in her self made web of deception. Since she is the only driver she dictates when and where and anything else that has no interest to her is tossed to the side like a pair of dirty socks, expecting the two of us to bow to her demands and cater to her lifestyle, one of doing what she wants, when she wants because she can, knowing that her actions affect all who live here, knowing she holds the trump card, the ability to say no and keep the two of us at arm's length and trapped by simply saying, 'No' or screaming her indifferences for all the neighborhood to hear through looked windows and closed blinds and room after room of clutter, clutter that resembles the life she blames my father and now me for.

Life that makes her express her unhappiness, her 'why does it always have to be me attitude' as she searches through the clutter for a new deck of cards, embarrassed and unaccepting of those she has been dealt time and time again, for better or worse with my father and out of her spoken responsibility as a mother, constantly reminding me of all that she does for me as she tells me no again and again, doing what pleases her, on her time schedule and thinking little of the needs of others, expecting me to pick up the slack, the house hold chores and daily duties, reminding me that I would have and be nothing without her, as she searches for something else she has buried somewhere.

She begins another sentence with, 'so just remember...' yelling in a direction I try to dodge, a direction my father will be unable to as instead of getting stronger and more independent he chooses to come home early, a rush to judgment, much like his surgery and the painful recovery that has followed him since that morning he told me to 'hold down the fort', the morning I knew he was neither physically nor mentally ready to endure, time proving me right...