Tonight I'm going to my home town (a small town an hour and half away) to put in my appearance at a post-Mother's Day mother-daughter dinner at the care center where my mother lives. My mother has Alzheimer's disease and while she's still coherent enough, she typically thinks she's still a teacher in a school, only this one is a boarding school. Hey, whatever works.

I'm the youngest of three kids -- my brother is 12 years old and my sister is 10 years older. My brother used to call me Boo-Boo when I was a little kid, probably derived from the Yogi Bear cartoons, but also a pretty apt descriptor of my appearance on the scene. Somewhere in between the birth of my siblings and my birth, my mother really, really changed. My memories of my mother are more akin to my nieces (the oldest being 12 years younger than me) than my brother's or sister's. And they're not especially pleasant. When my mother started showing signs of dementia, I thought she was getting abruptly nicer; my brother and sister thought she was getting meaner.

So when I tell people that my mother has Alzheimer's and they say they're sorry, I tell them thank you, but it's OK. It's a tragedy for my mother, of course, and for my siblings. For me, it's watching someone who never especially liked me leave and be replaced by someone who doesn't mind my existence. Of course, it would have been so much better for her to have retained her brain functions, and simply have come to terms with the demons that I represented. But it didn't work out that way.

I think a lot of her anger towards me was due to my "Boo-Boo" status and the fact that I had the audacity to represent the gene pool on my father's side of the family.

I was also very close to my maternal grandmother when she was alive, and I think there was also a certain jealousy there -- my mother didn't want to share her mother with anyone, much less me. My paternal grandmother died when I was about 3 or 4, and I barely remember her. No one really talked about her that much, even my father. But with my mother's loss of short-term memory, she talks a lot about the things still stored in her brain. I've found out a lot about my paternal grandmother's personality as a result of those little memory fragments, and my internal reaction is typically: "Oh, that's where that came from..." Meaning, those elements in my personality that seem rather foreign when taken in context to my siblings.

Ah, so I looked like my father's rogue uncles (that's another story), I was her mother's favorite grandchild and she had to watch her mother-in-law's personality bubble up out of me. It was probably too much for her to take. Not that it excuses how she treated me, but obviously she was too angry about too many things that I embodied.

I'll never know her reasons for being so angry -- part of the rules of my family were to not talk about feelings or ugly behaviors. Disassociation rules the day, and I've learned that it's a waste of breath to try to force issues. And over the years, and with a lot of help, I've developed equanimity around the matter. It was my only choice, really, in order to break the cycle of anger and lashing out.

As a friend of mine once said, we all need family, but they need not be our relatives.

It will be a nice day for a quiet drive, a little visit, and then a drive home. My mother won't remember yesterday was Mother's Day, but she will be happy to see me, happy to get attention, happy to get the teddy bear that I'll give her (for that is the level she's at), and happy to see me leave. And I'll feel the same way, although in so many ways, I left the family a long time ago.