*whew* glad that's over!

For now anyway. We'll go back again for Mom's surgery on June 24.

Two remarkable things about the visit:

Thing One

I seem to have done a pretty good job of "staying in the moment." I really had the experience, just like my Buddhism books say, of allowing unpleasant feelings to surface, be felt, and then flow through you and pass away. It's hard to describe why it felt better to be present with these feelings than to ignore them or shut them out. It just felt real. And it was so much less stressful than the continuous running away.

Thing Two

The unofficial Asperger's diagnosis actually really helped me deal with my mom, and helped me a lot with Thing One.

When she was being spectacularly oblivious of everyone else, instead of getting frustrated, I just thought, "well, she can't see us."

Then a really amazing thing happened.

When I was getting out of the car at the airport, Dad & I hugged and said our goodbyes, but Mom just went & got in the driver's seat (I'd been driving), saying as she did so, "Honey, you'll be glad to know, I really feel okay today." Huh?

But somehow, even as I wryly noted the total non-sequiturness, I discovered I didn't feel the usual resentment and hurt at her self-absorption. Not only that, I actually felt loved, because it seemed like she really was trying (however oddly) to say something that would make me happy. It wasn't her caring that was "off," it was her expression of it. She can't connect, but that doesn't mean she doesn't care.

Did you catch that? The whole "feeling loved" thing.

This is new, in case you haven't been following the story up to now.

I finally succeeded in doing what Loopy said: wanting from someone exactly what they have to give.