Losing the plot
“She’s your mother”, said the prompt in its infuriatingly calm voice, so like and yet unlike the voice of the infuriatingly calm counsellor.
Although it’s been a while, the prompt got so quick at identifying when it was needed that its voice was my first alert that anything was wrong.
I looked at her for a second and realised that the prompt was right on cue. “Yes she is.” I agreed in my own infuriatingly calm inner voice.
The prompt continued with its stream of stage directions, each one filling in the details of my role, ensuring that I didn’t stray from the plot, in the play of my own life.
This is the coping mechanism I have developed for those periods when a solid barrier slams down between my consciousness and its emotional connections to the world around me. When the world becomes unreal and my part in it mere fabrication. When my mother, whom I love, becomes a woman sitting in a chair - identifiable as my mother but only in the same way as I’d identify a cat as having four legs and a snail as having none.
The prompt keeps me on track. I hate it because of what it represents, but rely on it to step in and feed me my lines during the times when I need a script to play myself.
Just so that I can smile at my mother and say “Good morning Mum.” in the part of her daughter and not the dissociated stranger who sometimes inhabits her body.
