I rang her. She hung up on me.

I rang her. It was a special occasion that day, but instead of ringing her in the morning, or at noon, I rang her when I remembered, later in the afternoon on the same day.

I have memory issues, mostly due to narcolepsy, actually, but exacerbated by cancer treatment. This affects my short-term memory such that I can remember and forget something a number of times before I get it done. I remembered to call her that day, but it was later in the day when I picked up the phone.

Infuriated that she had been made to "wait" until the afternoon for a phone call from me, she was not inclined to demonstrate any understanding of the difficulties I face every day. No, it was my own fault that I couldn't remember anything. 

She said I caused my own memory loss, because of the chemo. 

And I had chemo, she said, because I caused my own cancer.

She said I caused my cancer because I had "let myself go" and allowed myself to get so terribly fat, and "obesity causes cancer." It's in all the scientific studies, she said. Being fat causes cancer, therefore I caused my cancer. 

Cancer is caused by obesity? No, mother, it is a little more complicated than that. And actually, since you've raised it conversationally, the evidence base for both of my types of cancer, is that NO, there is no relationship between obesity and the incidence of either of those types of cancer. 

Also, this many years after diagnosis, it's most likely that the memory issues are not related to the chemo so much, but the narcolepsy. Go ahead, explain how it is that I've brought that upon myself, please. 

And yes, I did get fat. And you know why? After years when you monitored and controlled my food and eating, when you told me I was fat and disgusting, called me "thunder thighs" from the time I was 9 years old, right until I left home, skeletally thin, as a teenager, when you denied me food, and forced me eat old, stale and unpalatable food while you and La Narcisse dined on better fare, when you fed your dogs freshly cooked meals while I was made to wait for hours and hours before eating, when you forbade me to accept food from other people, even while we were visiting friends, when you punished me mercilessly for eating a couple of pieces of dried fruit or a few chips that my friends gave me at school, and that punishment included writing, several hundred times I am a fat slob. I am a fat slob. I am a fat slob. but also on at least one occasion resulted in you whipping me with an *actual whip* that you had made, YES, in my adult life, I have had difficulties with disordered eating patterns. For many years I struggled to eat in social settings, and sometimes I didn't eat at all because I didn't know if I needed to ask permission before I could have some of whatever everyone else was having, the same way I found it difficult to ask for anything I needed. I had gone without for so long I didn't know how much food was enough and how much was too much. And eventually it was kinder to tend to my mental health and practice loving acceptance of my body than it was to trigger the self-loathing that you ground into me when you abused me using food and weight and self-hatred and enforced self-denial. And yes, eventually that meant I was overweight, obese even, and yet I know with every fibre of my lived experience that being FAT is not the worst thing that can happen. And ACTUALLY, there is strong causal evidence that adult survivors of complex trauma caused by childhood abuse suffer globally poorer health outcomes, across literally every type of health condition, including disorders of cognitive function, and obesity and associated morbidities, but also cancers. They get more cancers more often and survive them a shit load less than people who grew up in safe and loving homes. So ACTUALLY, if anything, maybe YOU caused my obesity, and my cancer, AND my memory loss.

That was not what I said, that day, although I was so upset I would have liked to. Instead, I (as usual) very politely started to explain that my memory loss was most likely nothing to do with my cancer, it was more likely about my narcolepsy, and that "cancer" is not a single, homogenous disease but many hundreds of different diseases that have different causes and anyway most types of cancer do not have a single, identifiable cause. And maybe I was a little too precise in my explanation, maybe I used words that were too big for her, because she often accused me of that when she didn't want to admit what she'd said was just plain outrageously wrong, and maybe I, for once, did not allow her to interrupt me while I was talking, because she became increasingly histrionic, then hung up the phone while I was still talking. Mid-sentence. And I did re-dial her number, half a minute later, just to check that the disconnection wasn't accidental. And, just like every other time she'd ever hung up on me, she had taken the phone off the hook. 

And I took a deep breath, and said, out loud, "That was the straw. That was literally the straw. The camel's back has been broken."

And I did not call her back that night. I did not call her back the next day. I did not call her back a few days later, after she'd had a chance to cool down. And she did not call me. Not that week, not that month, not that year. She didn't ever call me to apologise for saying such hurtful things, or for getting hysterical, or for hanging up on me like she had so many times over the years. She didn't call me later when she was sick, or when she dying, even though I'd rung her myself a few weeks before that. And when the hospice workers asked her if she wanted them to call me, or my sister, she said no.

So, go ahead and judge me for not having been in contact with my mother frequently enough to know, telephonically or telepathically, that she was dead. But before you do, kindly appraise yourself of the facts of the situation. Understand that it was the culmination of 40 years of abuse, in which I was required, time and time again, to telephone her back when she hung up on me after hysterical outbursts of her own making, to soothe her feelings of hurt and her sense of being egregiously wounded when the reality is that this was a woman that took a whip to me because I ate a handful of food given to me by a kid in the playground.