Mother

My dear mother has her heart set on going to the family gathering, after she was in intensive care when my cousin got married. She knows she's getting old, and she has found a new lease of life since she got a computer and an internet connection. Her small world of telephone calls and coping with my father opened up. She still doesn't lead the sort of sociable life that most people do, but the gregarious woman was no longer so alone.
My sister visits her regularly, driving up from London for a flying weekend visit, although my sister does let her frustrations with visiting show in the form of stroppiness and unco-operativeness, and also by spending much of her visits on her laptop.
My mother means the world to me, and I visit her much less. I know foreigners who fly home more often that I get the coach, so travel clearly isn't enough of an excuse, despite the coach having the nickname 'Vomit Comet'. It's a sickening 4-hour drive each way, with no reading to do (unless I want to feel even more ill), and no laptop or podcasts (I own neither laptop nor mp3 player).
When I get home there's always washing up and cleaning to do, even before I start cooking proper meals and making more mess. It's one of the rare occasions my mother gets to eat properly cooked food, so it's not something I could omit in the name of rest. Cooking and cleaning for 3 is tiresome, though. As is my father's smoke, even before we get on to the stress of simply having him around, never knowing what interruption he's going to dream up next. I think I put it best when I explained that although he's no violent, and too incompetent to be manipulative, he's stressful because of his timing. Half-way through a television programme, or an interesting conversation, we'll hear his tramp on the stairs and I can feel the stress response starting. In he'll walk, oblivious (or unaware) of the climactic moment he's interrupting, and ask something inane like "How's it going?" Then he'll dump himself down, mostly in his armchair, but sometimes moving things you've left for a reason, and say something stupid about whatever is occurring. "Who is thta and why is he running?"
"Well, if you were really watching, you'd have just heard his name, and if you bothered to watch for another 40 seconds you'd notice the police behind him and the smoking gun in his hand!"
Or maybe he picks up my glass of water, from which I'm drinking, getting a nice layer of tar around the rim from his fingers, and then step in front of my mother to get her collection of empty tea mugs. Not to wash up, of course: just to get in the way and take them through to the kitchen so that I can wash them up later.
This leads me onto why he's so annoying: it's when he tries to be helpful or sociable that is worst. A dead weight on the household is bad enough, but he gets these things wrong. His conversations range from the racist to the misogynist, are always provocative (stupidly, such as "If I can't see it it's not there" when arguing over whether a refrigerator drawer that had just been emptied of putrescent vegetables needed cleaning to remove the mould) and never get anywhere, since he repeats arguments that have just been demolished like a broken record. So socialising is out because he's either offensive, a waste of time, or usually both. His cleaning is worse. Glasses that he 'cleans' he rinses, leaving them dirtier (c.f tar stains) than they were. When he hoovers, he can never work the machine. When he tidies, he puts things in the wrong place or presents them to the owner for immediate disposal, rather than piling them up for the owner to deal with at the right time.
This is frustrating because you never get to choose what to do. You might think that you're settled down for a film, but if Papa wants to hoover then either you do it yourself in 5 minutes, or you put up with an ostentatious racket for 15 minutes before he bursts in demanding that we summon the repair men (late in the evening) because the blasted thing is bust. So you get up, throw out the old hoover bag, put a new one in, sweep up the mess whilst choking on the dust from the breaking of the old one and go back to your film ten minutes later.
You might think that you're relaxing with a book, but if you hear that tread on the stairs, you might find someone snatching your drink, peering at your book ("Can I have a look at that?" Yoink) and then peppering you with questions such as "Why do you read this tripe? You should read only Dickens or Trollope." or "Why have there been no black symphonies?" If you're lucky, you might merely be presented with a book you finished earlier and hadn't yet put away. Putting it away himself is not an option, and nor is waiting for you to do it, although it's sometimes possible to have him agree to put things off until later. You've still been interrupted.

I sleep on the dining room floor becase my father's lair is next to my bedroom, and the smoke stops me breathing. It's not quite as relaxing as a bed. My bed's broken anyway: the removal men broke it when my parents shifted down a size and my father never got round to claiming any of the insurance.

My mother doesn't get out much, so she's always excited when I visit. Finally she can have nice conversations, go out with someone and do interesting things. She wants to go shopping (bright and early to avoid the rush, which I wouldn't normally bother with, although I will admit that crowds and wheelchairs don't mix, since people assume that we're as agile as a cat, not the ponderous mass of mother and metal that we are), go out to eat, get things she hasn't managed to get for a while and see the big wide world. She wants little jobs done around the house that have built up: get this from the garage, shift that, put this picture up, re-arrange that, re-pot some house plants and so on. It's all very understandable, very sweet and I can't possibly refuse.
All the to-ing and fro-ing, dealing with my father and helping my mother (even heaving myself up to make cups of tea when we're all settled is annoying) makes a visit a stressfulm tiring and busy event. And that's my weekend! I have to go back to work afterwards, not recover.

Meanwhile I've not had any contact with my friends, not done any exercise (I love running, and I go to the gym a lot), probably not eaten enough because my mother (innocently) and my father (belligerently) don't understand how much I eat, and not done any extra work, nor any of my housework. So the following week I have to work hard to catch up: I must keep up with work, do the washing and cleaning in my own home and see friends who I missed in the evenings I was away.

It's hard to summon enthusiasm to see the person I love most, and that hurts. The hurdles are so high. I can 'waste' a week when I'm here doing nothing much, by sleeping in, working late, having quick meals and going out or cooking properly, perhaps with friends, and still not only relax and have a good time but also get more work done than a week when I go to my parents.

I know that some people who visit their parents are pampered at each visit. They might be picked up from a train station (there's no train to my parents, unless I want to take as long as the coach and pay over three times as much), fed and watered, contribute only mildly to housework and sleep soundly. But I still feel guilty for not emulating the frequency of their visits. My mother means at least as much to me as theirs to them.

But can I let any of this show with her? Of course I can't! It would hurt her to think that visiting her was a chore as well as a joy. I have enough self-control not to snap as my sister does, and I'm aided in paying attention to my mother by not owning a laptop to distract me when I visit. The whole house is enervating in a way that is hard to describe. I can make a drink for a friend visiting me here, but when I'm slobbing with my mother in the evening of a visit just hauling myself out of the seat again seems burdensome. It's partly the smell; I remember when my father was away for 6 months when I was a boy and he had a job the old house suddenly became light and airy, and all seemed good in the world. My mother and I had a great time. I'm not sure I can describe the atmosphere my father creates other than as a 'pall of gloom'. It affects everything in the house, all the time, niggling at your nose, throat and mind. Always stuffy, always worrying about what will happen next.

And she wants to go to the family picnic. My sister can't make it, despite us both being told months and months ago to keep the day free. I think she forgot and agreed to go on Scout camp (she's a leader). So my mother didn't lose all hope, after missing the wedding and shifting all her hopes of seeing her family this year onto the picnic. I can rent a car and drive her there. Only I've got to let her down.

My job, which I need not to go bankrupt, starts soon. And I need to be there at lunchtime on the next day after the family picnic, with an 8-hour train journey from St. Pancras. Do the trains go overnight? Will I have time to drive a car from here to my mother, to the picnic and back round the circuit again before going to London? If both answers are 'yes' then I won't sleep that night, which will make my first day or two in my job difficult.