Coming up for air

Would someone please give me permission to hate my grandmother?  I know it’s not okay to ask this, but I really, really want it.  I feel like a bug.  I feel like a worm.  It’s not okay to feel this way about your grandmother, but sometimes, when she calls, I have to close my eyes and try not to suffocate.  I wish she’d get a new favorite and leave me alone.  I wish she wasn’t sick and alone.  I wish she wasn’t the mother of my own beloved dead mother.  I wish she hadn’t been so good to me as a kid.  I wish I could just endure her sad lonely stories about how sad and lonely and sick she is, about how awful my grandfather was and about how her sons ignore her and about how her daughters-in-law can’t stand her – but I just can’t. 

I can’t breathe. 

I was supposed to go out to dinner with her and my uncle on Mother’s Day.  I hate Mother’s Day.  My mother is dead.  On Mother’s Day, I want to watch DVDs and drink a lot.  On Mother’s Day, my grandmother must try to mother me, since I don’t have a mother anymore.  She said come to the house at 2:00.  I went to the house at 1:50.  She and my uncle were not there; no note.  I left my card in the mailbox and went back home.  We hadn’t spoken until she called today.

I can’t breathe.

She said she needs me to call tonight, in her out-of-breath-I’m-probably-having-a-heart-attack-right-now voice.  I don’t want to call, I don’t care what it is, I don’t what she wants.  I can’t stand it.  I’m an awful, hideous, ungrateful, SOB grandson.  All I can’t think about is myself and what I need to do to make me happy.  I want God to kill one of us soon so that I don’t have to do it.  Jesus!  The woman is 81 years old, a widow, shut-in for the last 10 years, in crap-ass health, her sons ignore her, her wretch of a grandson won’t return her calls, and all I want is for it to go away.  What kind of human being am I?  What would my mother think?