When I told my father I wanted to go live with my mother I was about 10 years old.  My father tried to explain some things to me about my mother that he thought would make me change my mind.  He wasn't really able to explain them.  Maybe that was due to his schizotypal conversation style or maybe it was because I was 10 years old and he was trying to explain fairly complex psychological issues with which he had no formal understanding.  Regardless of the reason I didn't understand then, now I get it.  And by now, I actually mean now 45 years later.

I've never really understood my mother.  Most people I'm around them for a little while and I kind of get them what makes them tick what motivates them maybe not on a very deep level, but it's a thing I'm generally good at, a thing I've come to understand is not a super common trait.  Growing up I just assumed if I was good at something that pretty much everyone was good at it, and I can't now remember when I discovered that that was not a common trait.  Like I was a teenager before I realized that everyone didn't have really bad headaches most of the time.  But whatever, The point is typically I have some idea what makes people tick but my mother is a complete enigma to me.

Which is not to say that I'm like fascinated by her or necessarily care very much what makes her tick, but as she's gotten older and I'm trying to keep tabs on her the fact that I really don't understand her means that when she spins her little unreliable narrator tales I really don't have any idea which ones are true.  Are any of them true?  They might all be lies.  But the thing that really does fascinate me is whether or not she knows which ones are lies-- I mean it's not a lie if you believe it, right?