I keep seeing these posts, these young ones – talking about their “difficult” parents, and I… I feel such a pang. A sharp, familiar ache. Because I remember being that person. The professional in my 30s, sharp suit, sharp mind, feeling this… this utterly irrational FURY at my own mother, for refusing to cooperate with something as simple as taking her medication. Or letting me help her dress. Or just… sitting still for five minutes while I tried to organize her bills. It was more than anger, really. It was a kind of acute frustration, a cognitive dissonance that I couldn't reconcile. How could this woman – the one who raised me, who taught me to tie my shoes and read difficult books – suddenly revert to what felt like… willful defiance? It felt like a personal affront, you know? Like she was deliberately making things harder for ME. I remember snapping at her, using that sharp voice I usually reserved for boardroom negotiations, and then immediately feeling this cold wave of guilt wash over me. Shame, really. How could I, a supposedly intelligent, compassionate adult, speak to my own aging parent like that? I’d spend the rest of the day replaying it, dissecting every word, every inflection. A cruel sort of self-flagellation. And now, looking back… decades later, divorced, having rebuilt my entire life after 50 when my "friends" scattered like pigeons – I see it differently. I understand the resistance, the stubborn clinging to a fragment of autonomy. My mother, God rest her soul, was losing so much. Her memory, her physical dexterity, her place in the world. And I, in my youthful arrogance, saw her refusal as a challenge to my competence, rather than a desperate attempt to hold onto her own. I wonder now if she felt that same internal turmoil, that same fury, but directed at her own failing body, her own slipping mind. Did she lie awake, at 2 AM, feeling the sting of my sharp words, the weight of her own inability? I wish I had understood then. I wish I had just… sat with her, in her defiance, instead of fighting it. Instead of letting that anger bloom, hot and ugly, in my chest. Some regrets just… they never quite fade, do they? They just soften, like old photographs, but the image remains.