I want to be clear on one thing:  I did not try to kill my mother.

What ended as an arguable attempt of matricide began unceremoniously enough.  My  mother and sister used to live in St. Louis, but both have since moved to the rolling hills of Iowa.  My sister was dying to get out of the small town she calls home, wanting to visit St.  Louis friends, do some shopping, even see her older brother.  Mom also misses St. Louis and still has quite a few friends here.

Normally, my mother will stay with a friend of hers when she visits so she can be closer to her old neighborhood.  However, that particular  friend has nice furniture and many breakable things around her home and mom feared this would not mix well with two others making the trip.  Those would be my nieces:  one closing in on the age of five, and the other creeping toward terrible two.  So mother thought it better if everyone stayed with me, which may say something about my mom’s views of my house and furniture, but I’m ignoring it.

Now, I’m not really a “kid” kind of guy.  It’s not that I hate kids, but I seem to like it when they’re not around.  But for my nieces, I make an exception.  They’re family, after all.  Then again, I don’t have to live with them.  My oldest niece is truly adorable … for about five minutes.  Then her adorable factor decreases exponentially as her holy-terror factor skyrockets.  I get exhausted just watching my sister deal with her.  The almost two-year old  is … well, almost two years old.  She’s developing her personality and starting to get interesting, but is also far from realizing that many of the things around her don’t actually belong to her.  Many women never leave that phase.

My sister had told my nieces they were going to visit “Uncle Paul.”  The four-year-old has some understanding of who I am.  I was never clear on whether the youngest really got the concept of who I am or if she was just parroting her older sister.  Regardless, I was suddenly dealing with an onslaught of being told who I was.  The oldest would see me and start saying “Uncle Paul, Uncle Paul, Uncle Paul.”  Then the younger one would join in.  This might continue anywhere from a minute to the entire evening.

There is something those without kids don’t understand about parents:  why is everything a child does cute all the time?  “Isn’t that cute!” they’d say when the “Uncle Paul” chorus started.  And it was the night they arrived.  For a few minutes.  Then I no longer cared about who I was, and never wanted to hear my  name uttered again.

My sister had gone to great lengths to tell me how well my youngest niece slept and what a great bedtime schedule she was on.  Apparently my sister is a liar.  Every night was a struggle to get her to sleep.  I could do little to assist in the nightly battle with the child.  As much as it delighted the youngest to run around chanting  “Uncle Paul,” if I got too close to her the gleeful look on her face was replaced by one of abject horror.  My sister assured me that I shouldn’t take this personally and that it just took longer for the little one to reach a comfort level with males.  Right.  And she sleeps so well, too.  Fool me once …

The night before the family was supposed to leave, my mother threw out her back.  The oldest niece was behind this unfortunate development.  She decided she did not want to leave the restaurant they were in and went all protestor on everyone, complete with going completely limp and laying on the floor.  When my mother, playing the role of riot police, tried to pick her up to haul her to the family paddy wagon, her back gave out.  While I was concerned about my mother’s circumstances, I must admit to being a little dismayed at the thought of the visit being extended.  My  mother would be out of commission, forcing me into a more active–and completely unfamiliar–role of keeping these wild children in line.  Evidently my self-interest doesn’t like to take a back seat to the pain of others.

The next morning, as I was helping my mom and sister get the car packed up, mom’s back pain was only getting worse.  Not only was this problematic due to the 300-mile trip ahead, but also because my sister doesn’t drive on highways, so mom would be behind the wheel while in excruciating pain.  I didn’t have much in the way of painkillers–only some ibuprofen–but that was better than nothing so my mother wanted to take some.  Between trips carrying bags to the car while trying to avoid running into children, I grabbed a pill bottle from the medicine cabinet and set it on the kitchen  counter.  A few minutes later, I heard my mother yelling “What did you give me?!?”

Turns out, I grabbed the wrong pill bottle:  rather than ibuprofen, it was melatonin.  I take melatonin from time to time to help me sleep.  One tablet typically knocks me out.  My mother, thinking she had ibuprofen, had taken three pills before looking at the bottle.  So to sum up, I gave my mother three sleeping pills right before she was getting into a car for a five-hour drive.  When I say it like that, it really sounds kind of bad.

Again, just to be clear, it was an accident.

Fortunately my mother is a coffee drinker.