My mother, 53, is in hospital, suicidal.

I don't know how I feel about this, if I even care, or what I should be like to her anymore.

My mother grew up in Asia. Her father was an alcoholic who died when she was 15; everyone else, she says, "disapproved" or her. She suddenly joined a Catholic convent at 20 and suddenly left it at 25.

She married my father almost on impulse, he was 36 and had known her only a few weeks. They emigrated to this country and promptly didn't get along in the slightest.

So my brother, then I, were born. My parents' marriage was always tense and hostile, but later the real disasters began.

My father, diabetic, learned when I was 11 that he was irrevocably losing his eyesight. That same year, my mother's mother died and she fell into deep depression. Their marriage crossed the line from bad to nightmarish.

My mother became a cold, unfeeling woman who showed friendliness or affection to virtually no one. My father yelled at her in long, maniacal tirades whenever she crossed him, which was often. She in turn took out her huge frustration and rage on her two sons.

I was 9 when my mother first said she hated me. Maybe she said it on impulse, unthinkingly. But I remember it like yesterday, a bright green summer morning, the birds singing, and my mother's face is there, filled wih rage, mottled rage, the kind that makes you cower and run to the cellar, her eyes wide open, glaring like a tiger's.

I loved my mother. Really I did. I believed that a good son takes care of his parents and does everything possible to help them. But nothing I could do would please her. She would come home from work in the evenings and within minutes would be angry over something or other, dished unwashed maybe, carpets not vacuumed, or plants not watered.

"if you really loved me, you would......" I heard that one a lot. If you really loved me, I wouldn't be so unhappy, she kept saying. It was my fault she suffered. I was not a good son. I was lazy, she said; I was selfish, I was just like HIM - her husband, whom she hated with a virulent passion, yet did not leave, still a prisoner of her conservative Catholic upbringing.

I sometimes wonder to this day what it would be like to cuddle with one's mother, to have an older woman to turn to for support, or love, or encouragement. But all I can remember are the harsh lines on her face, the sneers of contempt at who I was, the patent dislike and disdain she carried towards me.

I wasn't the son she wanted. She wanted a lean, tall, handsome, athletic, popular, sociable kid with lots of friends and lots of girls; I was overweight, short, academic almost to the point of no return, and couldn't get a date if my life depended on it.

I guess what hurt me the most was when I did try to hug her. She would squirm, wriggle, look vastly uncomfortable, as if some germ or disease was touching her. One time I visited her at work, she is a nursery school teacher, and there she was with two kids nestled happily in her lap. Tears came into my eyes. She wasn't touch-phobic or anything then.....it was ME she didn't want.

She didn't even think of me, my father, or my brother as three separate people. Often we became simply "the three men" (even when I was just 14 and he 17). Or just "they", the mysterious they, whom she despised for their intellectualism, men who would rather watch Nova than the Cosby Show and vastly preferred Isaac Asimov to Harlequin Romances.

What would it be like to be loved? To really be loved? To have someone who really accepted me as I am and didn't want me to become someone else, someone different? Someone who loved me no matter what, who didn't hate me if I said No.

I remember the day when I was 16 and got into a fight with my mother, I swore at her. She started sobbing, so I came to apologize, she took a big knife and threatened to stab me if I came closer. I remember her eyes most of all, the hatred and rage I saw there. And I remember the pain diving in to me, the despair, the fear, the self-loathing, the terror and grief I felt.

I went to school that morning, and collapsed hysterically on the sidewalk, crying in full public view in broad daylight. I didn't go to school that day. I couldn't. I wandered the streets, dazed, eyes glazed with horror. I called her at work from a pay phone and apologized, endlessly, and she grudgingly agreed to speak to me again, but never really forgave me.

It has been seven years since that happened, and one year since I left home and told my parents I didn't want to see them again. I am 23 now, and have only just, barely, pulled out of an awful depression that turned 1996 into "annus horribilis".

Now she is the one suicidal. The family says she needs me, I must call her, visit her, be there for her. Part of me wants to, wants to help, to comfort, to heal and be there. But who heals the healer? where was she those lonely nights when I cried alone in the basement? where were her arms when I craved for a hug, where was her smile when I longed for it?

why did I write this? I don't know, it just spilled out, make of it what you will, sorry for the length,

S-youth, Aug. 13, 1997.