MY MOTHER and I fought a lot. And sometimes she fought dirty. We’d be in the middle of it, hurling accusations back and forth, and she would suddenly declare, “I wish I had been nicer to my mother when she was alive.’’ Well, there’s no answer to that. It used to stop me cold.
Then, into the silence, my mother would add, tearfully, “I miss my mother.’’ And finally, in case I hadn’t gotten the point, “Someday I’ll be dead and you’ll miss me. You’ll wish you had been nicer to me.’
I’d gotten the point, all right. But it made me feel annoyed and manipulated, rather than full of the penitent affection she seemed to be seeking.
She said things to me that no one else ever said.“Are you sure you want to do that?’’ she would ask, if I glanced at a dessert menu.And “Don’t wear black, it makes you look like an old lady.’’And “It’s great that you want to be a writer, but don’t you think you should have a real profession?’’And “You’re planning to move out of this place before the baby comes, right?’’And, after the baby was born, “Why would you give him that as a middle name?’
I wish I could say that I responded to these comments with a shrug, or a smile, or some kind of mild, well-adjusted line like, “Thanks, Mom, I’ll think about it.’’ But I shouted. I sputtered. I told her to mind her own business. I told her to butt out. I said, “How could you?’’ and “How dare you?’’ She said my tone was offensive. I said that my tone wasn’t nearly as offensive as her remarks. We yelled. We sulked. We hung up on each other.
All I really wanted, I thought, was for my mother to treat me the way she treated everybody else. My friends loved her. She was charming at parties. She was a sympathetic listener. She had an earthy candor, a quick sense of humor, and a shrewdness about what made people tick. She was a flirt. Admitted to the hospital in her eighties for a frightening, devastating sudden onset of total blindness, she was able to laugh at the irony - “Great. Just my luck’’ - when I told her that the intern assigned to her case was incredibly handsome.
At a moment like that, I admired and pitied and adored her, and told her so. It was when she said things like “You’re neglecting me’’ that I had trouble being nice; the only answer I could summon up was, “I am not.’’ To which she would respond, “You are too.’’ And then we would tumble into one of our scraps where there was never a winner or a loser, just an eventual subsiding into uneasy, baffled exhaustion. Since my mother’s death just over a year ago, I have not fought like that with anyone. No one else makes me that mad. And there’s no one else - not even my husband - with whom I am that free, that uncivilized. There’s no huge adversary to butt heads with, to strive against. I don’t have to keep insisting I’m a grownup - because of course, bratty and childish as it was, that’s what I was doing. The death of your parents makes it perfectly clear: you are a grownup. You don’t have to prove it to anyone. The flip side is: you’re no one’s child. No one cares if you eat your vegetables. (Another ridiculous fight she and I would have: “Aren’t you going to eat your string beans?’’ “Ma, I’m 40’’).Despite the fights, my mother and I were close. Or rather, we could not have fought like that - so fiercely, so rudely - if we hadn’t been as close as we were. I would call her and she would say, “Mental telepathy - I was just going to call you.’’ I still start to reach for the phone sometimes. I still think, “All right already. You made your point. You can come back now.’’So. Do I miss my mother? Do I wish I had been nicer to her?
All I can say is: If there is an afterlife, my mother is standing there looking down at me, shaking her head and saying, “I told you so.’’
Joan Wickersham is the author of “The Suicide Index.’’ Her column appears regularly in the Globe. 
