She Told The Nurse She Was My Mother So She Could Get Into My Room

I was in hospital for eight days after an operation that went fine and then briefly did not.

My mother-in-law wanted to visit. She wanted to visit on the first day, when I was on morphine and could not hold a sentence, and she wanted to bring "a few things" and, she said, "sort out" my kitchen while I was in.

My husband told her no. I want that on the record: he told her no, clearly, twice, and I love him.

On day two, a nurse came in and asked me, gently, whether I wanted my mother to come in.

My mother died in February. The nurse did not know that. Why would she.

I said my mother is dead.

The nurse — and I will remember this woman for the rest of my life — did not blink, did not gasp, did not perform. She said, "Right. I'll deal with that," and she went out, and through the door I heard the very particular sound of a professional woman removing a civilian from a corridor.

My mother-in-law had told the desk she was my mother.

She told my husband, later, that it was "just easier than explaining".

Easier. Than explaining.

She had, in her bag, a set of my house keys that she had taken from the hook in our hall in January, which we did not know she had, and which she had had cut, and which she used the day I came home to have "aired the place" and rearranged my dead mother's cookbooks into "a better system".

That is the sentence I have never got past. My dead mother's cookbooks. A better system.

We changed the locks. She cried, extravagantly, for weeks, to anyone who would listen, that we had "locked her out of the family".

We did not lock her out of the family. We locked her out of the house.

She has not been in it since. She has been at Christmas, at the restaurant, twice, and she has been perfectly nice, and my husband holds my hand under the table the whole time and neither of us mentions it.