Flashback-Who are you?

A couple of years ago we had a woman that stayed with my mother during the day. Ma was having alot of paranoid thoughts and was asking Darlene alot of questions about me and our family. What it came down to was she didn't know that I was her daughter. When Darlene told me about the questions I gave Ma a notebook and told her that when she had and questions come to mind during the day when I was gone that she could have Darlene write down the questions and when I got home we would go over the questions.

One night I got the notebook and sat down with her to go over the questions. Her first question was what had happened to her husband. My dad died in 1979. She said she knew he had been in the war but she didn't think he had died in the war. While she was talking to me about this she referred to my father by his first name instead of saying what happened to Dad? I told her that he did not die in the war although he did get injured in the war. The conversation went on with me laying out the events of the day that my dad died. She had been at the hair dresser when I got a call from my brother that dad wasn't doing well. He had been told he had an abdominal aneurysm a few weeks prior and by the symptoms that my brother described I was sure that it had ruptured. He called 911 and I started trying to get my mom at the hair dresser. We ended up picking her up halfway through getting her hair permed to take her to the ER where my father died.

As I told her the details she seemed to remember it - or at least said she did.

Another question was - "where am I?" . I asked her exactly what she meant. She couldn't really say so I asked her if she meant the city/state or my house. She said all of it. So I explained to her that she was at our home and told her the name of the town and state. She nodded but then asked why she was at my home. I told her that my husband and I had brought her to live with us because she needed some help. Then she wanted to know who I was. I told her I was her daughter.

My brother and I were adopted and fortunately for me I had some details since mine had been a private adoption. When I told her I was her daughter she looked like she didn't believe me. She said that she remembered a dark haired baby but that she didn't remember me. I told her that I was the dark haired baby but that I was all grown up now. She said that wasn't possible because she didn't have any papers. I assumed she meant adoption papers. I assured her that she did have papers but that she didn't have them here with her. I asked if she remembered Emily who was my birth mother. I reviewed the scenario of why Emily gave me up for adoption. It seemed to ring a bell but she still seemed a bit skeptical.

I explained that since I am her daughter that my husband and I wanted her to come stay with us so we could help her. Additional questions she asked revealed that she thought she was at some sort of facility like a nursing home and that there were other people living here. She would hear them upstairs although the upstairs was just storage. She would tell stories of the others using her bathroom (no one used her bathroom). She even insisted on having her shower cap labeled with her name so no one else would use it.

She frequently asked me who was in the room across from her. I showed her many times that it was just a guest room and that no one actually stayed there except when company came. She told Darlene that she was afraid my "other mother" was going to come and stay in that room and that there would be competition between them. It was awful to think that after 50+ years she still had those fears.