This is not easy to confront. I was aghast with admiration for the candour of one reader’s confession last week. I wonder: how many other people face a seemingly endless future of obligatory involvement with a parent they do not love – and have never loved?

“But all children love their mothers!” Not true. When discernment sets in – around the age of 11, perhaps – the scales can fall from the eyes. My infant attachment to my mother ceased irrevocably when I realised how stupid, bigoted and uncharitable she was, all the more so in contrast to my adorable father. When she was widowed, and I lost the father I truly loved, I took her on holiday, just the two of us. I was in my twenties, she only 50. There it hit me: from now on there was no escape. My only sibling had emigrated. It would be just her and me.

Now she is 88. She is not ill, but age has not improved her irascible temperament. Her black scowls, her hostile rebukes, her air of disapproval, still have the power to strike terror in me, at 60. I am lucky, so far. She is mobile, she can look after herself.

But her bewilderment and forgetfulness increase daily, so I watch and wait. She has long been paranoid about neighbours. Ever since our childhood she has fallen out with every next-door neighbour; now, in her sheltered housing, with a warden on guard, she imagines that her neighbours (or their carers) break in while she is out, and look for money. The locks are repeatedly changed, at her insistence; she cannot trust anyone, but then she never has.

Not even my children, who are always kind to her, escape her mad suspicions. She has accused them of sneaking into her flat to watch her TV. She has no friends. Never much interested in my life, she is resentful that I am still working. I am “always in a rush”, I “do too much”. The reader’s mention of switching on audiobooks for her mother roused a wistful thought (my world is in books): how nice – at least she enjoys books. My mother will not pick up a book. So we have no interests in common, there is little to discuss except what she wants for lunch. It was a great misfortune that she was widowed so young. It made her pathetic; it made me feel cruel. Whenever I play Dory Previn’s record with the lyrics “Oh mother how I hate you, you’ll never know how deep”, I think: how dreadful to say it, but how true. Her dependence on me has long outlived mine on her. If I did not visit her, she would have nobody. So I grit my teeth and ring her to discuss where I will take her. Guilt and fear predominate; duty keeps me seeing her, but she is a reminder of the lost love and laughter of my father.

I have no real cause for complaint: I am not yet one of the great army of full-time daughter-carers. But at any moment I might be: last week’s article made me confront the future. Old women increasingly cling on into their 90s, or 100s. There will be no way out. It is easy to give loving care to children and pets. Most women in my situation accept it as their selfless lot to care for those who brought them into the world. But I do not like her, and liking is almost more important than love: it is the adult response to a fellow adult. I am bound by this unwanted bond till death do us part.

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