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"My mother called me long distance all of my life to ask me about my weight," confesses Meg Federico with a grimace.

But was she ever overweight? The 53-year-old author of Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother, sits in her publisher's office in downtown Toronto, a thin, stylish presence.

"Oh, no," she says. "But she made me think I was. Once, I probably weighed 130 pounds. I was just a little plump, and she made me feel I was an elephant in a bikini. "

The fraught relationship made Ms. Federico's efforts to help her mother in her dotage that much more difficult - and important, she says. She had to travel frequently from Halifax, where she lived with her own family, to suburban New Jersey, where her 81-year-old mother, Addie, and her new 82-year-old husband, Walter, lived with the assistance of caregivers in a house Ms. Federico dubbed "the Departure Lounge."

But she had a long emotional journey to make as well.

"There was always this environment of insecurity and fear in our relationship," explains the mother of three. "I was always fighting for some kind of acceptance and feeling that I wasn't getting it, and she was always being disapproving because she had always been disapproved of [as a daughter.] There was a weird symmetry to it."

Her mother was an imperious, brittle woman who had lived a privileged life. "She had a lot in common with God, a confused, vengeful, Old Testament God who'd read Freud," her daughter writes.

When Ms. Federico was 3, her mother caught her playing with matches as she tried to light the fireplace.

To teach her a lesson, she grabbed the toddler's hand and held a finger into a flame until it blistered. Once, after being put to bed at 7 p.m. so that her mother could spend some time alone with her husband, Ms. Federico accidentally broke a lamp while playing in her room. Every night for the following week, her mother tied her wrists and feet to the bed with lengths of clothesline.

The memoir is not an earnest exploration of their relationship - although an early draft was. It is poignant and amusing, the pain always undercut with humour. "Decaying and dying is not funny, but if you drill down and look at the characters involved, you are laughing more at the human condition and the absurdity of the whole thing," Ms. Federico says.

Her mother and stepfather both suffered from forms of dementia. Told by their doctors not to drink, they found local liquor stores willing to take orders over the phone. As Walter's Alzheimer's progressed, he lost his inhibitions. Mail-order sex aids arrived. He would minister to himself with a peppermint "erect aid" and attempt to get on top of her mother on the living room couch. "When Walter smelled like a candy cane, he was in the mood for love," she writes.

But the result was not funny. Like many elderly couples, they had separate bedrooms. Walter began sneaking into his wife's room for a little midnight romance, disrupting her sleep. Soon she dreaded going to bed for fear of his amorous ambushes. On one of her visits, Ms. Federico put a lock on her mother's door after delicately talking to Walter about the birds and the bees and the need for sleep. It didn't work. In the middle of the night, Walter forgot about the chat and began kicking at the door, yelling "I want my Bride!" The police were called - and not for the first or last time.

"I got a map into that territory that we ignore as a culture, that gap between grey hair and dead," Ms. Federico says. "Not a route map, but at least some idea of the territory."

As a child of an aging parent, she was surprised at her own regression. "You live apart from your parents for a long time, and in some way you disconnect from them. And then you re-enter their household and everything comes back up. It's right in your face. 'You never loved me,' or whatever it is you are dealing with. You find yourself suddenly shaking with the emotions of childhood."

She also discovered that "when parents get old, the habits that run the deepest stay. The flesh comes off, and there is just the armature holding up the visage of a person."

Ms. Federico, who is a freelance journalist, was "more interested than afraid" of the aging process and the indignity it often involves.

"People do what they can do and not what you think they should do," she says, when asked why she and her brother, and not their other three siblings, came to their mother's aid. "Everybody has an individual relationship with a parent and that's what you have to respect. And maybe they can't see their mother pooping on the floor. I'm not squeamish."

Her own relationship with her mother compelled her to look for a resolution, she adds. "I wasn't done with Mom, and maybe they were. I wanted to be loving. I wanted to be accepted and to be crucial."

The last child at home, she had often provoked her mother when she was younger. "She had to reveal herself to me slightly more than she wanted to because I made her angry, and the whole thing about being superior is about not being angry. But I took pleasure in provoking her."

As she cared for her mother, a realization dawned on her. "She had downloaded all the stuff that she had believed had disappointed her parents about her onto me."

That dynamic never became clear to her mother. "No, I never got an apology," Ms. Federico says. But that didn't matter. She went about ironing out their warped relationship on her own. "I told her, 'You're not ugly. You're not a disappointment. You did the best you could.' And somehow, in ... offering unconditional love for her, it was like getting it back. ... It is a dopey thing to say at my age, but I felt I was a whole person for the first time."

Her mother wanted the same closure, she says. "I had never seen anyone so naked and defenceless," she says.

"Addie was my compass north; as long as she was around I knew where I was, even if I was running in the opposite direction," she writes.

In the final moments, she reassured her mother that it was okay to go, whispering, "Dying is so easy - everybody does it, Mom" as she cradled her in her arms like a baby.

shampson@globeandmail.com