A perfect dark-red, circular spot on the beige carpet. I reached down and touched it, first with a finger and then my thumb, pressing lightly. Sure enough, something wet and red thinly coated my fingers. It had to be blood. But where did it come from?

“There’s blood on the carpet,” I announced to my mother. We had just spent 40 minutes getting her from the dining table to the couch—a distance of about 12 feet. She was certain I couldn’t help her stand up, that my dad had to be there for her to move. My parents recently relocated, and dad was at the old house cleaning out the garage. They would sign closing documents that afternoon for the sale of the house. I came to be with my mother, whose mobility and cognitive ability had declined rapidly over the past few months.

Back at the dining table, I’d held out my arms to help her stand, but she made no attempt to respond. I moved the walker in front of her and held it steady so she could pull herself up, but still she didn’t move. Then she wanted to get down to the floor and crawl. She instructed me to bring some towels to soften the floor. I spread a thick blanket, doubled over, between her dining chair and the edge of the living room carpet. She leaned forward and tried to rest a hand on the floor, but lost her nerve. At her insistence, we called my dad. He said yes, I could move her. Again, I held out my arms—no response. I brought the walker over—she tried holding it in different ways but never got to the standing-up part. She tried again to get to the floor with similar results—her hesitant hand reached low.

I kept offering to help her stand, as that seemed to me the best option, but she said she didn’t want to hurt me. She is several inches taller than me, but only a few pounds heavier. I had helped her stand and walk many times before. Perhaps her reticence resulted from a recent fall, although I wasn’t there at the time of her fall. She asked who else could help her and named an acquaintance who had visited a couple days before. When she determined that I was, indeed, the only available person to move her, she asked for my dad again and cried. An hour earlier she had announced, “This afternoon I’m scheduled to have a nervous breakdown.” I was beginning to agree.

My mother insisted that she could not stand up with her feet on the smooth floor of the dining room, but only on the carpet. In response, I grabbed the front legs of the wooden chair she occupied and pulled it to the edge of the carpet. Now we had less than six feet to go. I held out my arms again, instructing her to hold onto my biceps as I held her elbows. I planted my knees against her right leg and pulled her up—sort of. She doesn’t straighten up all the way when she stands. I put my arm around her back to keep her from sinking back down, and pulled the walker in front of her.

A one-inch scooch, a six-inch step, a rapid little shuffle. She leaned forward on her toes, her center of gravity moving precariously in front of her as her heels came off the floor. I lifted her foot so she could move it forward. Then again the other foot. Then a step on her own. Then a one-inch scooch. Somehow she got her back turned to the couch and sank down onto the cushions. However, she wanted to lie, and would need to be closer to one end of the couch to make room for her legs to stretch out. Rather than attempt convincing her to stand again, I grabbed her blue jeans on each side of her hips and heaved her slowly across the couch. I lifted her feet onto the couch, then blue-jean-heaved her a little more until her hips rested perpendicular to the back of the couch. A large array of pillows served as a back rest. I spread a fluffy white blanket over her.

“I haven’t brushed my teeth in three days.” She seemed worried about looking well-kept for the house signing, although I had no idea how long it really had been since she last brushed. I poked around in the bathroom drawers and cupboards until I found floss, toothpaste, and toothbrush. She couldn’t floss. I tore off a piece of waxed floss, wound the ends around my fingers, and started with the teeth that were easiest to reach. After flossing most of her teeth, I handed her the toothbrush, which she had instructed me to wet, but not apply toothpaste. She proceeded with brushing on her own. When she finished, she asked me to take a picture of her shiny clean smile and text it to my dad.

It was at this point I noticed the red spot on the carpet. What could have produced a clean drop of blood? My mother suggested I check her knee, which I did—but given that she had jeans on, it couldn’t have dripped blood unless she had a gushing wound that soaked her pants in blood. We checked her elbows too—had she bumped into something and not realized it? No, no signs of blood on my mother. “I’m on my period,” I confessed, “but I don’t understand how I could have dripped blood on the floor like that.” As we discussed the possibilities, she concluded that my menstrual bleeding was the mostly likely culprit.

I wetted a paper towel in the kitchen and went to work on the red spot. Much to my relief, it came out of the carpet with minimal scrubbing. I had no interest in staining carpet at my parents’ house—the very same parents who kept cream-colored carpet in near-perfect condition for 20 years while farming and raising two kids. I knew better than to soil it.

As I turned, my mother noticed blood on my shorts. Another piece of the puzzle. I hastened to the restroom and found that indeed there was blood on my shorts. They were loose, pink-purple shorts made of sweat-pant material. As I cleaned them the best I could without actually taking them off and washing them, I realized what must have happened. When I sat on the edge of the couch to floss my mom’s teeth, I must have leaned into such a position that my underwear and pad weren’t fully in place. Hence, a few drops of blood had fallen onto my shorts, and from there one of them dripped to the carpet.

I have this idea that at 40 years of age, period “accidents” should be a thing of the past. It’s not like I’m new at this bleeding-out-of-my-vagina thing. But there I was, cleaning blood from various surfaces. My mother was unconcerned, a conversational ally as we pieced together what had happened. How strange that in the afternoon’s events, simply standing up would be infinitely more stressful than blood on the carpet.

Oddly, when it was all over, I primarily felt gratitude. It’s awkward to be a fully functional person around a not-fully-functional person. It feels weird that I can floss my teeth and walk where I want to, and my mother can’t. I’m never quite certain what to offer in terms of help, and since her mobility and cognitive ability are a little different each time I visit—sometimes more and sometimes less—it’s a moment-by-moment game. Not the kind of game I’m good at.

This blood on the floor was a gift. An opportunity for me to be vulnerable, to need help solving a problem, to have an awkward dysfunction of sorts. It allowed our roles to feel just a bit more “normal” for a few minutes—she the mother, I the child. I miss that.