Going Round In Circles

"Feels like we've slipped into a parallel dimension," I grunted, kicking a stone. I always kick stones when I'm in a funk. I become practically stonophobic.
"Yeah," said Ma. "Exactly that..."
She doesn't kick stones. It's a flaw, I think. She had a look on her face that suggested she wanted to kick something.
"I keep thinking we should be worrying about Dad now," I muttered, kicking an entirely different stone. "He should be in hospital right now, having his clinical trial. We should be worrying about what to feed him, and keeping him mentally engaged and trying to make him laugh and...and...STUFF!" I said, kicking the living crap out of a third, entirely innocent stone. It skipped off into the lake to have a sulk of its own.
Ma sighed.
"Yeah," she said again. "Instead of which, we're just...sort of..." She sighed. "Going round in circles."
We rounded the edge of the lake, on the first in a long while of our lakeside morning walks.
It was a little on the nose, I admit - walking round and round a lake, feeling like it's an analogue of life at the minute.
We walked.
"Look," said Ma. "The trees are pretty."
I looked, nodded. They were.
Somehow that didn't help.
"Yeah," I said. "Pretty..."
We walked around the circle one more time.