Who is Charles's mother from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel and what is their importance?

Charles's mother, like her husband and son, is a sad character. Charles only visits her once during the story. He goes to the family home, where she has prepaid for 10 years to live in a time loop that repeats the same, hypothetical 60 minutes of her life. She moves through it in a kind of stupor, as if she were drugged, and Charles likens the situation to a rest home. He is able to break into her consciousness and disrupt the time loop for a short period, during which she chastises him for not calling often enough, and gives him a wrapped box from his closet, an act that indicates she occasionally breaks out of her time loop voluntarily. She intimates that she is not thrilled by her situation, and yet, she does not complain about the life she has chosen. Her main personality characteristic is an undisguised need for love, especially from Charles, but previously from her husband, as well, according to Charles. Even when Charles meets an idealized version of his mother in an alternate universe, her Zen-like calmness is still marked by her need for his love. Not a thoroughly rounded character in the novel, she seems to represent an aspect of familial love that is too self-directed to be entirely healthy.