I’ve got voice mail from my mother. Her dismal voice made me creep all
over. Since her calls almost always aim to hurt me, I’m used to
receiving bad messages. But her tone was new low this time and I had to
brace myself.
I guessed it was either she conceived a new bitter idea to strike a
blow at me or she turned the brunt of her daily anger toward me.
Nevertheless, there was a slight possibility that the call was about
some emergency, such as my father was taken to the hospital or
something. I didn’t want to spend any more nervous minutes worrying what
was that all about as much as I didn’t want to return a call. I decided
to face the fear and called her back with sweaty palms.
She started with trivial social chattering and suddenly burst into
wailing. I couldn’t believe my ear that was hearing my mother crying
hard on the other side of the line. I had seen her crying only twice
before. The first time was when I was too little to understand the
matter. A relative of ours was driving us home from my mother’s parents’
home. While she was talking to him in the car, she burst into tears and
he consoled her. The second time was when I failed the entrance
examination of a renowned junior high school. She suggested that we took
a bath together and started crying in a bath tub, saying, “I’m so
disappointed!” again and again. Even as a 12-years-old, I realized how
hugely I blew it and I was terrified at my failure. And this was the
third time. I was astonished as much.
I asked her what happened, and she confessed that my younger sister
had begun to live with my parents. I have no idea why, but she had
concealed it from me for about a year. My sister had been my mother’s
favorite. Unlike me, she did everything as my mother told her to do. She
was the pride of my mother who always bragged about hers to me as if it
had been a proof that doing as she told was the key to success. That
pride of her had worked abroad in a managing position at one of major
hotel chains. But she quit the job and returned to Japan a year ago.
Soon after she started living with my parents, the relationship between
them got atrocious. My sister blamed my mother harshly for having
parted with the land and the house that had been inherited for
generations, and for messing up her life by telling her to do the wrong
way. That wasn’t surprised me because those things are the norm for a
person like my mother whose lifework is to make people around her
unhappy by telling a lie on an every possible occasion she gets. I was
rather surprised that my sister had gotten along well with her for such a
long time until now without noticing her malice. Then, new surprises
easily topped it.
My sister’s constant rebukes to my mother didn’t stop just there.
According to her, my sister had made her cook, wash, clean, shop, do all
chores with authoritative commands. She also had piled up the trash
inside my parents’ condo, making it eat up almost all the rooms so that
my parents barely had space to sleep. They hadn’t have enough time to
sleep either because she demanded that they be up and wait until she
came home in the middle of the night. When my sister found anything that
wasn’t as she liked, she would throw things or abusive words at my
parents. My mother admitted on the phone, crying, “I’m in hell.”
Her countless evil tactics have only led herself to a horrible life
so far. Although she married for my father’s money, she failed the
family business and lost everything. She sold the family’s big house and
moved into a small condo that she had despised all her life. When I met
her two years ago, she said, “This is what means ‘as a man sows, so
shall he reap.’” in an unusually regrettable tone. I had never imagined
her life would have any room left to get even worse than that like this.
I wonder when she is ever forgiven. I know she has done too much evil
and has been burned by unquenchable fire, but I feel compassion for her
for the first time in my life. It’s so pitiful for her if the day she is
forgiven will really never come.
But wait. It’s my mother with whom I’ve been dealing here. Don’t
forget she’s a world-class liar. No one can tell which part of her story
is true and which part is an act. It’s even possible that everything is
bogus and simply her new scheme to bog me down in some way. It took me
some time after I hung up the phone to come to myself and remind myself
of the facts above. I might have fallen for it at least for a while...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)