I checked out the hotel on the last day of my trip to the western region
of Japan, flew from Kansai Airport and took an airport bus to the
station where I would catch a bullet train heading home. When I finished
a late lunch near the station, I noticed there had been voice mail from
my mother on my cell phone. My parents had declined to meet me the day
before when I was going to visit them who live in the western Japan. I
thought the voice mail was about lame excuses to hide the fact that they
didn’t want to see me, and called her back although my phone’s battery
was extremely low.
I started sarcastically, “It was a pity that
we couldn’t meet yesterday although it was a once-a-year opportunity,
wasn’t it?” to hear her made-up excuse. Then, she replied, “Huh?
Yesterday?” sounding like she had already forgotten about it. And she
continued on as if it wasn’t important at all. What she wanted to tell
me was why my parents had run away from their condo where my sister had
begun to live with them, which I had learned also the day before as a
surprise.
According to my mother, my parents had prepared an
envelope that contained ten thousand dollars for me for a tax avoidance
reason. They were going to hand it to me if I visited them because they
didn’t know my bank account number to wire it. They had put the envelope
on the Buddhist alter of their home. When my sister found it, she got
into frenzy and began to hit my father, shouting, “Get out of this
condo!” As her violence didn’t stop, they ran away with almost nothing
but the clothes they wore. They had stayed at a hotel for a few days and
moved in a short-term rental apartment that my sister later traced. As
they wouldn’t let her in, she scratched my father’s car, broke his
bicycle, torn window screens and put garbage at the door. They had been
moving from one place to another for three weeks because she found them
each time and repeated her harassment. They were still looking for
another apartment to escape from my sister. As if to sum up, my mother
said to me, “We couldn’t get back to our home where the envelope that
had money we were going to give you sit. Your sister stole your money.”
I had heard about some abuse my parents have been inflicted from my
sister when my mother called me a month ago and told me that she was in
hell. But I hadn’t known things have gotten even worse like this.
Although I just learned all her miseries, only one thing seized my mind –
ten thousand dollars. It triggered something in me and my eyes turned
dollar signs like a cartoon. I swiftly responded her that it happened
because they had prepared it in cash and that I would give her my bank
account number not to repeat this in the future. I was desperately
trying to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. I thought they might wire
it again once they got my bank account number. By then, my cell phone’s
electrical voice had uttered ‘Low Battery’ and ‘Charge Now’ for several
times over my mother’s lamenting. I told her to get a piece of paper and
a pen immediately and started the names of my bank and its branch. She
was getting them so awfully slowly that I suspected she did it
intentionally. After a painful wait, I started the number. But right
before the first digit came out of my mouth, my phone went dead.
I felt quite chilly because the timing was so precise that it didn’t
seem coincident. I also felt ten thousand dollars were slipping through
my fingers. I looked around for pay phones to finish the number, but
couldn’t find one. I came home by bullet train, recharged my cell phone,
and called back my parents. Both of them didn’t answer. I called them
again the next day. My father answered this time with the same vacant
voice as I heard on the phone during the trip. He told me that he
couldn’t talk with me now as he was in the real estate agent’s office
for another apartment hunting to hide from my sister. He sounded
completely absent-minded and made me feel uncertain. My mother came up
to the phone and told me their effort would be in vain anyway since my
sister would eventually find out their new place somehow. I offered that
I would find an apartment for them around where I live if they didn’t
bother it would be 500 miles away from where they are now. It was when
my mother burst into tears again. “Will YOU help me? Really?”, she
bawled, as if she couldn’t believe my words.
After I hung up the
phone without telling her my bank account number, I finally came to my
senses. My dollar signs tumbled down from my eyes and my reason
returned. My mother is, has always been, a liar. She tells any kind of
lies from big to small to anyone. She also has set her mind to make me
unhappy in every possible way. She has wielded countless tactics for
that purpose. The marked example was when the music label my partner and
I started finally got on track after strenuous years. When she noticed
our beginning of success, she offered financial support to back me up. I
foolishly trusted her because she was my mother. My partner and I moved
to a bigger office and hired more staffs. Shortly after that, she tried
to take over our business by threatening to stop financial aid unless
we handed over the profit. I realized that she had offered money in the
first place to crush our business, but it was too late. Our label
suffered heavy losses and damage with her sudden finance withdrawal.
Thinking back my bitter experiences of many years, it has been proven
that she never does anything good for me and she never hopes my
well-being. It’s totally a blue dahlia that she would give me any money.
I almost took in her ‘ten thousand dollars’ this time and was stupid
enough to be about to tell her my bank account number.
I wonder
why I keep being fooled by my mother after all those years from
childhood. My mother has never been forgiven for what she did and things
have increasingly gotten worse around her year after year. I may wish
somewhere in my mind that she is finally brought back to her sense and
cleans up her act. Then she becomes a better person and someday she
accepts me and loves me. Probably those vain hopes are my weakness on
which my mother plays with her lies. Or more simply, like mother like
daughter, I’m as greedy as my mother, that’s why I easily fall for her…
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