Memoryland hr686

 

My memories shared with my mother are stored in Memoryland. It’s the place inside of me that holds all my memories and I named it Memoryland by myself. Recalling my memories means visiting Memoryland. Like it or not, a scene or conversation with my mother sometimes happens to flash back in my mind when I inadvertently step into Memoryland.

I carefully avoid the section concerning my mother whenever I visit there. It always evokes heartache and anger. Taking a glance at my mother’s section, I find notable examples. I was in my late thirties and came back to my hometown for the first time in years to see my family. Instead of welcoming me, my mother said to me, “You’re not famous at this age of yours. That proves you have no talent in music. You have failed in music and you are a failure.” On my other visit, she said, “To get this family’s fortune, I gave up everything that I wanted to do and married without love. But you are doing what you want with someone you love. Taking everything isn’t acceptable! Because you don’t sacrifice anything,  you’re not entitled to inherit the family fortune. So, don’t ever come home. Visits are unnecessary since you’re not a successor.” Just a few glimpses of my memories with my mother cause a lot of pain, and that’s why I try to steer away from my mother’s section in Memoryland.

My relative called me ten days ago and let me know that my mother passed away.

She was a chronic liar and an evil-doer. She got our family’s fortune by sacrificing her life, yet seemed unhappy day after day. It appeared that she had taken it out on others by trying to do harm anyway she could think of. Eventually she lost the fortune when she and my father failed the family business and moved out of their big house. After she moved into a condo, she had submitted to violence from my sister. She ran away to hide and moved into a small apartment where she died alone, covered with her own vomit and excreta. Despite her advanced age, I had assumed she wouldn’t die soon. Her revenge for her unhappiness was never enough. I supposed she would persistently plot evil schemes or throw heartless words at me and others around her which would keep her going. Since I had thought her time wouldn’t come in the near future, her death took me by surprise.

Has she repented and gone to heaven? In my theory, people realize their mistakes and wrong deeds before their deaths. They admit, regret, and thus are forgiven, released from suffering called life, and then die. I wonder if she also has been forgiven. Considering her nature that she wouldn’t admit her wrong doing, it’s hard to imagine she could ever be forgiven. Nevertheless, as she has actually died, she might have been.

I dared to go into her section of Memoryland. Passing through her countless lies I received and her desperate efforts to make people unhappy, I found a tall, heavy brass gate in the deep back of the section. It was locked by a huge bolt, which meant I had blocked this memory. Summoning courage and bracing myself for what horrible memory was there, I unbarred the bolt and got inside. It was on the bus that was running along the beautiful coast of the sea. My family was on a trip and taking a tour bus. I was a small child and was in the window seat with my mother next to me. She pointed at a big rock jutting out of the sea and uncommonly tenderly asked me, “Hidemi, what does that rock look like to you?” “An elephant,” I replied. “Really? Yeah, you’re right! It does look like an elephant! Then, how about that rock over there? What does it look like?” We continued this conversation for one rock after another and she said I was right each time kindly. While she seemed a different person from the one I met every day, I felt extremely happy. Later though, when I told her how happy that bus ride was, she confessed to me that she had just tried to divert my attention so that she wasn’t embarrassed by me who could have thrown up on the bus because I usually got car sick too easily. In any case, the funny thing was, I unconsciously had blocked one of the happiest memories of mine.

On the night of that day when I was told about my mother, I burst into tears all of a sudden. I couldn’t figure out why. I just couldn’t explain the emotion I was having, but it engulfed me. While crying hard, I was dismayed and tried to understand what I was feeling. It was more like emptiness rather than sadness. I felt as if the long fierce battle I had engaged in abruptly came to an end with my arch enemy evaporated. I even no longer knew whether I loved her or hated her.  Maybe both. I was simply overwhelmed by an illogical, strange emotion that I couldn’t comprehend and kept bawling.

Good and Evil hr668

 I haven’t seen my parents for about five years now. When I saw them last time, they were in their late seventies and my mother told me an episode for a giggle. It goes as follows.

During a recent trip my parents took, they went along the highway beside a lake by car. They found a signboard that advertised a tour boat on the lake. It was already late afternoon but they thought it was still early to check in the hotel. They decided to drop by the lake for the sightseeing boat. When they pulled up their car, the staff at the ticket window was closing the tour boat office and the boat crew who had just returned from the last tour of the day was leaving the boat. My mother jumped on the staff and asked for the tour. The staff replied that today’s tours had been over and told her to come back tomorrow. That was the point where my mother unleashed her specialty. A fabrication.

“My husband and I are an old frail couple who came all the way from a very far place just to get on this boat. We had been looking forward to sightseeing this lake by boat so much for a long time. It’s extremely disappointing not to be able to get aboard. We arrived here later than we had planned because we couldn’t drive fast due to our age. We won’t have enough time tomorrow to come back here. If anything, I’m not sure if we could come back here ever again because we’re too old.”

In this made-up story of hers, there is not a jot of truth but all lies. However, the kind staff bought her fake misery and talked to the captain of the boat. He willingly untied the mooring rope and prepared the boat especially for my parents. They monopolized the entire boat as if it had been their charter tour. After she told this to me who was downright disgusted throughout the whole story, she added that although the tour had been boring and the lake hadn’t been appealing, she had exulted in her deed by which she made the staff work overtime just for her and my father and made the staff go home late that day. It appeared that she was proud of what she did to them since it showed how clever she was to take advantage of them. My father was smiling and nodding amusingly.

My parents are evil. They haven’t changed as they became older. My mother never stops deceiving people whether she gains benefits or not. Benefit doesn’t matter to her but deceiving is her purpose even if she would suffer a loss in return. Too many times I have seen her do harm by lying to her family, acquaintances and strangers alike. It seems someone’s unhappiness is her only pleasure. As her child, I have had more than enough share of suffering by her lies. It started by what she had kept teaching me as far as I can remember as her mantra that was all the people in the world were evil and they spoke ill of  me behind my back while they seemed nice. When I was hospitalized in a children’s ward for nephritis, she came to see me mere half an hour before the visiting hour was over at night and went home hurriedly though she promised she would come early afternoon everyday. A thorough examination day was scheduled for me at the hospital and I earnestly begged her to come early for once and accompany me because I was nervous and the nurse also urged my mother to do so. She made a promise, and of course she broke it and didn’t show up. The nurse accompanied me in place of my mother the whole day through numerous kinds of examinations. When they finished and I got back to my ward, my mother was sitting beside my empty bed, not apologetically but satisfactorily. Beside these instances, I was hurt by my mother’s constant lies, big and small. Worst of all, I couldn’t help trying to believe her while I duly knew she was lying, which enhanced my disappointment. As I grew older, her lies to me got more fierce thus the damage resulted bigger. My father is her puppet who does whatever she tells him to do and connives at her lying. Eventually they ruined my business and then stole my money. I learned a lesson in a hard way before I estranged myself from them and finally cut them off. We haven’t been in touch for years.

Although I sustained irretrievable damage from my mother a million times, I feel envious every time I see a mother and a daughter hanging together. I always wonder if there’s such a thing as good parents in this world when I watch the award show on TV and the recipients mention gratitude toward their supportive parents in their speeches. It sounds more implausible than envious to me. On my part, I want to think that a child from evil parents can grow into a good person. I sincerely try to prove it by being good myself.

A Call from Hell hr620

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...