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 to Hell hr623

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…

The Last Letter from My Mother hr608

My parents sold our farms, house, land that had been inherited from generation to generation and lost everything after they had failed their business. They moved out their hometown and started their new life in a small apartment in a strange city. It was a huge blow to them because my father had given up everything that he had wanted in order to inherit them, and my mother had married my father whom she didn’t love in order to get his family fortune. Although they had planned the similar life as theirs for me, I refused to inherit my family by sacrificing what I wanted to do. I chose a musician as my career and left home. That drove them to be eaten up with enmity against me and they had done everything they could think of to make me give up and come home. While I kept defying their attacks for a long period of time, they lost all the family fortune and had nothing left for me to inherit. Their battle against me was automatically terminated. Oddly, since they moved in their new apartment, they have become gentle to me as if they had been different persons. Their dramatic change of attitude toward me had often perplexed me. I had tried to explain that they became old, felt weak and had learned a little from their failure, which was why they mended their ways to treat me. As I hadn’t had a good relationship with them for decades, I slightly wished we were having a new starting point to build a better one. That was just about when I received an unexpected letter from my mother that crushed my wish so easily. To my great surprise, all that the letter contained was blame and reproach to me. She just kept on criticizing me at length, complaining how much I disappointed her, how much she bore a grudge against me, how much she felt chagrin at me being a musician, what a bad person I was. Although she had done innumerable cruel, heartless, thoughtless things to me over the years, she had the audacity not to mention one word about those. At the end of all slander, she concluded her letter by writing, “This is the last letter from me to you.” To summarize her long letter, what she wanted to tell me was that she didn’t want to see my face ever again and didn’t want me to send her birthday presents or Mother’s Day gifts ever again. She asked me not to stay in contact with her anymore. I had been treated unfairly by her for so many times but this letter exceeded all the spite that she had shot at me. The letter was out of blue and shocking enough for me to wonder if she was having some kind of brain disorder. Since I was little, she has had a strong tendency to tell an every sort of lie from grave to transparent, and to forget about anything inconvenient to her. For a person like her, it’s not so unpredicted that her old brain got murky. In any case, I was deeply shocked. I shouldn’t forget that things like sending this letter is the norm for her and I’ve gotten used to it already. She only did what she usually does again and I was the one who was fooled by her recent nice gestures. But I asked myself repeatedly if it’s impossible for human nature to be changed after all. My mother is a scorpion which ultimate goal is to make others unhappy regardless of its own profit. The fact that I have the same DNA in me horrifies me. A good thing is that I was mostly raised by my late grandparents. I may have grown up to be a decent person not to be like my mother. I will, and should, prove it by myself with the way I live...