Mother Mother Mother

This is just a story of three moments where a mother has heavily influenced her child

A monkey can write better than this.

     My mother peered over my shoulders and  her words pierced my ears. I was only six years old, but it struck me where it ached the most. The pen in my fingers that flowed effortlessly across the lines of my paper were now  frozen by the frigidity of her voice. I felt my breath slowly running out as her mighty aura suffocated me from behind. Before I could say a word, she ripped the notebook out of my hand and began an evaluation I never asked for.

     “This is a hot mess,” she declared effortlessly. “The sentences don’t line up. The events don’t connect. It serves no purpose, and it’s all over the place. What does our day at the apple orchard have anything to do with what we ate for lunch? I’m reading this and I wonder why it needs to exist.”

     She took out a pen and marked up my piece of writing. “Write a more meaningful entry next time,” my mother said after she was done. She tossed the notebook back into my hands and headed towards the kitchen.

     I looked at my newly marked disastrous piece. The red ink my mother left behind had raged across the paper so viciously that I wished it would just ignite and burn the page to ash. I shoved the notebook into the bottom of my shelf and never touched it again.

You’re turning into a balloon.

     That was what my mother said to me when I was 8. She placed her palms on my stomach and rubbed it like she was petting a dog. Except I didn’t find it comforting.

     “You really are a carnivore,” she laughed drily. “Meat, meat, meat, there’s always two bowls of meat in every one of your meals. Your ravaging consumption makes you seem more savage than a wolf, but your round belly makes you look lazier than a pig. God bless your future wife for ignoring your chubbiness and continuing our bloodline.”

     Her words echoed in my head over and over. For the next month, I skipped lunch and pretended I had eaten at school. I filled my rice to no higher than half the height of the bowl, and I avoided meat at all cost. Vegetables that I had despised became a part of my meal every day as I struggled to swallow their bitterness and fought the urge to regurgitate. I ran around the neighborhood everyday even though the barking dogs across the street terrified me to death, for I hoped that I could lose every fat crevice that was visible above the waistline.

    The doctor said my blood sugar level was dangerously low after I fainted on the sidewalk.

     Why did I put so much effort into raising this ungrateful child?

     Though her rage and scream struck me with fear, it was the  last part that hurt me the most. The fury in her eyes softened to disappointment as she dropped my fourth grade exam paper onto the floor and left .

     I slowly dropped to my knees to pick up my paper of shame. Tears that I had desperately tried to hold back escaped my ducts and blurred my vision as it dropped onto the exam. My mother was right. I was a poor excuse for a son. She had left her family, her job, her beautiful home in China to live in an apartment in a country whose language she barely understood so that I may have a better future. But what have I given her? I have brought her shame, and everything that she had given up was lost in vain. 

     Moments like these had made me realize that I’m better off left dead. After all, a life without meaning is no life at all.