Browsing, a good day
Mom sat in the store fancy chair hugging the bag in a protecting embrace. She had made an impenetrable Chinese wall with her arms, fiercely defending from me a stolen $2,000 Prada bag. The round mound rested on her lap, while I tried to convince her that the store cameras knew exactly what was going on.
We got some looks from wealthy shoppers that seemed to reprove my pushy, disrespectful behavior toward this 90 year-old. Perhaps they thought I wanted to keep her money. She, however, felt very entitled to take from the wealthier ones. I felt I was abusing my mother by forcing her to release her “shopping choices.” But this wasn’t our first rodeo at the mall. Stealing in the most abrupt ways was one of her favorite self-esteem improvement methods.
I took a look at the contents of the bag: one bra and two dozen men underwear for her disabled 85-year-old brother. I felt like I was smashing her dreams, but she was going to have to put the stuff back. {How she unchained that Italian bag is still a mystery to me. Never underestimate the Houdinian skills of the elder.}
Since she wouldn’t make a move, I told her, “I’m leaving, mom, and you don’t speak English.” She got up, propelled by fear of being abandoned in a foreign city, dropping the bag carelessly in the first flat surface. She sped up to the blinding, sliding glass doors and exited the luxury building ahead of me. Once in the passenger seat, she refused to talk for the rest of the day.
The following day I bought her a pair of rubber boots to work in her garden back home. She then smiled like a 4-year-old and said: “Thank you for having you.” That was the closest thing to “I love you” she ever told me.
Thank you for publishing this article. I wrote it in a humorous vein in the hope that this artifice would suffocate my pain somehow. My mother is not a benign psychopath, as I depicted her, but is very childish and is a thief of high degree. I myself learned to steal small things when shopping with her, as a child. This is the sense of entitlement we all hear about. It is true that mom would spend long periods without talking to me, which was pure torture, given that she talk to my brother and father who were seating at the table right next to me. I felt I was definitely not deserving of being acknowledged, that I was not human, and often asked if I had been adopted. My mom just disinherited me, which is illegal in our country of birth. I have been fighting a “puburectalis contraction,” a serious bowel condition caused by anxiety that prevents normal defecation. If anybody wants wo see a more accurate depiction of my mother, please watch the Scorcese movie “The Grifters,” with Anjelica Houston and John Cousak. Hold on to your chairs, and oh, thanks for reading this short writing exercise. yellowsubmarine
Dear Yellowsubmarine,
Would like to read how you recovered from such a mother!
My heart goes out to you!