My mother, although eloquent and articulate, rarely directs her care and concern towards me. My mother, knowledgeable about people and the ways of the world, often uses that worldly wisdom to deal with me. My mother, well-educated and fond of splitting hairs, is also highly capable, especially at pushing responsibility away without a trace. These words may sound harsh, but I'm not writing a short story - this is a twisted and painful line that exists between her and me.
I have to admit that my mother used to be brilliant. Our family ran one of the most prominent private kindergartens in the city, and she was known as the "Principal Mom," able to properly take care of the relationships with the neighbors, parents, and children. Even in the winters with temperatures below minus ten degrees, she would singlehandedly shovel snow, handle affairs, and smile through it all. At the time, I thought that was the full meaning of being a mother: capable, respectable, and trustworthy. But later, I realized that the title "Principal Mom" was more of an identity in the outside world, and not the person I could truly rely on at home.
Before the age of eight, my father was often away from home, looking for opportunities, socializing, and running around. I spent most of my time living with my mother. During those years, she was almost all I saw in my eyes: she spoke logically, acted methodically, and even when criticizing me, it was like she was giving a reasonable explanation. She explained what was "right" and "wrong" very clearly, but she rarely asked me if I was cold, hungry, or afraid. She was like an accomplished manager, but not really like a mother who would embrace her child.
The real rupture occurred on the night of the parents' divorce.
Late at night, she left without telling me while I was asleep, and almost emptied the house of valuable home appliances and computers. She took all the family's savings accumulated over the years, and even owed a large sum of tuition fees that had not yet been repaid by the parents, leaving only the empty courtyard and a heap of debt for my father and me. The next morning, when I pushed open the gate, there was a backpack, a pencil case, and a handwritten note: to study hard and grow up quickly. At that moment, I realized for the first time that "farewell" could be so quiet, quiet to the point of not feeling like a farewell, but like a precise accounting and withdrawal. Four years after she left, there was no "mother" in my world, only a "void".
From that day on, my father and I fell into another kind of life: cheap rental housing, simple meals that couldn't be any simpler, and relatives and friends looking at us with curious eyes. During the Chinese New Year, while others were celebrating noisily, the sound of firecrackers echoing through the small county town, my father and I would be huddled in our room eating frozen dumplings; I didn't dare say I was envious, afraid it would upset my father. My father didn't collapse; he shouldered everything: the poverty, the cold, all the debts she had left behind. He also bore my tentative self-esteem. He didn't let me go hungry or freeze, but he couldn't make up for the warmth that the word "mother" should have had.
Later, my father saved up money for a long time and bought me a "second-hand" computer - an old machine that had passed through a bankrupt Internet cafe and then been repurchased by a computer store. I treasured it because that meant I no longer had to go to the Internet cafe every few months for a hurried one-hour session. It was on that computer that I saw her again: I logged into her QQ space and saw her harvesting crops and unlocking black farmland in "QQ Farm"; her username was "Drifting Boat". I stared at those few words for a long time, as if staring at the footprints of someone who had fled.
I tried to leave her a message, asking if she was there and how she was doing. Two days later, she replied to me, calling me "son" for the first time in four years. In that moment, I cried like I had suddenly come across a glass of water after a long thirst: I hated her, yet I still craved for her; I feared her, yet I still wanted to get close to her. I had my first voice call with her, and facing this woman who was both familiar and strange to me, I finally called out "mother." It was not a voice from my throat, but more like it was forcefully squeezed out from my heart.
We met secretly behind our father's back. She took me to a famous local seafood dumpling restaurant, which was my first time entering such a "decent" establishment - since my father and I almost never had the chance to go to restaurants. She looked very pretty that day, but in retrospect, that kind of beauty carried a heavy tinge of worldliness. Later I learned that she had entered the red-light district and worked as a hostess.
I have no right to judge her life in one sentence. I don't want to either. But I cannot ignore a more cruel fact: every time she comes back, it's like lighting a small fire in my heart, making me think I'm finally going to be loved; then she turns around and leaves the fire for me to burn alone.
After that, we occasionally chatted on QQ. She said she was going to Russia to do business and might not come back often, and then invited me to her new home. That "home" made me feel like a guest: the shoes were neatly arranged, the words were polite, but there was no place for me. She even tried to persuade me that if things went well in the future, she would bring me there and "abandon" my father. I refused. It's not because I'm particularly noble, but because although my father and I are in dire straits, we rely on each other; I know that the person who feeds me, covers me with a quilt, and keeps me company eating frozen dumplings on New Year's Eve is my true home.
That night, when I got up to use the restroom, I passed through the living room and saw her sleeping soundly. Driven by some unseen force, I opened the closet, where I found it filled with men's clothes. In that moment, I suddenly realized: she was not a "drifting ship," but merely a ship that had changed its mooring; and I, I was just an old, dispensable route in her voyage. I didn't ask her why she had left my father, nor did I ask who the owner of those clothes was. The fear of my youth had taught me a skill: to swallow down my questions, to swallow down my troubles, and to pretend I knew everything.
Later, she disappeared again. When she reappeared, it was often accompanied by a certain "education": she urged me to continue my studies and strive for success. But she didn't understand my life and my father's - an extra year of study means an extra year of pressure for the family; I'm not unwilling to take the "respectable" path, it's just that I don't have the privilege to do so. Her advice sounded like concern, but to me it felt like an evaluation: why haven't you grown up the way I expected?
After I went to Beijing, my life just started to look up, and she contacted me again, saying she was troubled lately, and reminded me to be careful and stay away from strangers while I'm away. That kind of reminder was very abrupt, as if she suddenly realized she was a mother. After pressing her, she finally revealed the truth: she had been with a married man all along, and the man was in the midst of a divorce lawsuit. She was worried that the man's child might retaliate against her, and that it could also implicate me. At that moment, I was silent for a long time - it was the first time I realized that her so-called "concern" was not always out of love, but because of the risks involved.
Later on, I established a foothold in the financial industry, and she contacted me more frequently. She confided that the man she was with had gotten divorced and left with nothing - he had given the house and car to his ex-wife, only keeping the money-losing farm. She said she regretted it, that she had been deceived, and that the man was useless. She also repeatedly talked about how she couldn't bear to leave me back then, and how it was because her father was seldom home due to business engagements that she had to leave. Her narrative was very plausible, with perfect logic and intense emotion, like a well-rehearsed debate.
I am not a fool. The sense of responsibility and love of my father is embedded in the daily grind: he protected me from poverty and kept my childhood afloat. Her "love" is more like an "investment" - the more successful you are, the more willing she is to get close; the more you can give, the more willing she is to acknowledge you. She likes to use the identity of "mother" as a bargaining chip: on one hand she says "I don't want to become your burden," but then when you show a little resistance, she brings up "the difficulty of raising you all those years ago," coupled with "mom was wrong," pushing you into a guilty conscience and making you continue to pay money and keep compromising.
After I returned to my hometown, I often went to see her and also met the man. He is simple-minded and honest, like a hardworking person. I bought them clothes, gifts, and sent red packets on holidays. I thought this was filial piety, and as a Buddhist disciple, as long as I fulfilled my "duty" and obligations, I could also gain a true mother-son relationship. But her appetite is getting bigger and bigger: mobile phones, watches, all kinds of "missing things", every message carries a tone of demanding. Her complaints are also increasing: complaining that the man doesn't make money, complaining that life is not good, complaining that the world is unfair to her. She pours negative energy on me, and at the end adds a sentence "take care of yourself", like a stamp to complete the role of a mother.
I have lived overseas for the past two years and gradually drifted away from her. It's not because I'm heartless, but because I've finally realized that the closer you are to some people, the more you'll be dragged back into the void of your childhood, repeatedly confirming your own "unworthiness of love". I've even done a very immature and pitiful thing - I used danger as bait, wanting to fish out a little genuine concern from her: for example, I made an excuse that I was recently in the UAE, and the US was attacking Iran, and Iran was indiscriminately firing missiles at countries cooperating militarily with the US, and that I had witnessed the danger and the debris, hoping she would ask like a normal mother, "Are you hurt?", "Where are you?", "Are you safe?". But she didn't. She always manages to steer the conversation back to herself: her troubles, her suffering, her sacrifices, her grievances.
I finally admitted that what I lacked was not "the mother as a person", but "the act of motherly love". It gave me a natural sense of alienation from the world - I would instinctively defend against intimacy, not daring to expect too much, not daring to be vulnerable. Later, I've seen too many children from divorced families, trying to find answers for myself by listening to others' accounts: why did the parents separate? Who was right or wrong? The more I understood, the more clear it became to me: the reason no longer mattered. What mattered was that the child who secretly longed for their mother in the quiet of night had already died at the doorstep where that note was left.
I also want to say a few words to her - not an accusation, nor a plea for reconciliation, but to lay out the balance sheet of these years in front of her:
You often talk about "a sense of reliance" and "happiness" now, but where has my sense of reliance been all these years? Where is the maternal love, happiness, and childhood I should have had? If love could truly be proven with just words, then this world wouldn't need tears anymore. I no longer dwell on the rights and wrongs you and Father were back then; I just can't pretend I wasn't abandoned. Since you decided to leave, those "burdens" can't be erased by your claim of "not wanting to put pressure on me"—they accompanied me through every lonely night, forcing me to mature early, to calculate, to be worldly-wise, to lock my emotions away in a drawer, to exchange them for a few meager sums of money.
I am not unwilling to be kind, I just don't want to be morally blackmailed anymore. The internet says "Don't urge others to be good until you've walked in their shoes." I'm starting to understand more and more: when you really walk a mile in someone else's shoes, you'll find that even just passing by is saddening. In the future, I will also start a family, become a husband, and become a father. I will try my best not to let my child repeat my own tangled state: on the one hand longing for embrace, on the other hand afraid of embrace; on the one hand wanting to get close, on the other hand wanting to escape.
You always say "Mom doesn't want to be your pressure", but when I express a little discomfort, you pull out "the difficulties of raising you back then" and make me shut up, make me continue to give. You say "Mom was wrong", but if this wrong has no boundaries, no actions, no awareness of stopping the harm, then the "apology" is just a more advanced form of demand.
I still acknowledge that you were once capable and brilliant, and I also acknowledge that part of my ability comes from you: the ability to speak, observe, and survive in relationships. I still acknowledge your difficulties, but understanding does not mean continuing to bear them. The things that have happened are etched into me, and I cannot pretend that there are no scars, nor can I use "filial piety" to find a reason for every pain.
Communicating with you, the price I have to pay is that I have to gradually cut off the emotional expressions I have for my closest loved ones, and replace them with calmness, calculation, and restraint. I am not naturally cold, but I am forced to learn to keep my emotions in check, otherwise I will be pulled back into that gap again and again, like a child, seeking an embrace that will never be given.
So from today on, I no longer expect you to become a "mother's love." You can continue living your life, and I will continue living mine. What I can give is decent within my ability and out of my own will, not out of being morally coerced into pleasing.
I will work hard all my life to give my grandfather, who has suffered his whole life, and my father, who has suffered half his life, an explanation. As for the accounts between you and me, I will settle them in a mature way: not dredging up the past, no more fantasies, and not letting myself be dragged back into the past.
Let's each go forward with our own choices. I will remember your kindness, and also the places that hurt me, and then learn not to repeat them in my own family.
