My childhood was never carefree because of my mother. She hated me and my father, and she was never shy about telling us that openly. Before I was born, she was completely satisfied with her marriage and her life. As my father said, she was popular and took part in shoots in various national magazines, and after she gave birth the demand for her declined, she couldn’t get back into shape for a long time, and she hated her family for it. When I was six, she left us, bargaining with my father for almost all of his savings, promising to come back, which she never did.
It wasn’t easy with my father, either, because he only worked and scolded me for bad grades, saying that I had to study myself, otherwise I wouldn’t get in or get a job. He demanded a lot from me around the time of my admission. When I started going to university and working part-time, my father started treating me like an adult and considering my life only mine.
“You’re all grown up now, you and I are equals. So who am I to tell you what to do?” – he used to say.
It was the same phrase he repeated to me after my mother showed up at our house seventeen years later. She had cancer and urgently needed a bone marrow donor. With the statistics in our country, she, in her forties and early forties, might not be able to wait for help, but there was a chance that my bone marrow would do the trick.
– I won’t exist if you don’t help me,” she pleaded.
She begged me and Daddy to help. It turned out that she was already in line, but the line was too long and no one knew yet if a suitable donor for mom would really be found, and I could at least take some tests to find out the percentage of compatibility. But I refused.
It’s not that it’s painful or scary, it’s that I don’t want to. I have a job, a girlfriend, plans for the future, and I’ve never wanted to be a donor of anything to strangers. And my mom is an outsider to me. Other parents, when they leave the family, keep at least some connection, and she only came to our old house when she needed our help. And I said no. That’s the kind of cruel person I am – I can’t feel sorry for her. Maybe it’s karma, so why should I be with her when she abandoned me as a child?
