(2012)

I.
Funny… she was the person I was with the longest in my life… but I don’t remember her well in my childhood. I just know that I was madly in love with her. I don’t mean love as when woman has a love for a man. My mother was an angel for me, a goddess, everything what you call Good, God, Love, Peace, Life…

I don’t know when our relationship started to be love-hate relationship. When I was a child, I was very spiritual, but of course I didn’t understand what was “wrong” with me. I was so different from other children. I was so different from my younger sister who was everybody’s darling.

I didn’t show my feelings because I was ashamed them. I wanted to show my mother how much I loved her, but I suppressed it and because of it, it did hurt.

So… when I was a child, I suffered, because I didn’t show my feelings to the ones I loved, especially to my mother. I was thinking: She didn’t show me as much affection as she did to my sister. So, for whatever reason, she likes her more than me. So… I must be bad, because she doesn’t like me so much as her. I resented the situation and was so sad and I was of course jealous of my sister.

I missed my mother’s love. She was so oblivious to me. She didn’t understand that I loved her so much that my heart would explode just by her touching me. Because she didn’t give me attention – because I always reacted very horrible if she wanted to touch me, so she thought that I didn’t want to be touched – I had to go the other way, to invent how to show her my affection. I craved so much for the love of my mother. I just can’t tell you, how much I loved her… And how it hurt that she never showed affection to me. And I never could show affection to her.

So, I invented this game to get rid of these feelings which I would drown into them. I called my mother some times in the middle of the night when I was in kindergarten and the other kids were mocking me. She always came. Sometimes I had to call her really long. She came, I just had to call her sometimes longer. I would never ever give up calling her.

I was waiting for her. She would come… Asked softly, what it was… I said something like… I had nightmares … sometimes I just invented story, because I wanted to get this kiss from her. So… she came… asked me what it was… I told her… she caressed my face, gave me a kiss, correct my blanket, said that everything will be OK and went back to her bed…

And me… I was just there… happy… couldn’t move, because I wanted to be covered like as my mother would cover me. I felt blessed. I felt loved. I was just the happiest being in the world. This person… this God… this Angel… my mother was there to take care for me and I knew that everything is just OK.

Why I am crying now when I write this?

***

II.

I don’ t know what happened, when we started to hate each other so much… Somewhere along the line I just stop calling her during the night. I think, this was the time around my tenth birthday when I began to write in my diary. It wasn’t a very good talker, but it could listen good and I could write anything inside. I started to be interested in boys. There was something else in my life, not just my mother, my father and my sister.

And… I started to be ashamed of my mother…

My mother was a nervous and psychotic person. Over the years it became worse and worse. But how could I as a child ever understand what was going on?

To tell you the truth… I actually don’t remember my mother all that well during the week, because she used to work until two o’clock and then she would come home for lunch. She would eat and she would go out to see her friends or in the evening school.

And I was really happy with that.

But on weekends she stayed the whole day at home and was always crying and cleaning. Cleaning and crying… Cooking and crying… Listening to the music and crying… Singing and crying…

I would listen to her. She was always saying things like: “It’s so horrible, so horrible. I will divorce him. I will definitely divorce him…”

Every time she had the same monologue and every time I was sad because I didn’t understand why is she was so sad and I wanted to help her.

My father was at the time present in our lifes, he just wasn’t at home often. During the week he would come home late in the afternoon. Saturdays and Sundays he was always at work at his military base. Nowadays I think he did that just to avoid her, maybe he was always late for lunch for a reason.

Home at weekends was like that: She, my sister and I were alone at home, cleaning. Afterwards my mother would be cooking lunch, listening to the radio. Always the same odd music with someone singing about beautiful flowers, wine and how happy are we all together drinking wine. But she was crying… how horrible everything is… she was crying and cooking tons of food.

And he was always late for lunch, so she really had a reason to be mad at him!

Once… after twenty years I asked her, why she didn’t divorce him when she was talking about that all the time. She answered that she never said that…

I asked my sister if she ever heard my mother talking about divorce… She said, no. And she added… (her beloved phrase):

“Just don’t take them seriously. Divide them by two!”

**

III.

After this period my family moved to the capital city, where I finished elementary school and where I was going to the secondary school.

All was the same. Or similar… My father wasn’t home during the week, but he was there during the weekends. My mother always got something to complain about, just to criticize all the time and had a reason to be unhappy.

I don’t remember any quiet time when these two beings were together. I thought how they hate each other. But this was not hate, this was way of life. I just didn’t understand that at that time. My mother always founded something to nag about, my father was upset and pulled the strings and there we got fights as a daily order…

My diaries were full of crying for help and for peace. I actually didn’t have any problems when I wasn’t there, just when I was at home. So… I went looking for a boyfriend to get away from home. I was not with my boyfriend because I wanted to be with my boyfriend…. I just was with him because I had to escaped from the fights at home.

I was with my boyfriend when I turned eighteen. Specially on weekends when they were at home. But running away from them didn’t help me. In seven years I had the next boyfriend. Again…. I actually was with him, because I wanted to escape the hell where my parents where.

Then I came into my thirties, I broke up with my second boyfriend and escaped to Vienna. There I married an Austrian guy and soon had a child. Soon we started to quarrel and we divorced after three years. I wanted to stay in Vienna so that I didn’t have to come back home to my country and have to go back to my mother’s home. So I found another husband, after five years this marriage also ended in divorce…

And then I had another relationship which ended four years ago.

So… this is about my relationships…

And now… I am a widow like my mother is. We are again on the same level. We live together in the same place where we lived when we were family. Just that my father is not alive any more. Instead of him and my sister who lives away, there is me, my three kids and my mother.

**

IV.

Three years ago I was thrown out of my flat. Me and my three kids. I didn’t have anywhere to go except to my mother’s place. Our relation was… sick. Actually – it was my last wish to go back to her place. Why I was in Vienna living so long? To escape confronting her.

It’s not that she would not allowed us to be in her flat. Which is actually also a bit mine… She just didn’t say straightly what. She never says straightly, you have to know what seh means, she seldom says what she really means…

I didn’t get on my knees to beg her a pardon. A pardon for what?

I didn’t owe her anything. Of course, I should support her with money that I had to give her back for her supporting me while I was on studies and lived there.

But she always wanted some kind of excuse from me. Why? Because I am how I am? Because I am not like my sister, who is worked after finishing her studies and that’s how she sees a “normal” woman should be. Always working her guts out. Always under pressure because of money which there is never enough for us…

I was thinking why mother hates me so much. Often she was telling her numerous friends and relatives, how bad I am. Why I was bad? Because I had more relationships. Because I had men who were not paying for kids. Because I never worked like she expected me to work.

I am living now three years at her place. And yes, at the beginning was horrible. Yes, she hit me sometimes with a stick. We were yelling at each other. We said horrible things to each other. The kids were upset If the kids were there when we were yelling, the kids start to cry, so we stopped.

She told me, that I am the worst person on this planet. She told me, that I am not capable of doing anything, that I actually killed my father and I couldn’t wait until she died. She told me, that I wanted to push her down the steps so that she would die.

She told me horrible things about me.

But I don’t take her words seriously any more.

I know that these are just words and that she has them from her father who was a very angry man.

I just was thinking the other day, when I was going to sleep and she was on the other part of the flat, that if I would call her in the middle of the night… just so that she would kiss me and that I will have that feeling again… the feeling that everything is possible, that I can get anything what I want… that all is well…

**