Promise

  She finally has the TV to herself. She sits down, legs crossed, in the tiny living room enjoying the temporary silence of her apartment. She is wrapped in her decades-old robe, holding, with both hands, a steaming hot cup of tea with milk. Stretching her back, her muscles start to untangle and her mind -as usual- starts to wonder how long her life is going to remain like this. 

   As the show starts on TV, she inhales. Exhales. She thinks to herself that maybe she should’ve let my brother watch the cartoon he wanted, but she lets the thought escape her confused conscience. He knows I watch it every day, he’s just going to have to watch his cartoon another time.

  9 P.M.; an hour later, she’s back to her reality. Now what? I don’t want to go to bed right now, it’s really early. I definitely don’t want to go downstairs and sit with mom! Grandma will endlessly complain about what my overseas uncle said or didn’t say when he last called.  Ok, so, should I go and ….?

  I imagine that my mom spends most of her free time thinking what she should be doing with it. I imagine that most of the time when she’s waiting for my brother to be done with one of his sports practices, she watches the other moms talk and laugh. She wonders if they’re actually happy, she envies them for a split second, she reminds herself that everything happens for a reason, that God has something better in store for her. He must.

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She says it so many times. Sometimes it hurts and other times it doesn’t, but it catches me off guard, every-single- time. I honestly cannot imagine how she has survived living with my father until now. At least my sister and I have lives outside our apartment, but mom? Her world has become a combination of budgeting, blaming, reminiscing, crying, being almost genuinely happy for me and my sister’s accomplishments, and lots and lots of day dreaming.

“Mom, are you okay?”

She looks at me without lifting her head up, but I see tears glowing on her cheeks.

“Of course not”

 “What happened? Why are you crying?”  

She looks up at me and tries to straighten her back. “Nothing happened. That’s the problem. Nothing ever happens.”

I don’t say anything because this is not the first time that we’ve had this conversation, not even the hundredth time. She then breaks the heart-throbbing silence:

“Marrying your father is the biggest mistake of my life”

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It’s never really complete, her happiness. It could be the news of me getting the job I wanted or my sister getting the scholarship she applied for, I feel that she’s still never completely happy. I don’t think even a miracle would make her happy, what she wants is her life back, or at least control over the one she has now.

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 I think my excessive need for men to tell me how they feel about me and also act on it is because my mom doesn’t say much. And when she does, it’s when I wish I was deaf. Years of being alone, with three kids, trying to maneuver around an almost non-existent income has dried her inside out. Her emotions now are only what she does, because dad has proven to her that words mean nothing.