The closer you live to your family, the worse it gets. Not only do we fight all the time, but we don’t appreciate what we do every day. Anyway, my mom doesn’t see all the spending I do for her: monthly medication purchases, paying for her hospitalization, trips to health resorts, and vacations to the sea in the summer. Even though I am single and can’t please my mother with grandchildren, I always try to surround her with care so that she doesn’t feel abandoned. I do my best to please her. But how does my perpetual presence in her apartment and spending “pennies” on her compare to a phone call from her oldest daughter, Samantha? Or a package full of some mints from France that you can break your teeth on?
I miss my sister sometimes, too, because she lives far away. We haven’t seen each other for more than five years – the last time she came to show her granddaughter to her mother. But they live in France, they do their own things, they have their own life there, their own work. She thinks of my mother once a year, on her birthday. That’s when she calls. And she has never sent any money or done anything important for her mother, even though she has more opportunities there. But for some reason my mother is always more pleased with Samantha than she is with me. She’s always fussing with her on the phone, and she can scold me for still living with her.
Maybe I really should have left a long time ago. Leave her alone, don’t give her any money, and only call her on her birthday. Then she’d realize her life would be a lot easier with me. And she would have appreciated me more than she did now that I was always around.
