I Became The Pariah Of The Family

I spent three hundred dollars on a brand-new phone for my mother, only for her to start saying that the smartphone was stealing her money and that I had personally siphoned off her bank balance.

I could never win the argument. So I offered to just reimburse whatever “loss” she imagined.

She got even more unhappy. She slapped a stack of receipts on the table and demanded I pay up.

“Where did you buy this piece of junk? It’s a ticking time bomb. Give me my money back!”

Most of the receipts were for men’s sneakers and athletic wear; the rest were household basics like brooms and hangers.

I felt a wave of suffocating frustration. Since when was shopping free? Why was I expected to pay for her? I bought her a new phone, and I just became the ATM?

“Fine. If you hate it that much, I’m taking it back to the store.”

But she would not let go.

As soon as I started working, my salary was used to pay for the family’s living expenses.

I was the one upgrading everything, from expensive things like the washing machine, AC unit, and cabinets, down to the cheaper items like toilet paper and cutlery.

However, Mom was never satisfied no matter how much thought I put into my choices. In fact, she seemed to hate my gifts.

Once, a colleague gave me some premium-quality beef. I brought it home for her, but she accused me of trying to trick her with “fake goods.”

I found it strange; my colleague had no reason to lie to me, and it tasted delicious when I cooked it for myself. I later figured out she probably had trouble with the cooking, so I ordered a pressure cooker and had it delivered to the house. I thought the pressure cooker would be a faster and easier way to cook the best stew and that it would make her happy.

But an accident happened again.

“Are you trying to kill me?”

It was a disaster.

Thankfully, nothing exploded, but the stew boiled over.

She always said I was bad at everything. Literally everything.

I had bought a top-of-the-line cooker perfectly sized for two people, but she insisted on filling it to the brim with water. And when it inevitably overflowed, she blamed me.

This was my everyday life. She complained that the AC used too much power; she complained that the toilet paper was too thin. There was never a moment of approval.

I felt like an unloved child, slowly eroded by her constant nitpicking until I was left small, timid, and crying in the dark.

The wake-up call came when I used my parents’ toxic communication style with a colleague, and she did not speak to me for a week.

That was when I finally began to question if that dynamic was normal. I was in pain. I clearly felt my heart go from aching to completely numb.

The most pathetic part was that I had become used to it.

Change felt impossible.

Mom’s face was a mask of cold indifference on the other end of the phone. Criticisms rolled off her tongue like a script she had rehearsed a thousand times.

“The color is ugly, it’s tiny, and it makes this horrible sizzling sound. I’m scared of using it.”

I felt a pang of sadness. The “sizzling” was obviously because she had not wiped the bottom of the pot dry before putting it on the heating element.

She had taught me to do that back when I was in elementary school. How could she forget to do that?

What baffled me even more was that she broadcasted this “tragedy” to the entire extended family. Everyone knew that I had bought a defective product that almost poisoned my mother.

I felt guilt-ridden, so I just told her to just throw it away and never use it again.

But she only used that as an opening to more criticism.

“Patrick is the sensible one. He’s the one who actually cleaned up this mess. He knows I can’t handle these complicated things, so he just bought me some canned soup. You just love giving me more work to do. You don’t care about me at all.”

I was speechless.

Canned soup was not healthy food. It was nowhere near the quality of the beef I brought home. She insulted it but would not let me take it back. When I bought the pressure cooker, she complained it was complicated to use but stopped me from returning it. I tried to teach her step-by-step, but she claimed it was too difficult to learn and kept making mistakes.

Using this as an excuse, she demanded, “My old phone is hard to use. If I had a new phone, I could check how to use it online.”

I was extremely busy with work, yet she was the one complaining.

Then, she started posting photos of delicious-looking ribs and pork knuckles on her social media every other day. Were those gourmet meals fake?