I was in the kitchen making breakfast when my phone buzzed nonstop—the community homeowners’ group was tagging me over and over.
[Owner of Unit 401, your son scratched my brand-new Porsche again!]
[What kind of thing are you raising? His hands are like knives—want him sent to juvenile detention?]
[If it happens again I'll cut his hands off!]
Other owners pile on.
[My car got scratched last week too—from bumper to bumper, there's a huge gouge!]
[He's probably gone through the whole underground garage by now. No manners at all—how did you even raise him?]
[No wonder I saw him walking around jingling a key last time—he was using it to scratch cars! What a little beast!]
I numbly switched off the stove and pulled out the account book from the drawer—the one I kept solely for recording compensation payments.
This was the fifty-sixth time my son has scratched someone's car.
The first time it was an old Jetta; I paid two thousand. The tenth time it was the BMW downstairs; I paid twenty thousand. The thirty-sixth time it was a Lamborghini in the underground garage; I paid one hundred thousand—that wiped out the last of our savings.
Every payment since then, I’ve had to scrape together by borrowing, over and over, shamelessly.
I went to the shiny Porsche and my son looked at me with that innocent face of his.
"Mom, didn't you say if I scratch a car I get a new toy? Why is that uncle so angry?" he asked.
Here we go again.
He wrecked things on purpose and then, with his angelic, childish words, pushed the blame squarely onto me. The owner, furious, opened his phone and started live-streaming, pointing the camera at me.
"Look, everyone—this is the mother who teaches her son to scratch cars! She is the cancer of society!"
The screen flooded with bullet comments, an avalanche of judgment aimed squarely at me.
In the video, I stood in stained loungewear, greasy hair plastered to my cheeks. Staring at my own reflection in the camera, then at the scratches carved into the car, I suddenly let out a laugh.
——
I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve been pointed at and cursed.
The very first time was three years ago, when my son was only three.
I was watering plants on the balcony. My usually quiet son took the key I dropped on the ground and drew a crooked little flower on the neighbor's new car.
The neighbor's anger crushed me. I apologized until my throat hurt and promised to pay for the damage.
Back then, I thought my son was just curious, too young to understand.
I told him again and again not to touch, not to break what belonged to others.
He would nod vaguely, and I thought he had listened.
But soon it was the neighbor’s car, then cars in the community, in the mall, even those parked on the roadside.
Wherever there was a car, there was his “masterpiece.”
I apologized until my throat went dry, paid until my pockets were empty, and tried every method I could think of—gentle reasoning, harsh scolding, slaps on the palm, hours of standing punishment.
I even took him to see a child psychologist.
However, the result said he was perfectly normal, even highly intelligent—just a little mischievous.
Yet he never changed.
Each time he turned those clear, trustful eyes on me and swore, "Mom, I won't do it again."
Then the next time, he picked a more expensive car and etched a deeper line. Afterward, he’d meet my gaze with an even purer innocence, as if none of it were his fault.
Like now—when all the blame was pushed onto me, and I became the one condemned, cursed, and despised, calling me a bad mother.
I couldn't understand why he kept doing it. All I knew was I haven't slept a good night in a long time. I wake up every night, check the door, check the window, terrified he's slipped out to create a new debt, a new shame.
