The push I gave wasn’t hard, yet Mom collapsed to the ground as if she had no bones, her body soft and fragile. When Dad and my older brother Martin stepped out of the bedroom, she was already crying, dabbing at her tears.
“Eleanor, I’m your real mother. How could I ever mean you harm? How could you treat me like this!”
I didn’t get a chance to speak before Dad’s hand slapped across my face.
“You heartless thing! Your mom loves you more than her own eyes, and this is how you repay her?”
Martin kicked me, glaring and shouting, “ungrateful wretch,” before rushing to help Mom to her feet.
“Don’t scold Eleanor anymore, it’s my fault. I just love her too much,” Mom said, still wiping at her tears, sighing endlessly.
“I know, Eleanor just thinks I’m old and useless, so she doesn’t take my words seriously. She even thinks I want to harm her deliberately!”
Watching her pitiful display, I couldn’t help but feel it was laughable. I had worked tirelessly since childhood, yet every major moment of my life had been sabotaged by Mom’s so-called kindness.
During my high school entrance exams, Mom kindly prepared a lavish seafood feast, which left me vomiting and bedridden with diarrhea for three days, making me miss the provincial key high school.
During my college entrance exams, she kindly booked a hotel the farthest from the exam site, claiming it would keep me undisturbed. But on the day of the exam, the long distance and traffic jams made me late, costing me my dream university.
When I began job hunting, Mom kindly altered my résumé, falsified my education, and sent it everywhere. That landed me on HR blacklists as a dishonest liar, shutting the doors of countless companies in my face.
Every time I argued with her, she would cry and apologize, insisting she only meant well, claiming she had made mistakes.
In the past, like Dad and Martin, I had been brainwashed by her over the years, mistaking it all for love. Even in anger, I never thought to resist or escape.
But now, having already been harmed to death by Mom once, I vowed I would never make the same mistake again.
While Dad and Martin were busy comforting Mom, I grabbed my laptop and phone and dashed out the door.
Downstairs, the e-bike tires were still full. Clearly, in my previous life, Mom had tampered with them while I slept, but this time she hadn’t had the chance.
Hearing chaotic footsteps echoing in the stairwell, I dared not delay. I twisted the throttle and sped out of the neighborhood.
When I reached the company, I slipped a pack of cigarettes to the security guard and pleaded repeatedly with him not to let my family in.
Even so, disaster struck during my project presentation. First, a colleague’s phone buzzed incessantly. Then my boss’s. Finally, even the client’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
Confused, the client answered immediately. “Who is this? Why do you keep calling me?”
Mom’s voice rang from the receiver. “I’m Eleanor’s mom! This child stayed up all night. This is all your fault, you heartless capitalists!”
“Eleanor must be so overworked she hasn’t even had breakfast. Let her come downstairs right now! I’m waiting outside with soy milk and fried dough sticks!”
The entire meeting room froze in stunned silence. I snatched the phone and shouted, my voice sharp with anger:
“If you interfere with my work again, from now on, consider me no longer your daughter!”
Without waiting for her reply, I hung up and blocked her number.
Perhaps the threat had worked, because for the rest of the presentation, Mom didn’t cause a single disruption.
My boss and client were highly satisfied with my proposal, yet when the meeting ended, he still fined me 800 dollars for breaking meeting discipline.
He looked at me with seriousness and said, “This project was a great success. Your transfer to the Palmer headquarters can basically be finalized.”
