My Mother and I

We owe nothing in one life, so we need not meet in the next. If we do meet in this life, it must be fate. Our encounter was written in the stars, an inescapable bond. Perhaps I owed my mother a debt of affection from a past life, so Heaven arranged for me to be born to her.

From then on, my mother relentlessly put me down, insulted me, and smeared my name. I grew up on the margins of my own family. My mother couldn't stand me, and my older sister bullied me. My father was honest and inarticulate, and, like me, he had no standing at home. He let my mother trample all over him.

I lived a hellish life at my parents' home, but fortunately, I married a man who loved me, and my fate changed. Like Cinderella in a fairy tale, I married a prince and went on to live happily ever after.

The burdens of my birth family and the pain my mother caused became unbearable, and I was desperate to end my life. My husband's love and care pulled me back from the brink of death. My mother only stopped exploiting me after I was diagnosed with cancer.

I spent so much of my time caring for my father, who was in a vegetative state, but my mother was never satisfied. To get what she wanted, she shamelessly slandered and insulted me, and twisted the truth.

All the years of effort I put into my birth family went to waste. I never wanted to see them again. I returned to my own home to be with the person I loved and enjoy my life.

I still went to visit my mother. When she saw me, she wept and told me how much she'd missed me, but her tears could no longer move me. I felt that I no longer owed her anything in this life. From the moment I learned I had cancer, I let go of my mother.

The better I treated her, the more she took advantage of me. The more dutiful I was, the more brazen she became…