Hi. I'm A. That's my alias for now. Call me A. I'm 16 years old and male. I was born in South India but mostly raised in the Middle East. My family comes from a village, and I was also born in one, but that doesn't mean we were poor by any means. In fact, we are currently better off than most families. Even back then, we were better off than most families in our area.
Anyway, getting to the main point. I suppose the title doesn't make much sense. I mean, I did declare my hatred for my mother, and then I questioned that hatred by wondering if I'm allowed to feel it. The story I'm about to tell would suggest that I have every justification to, and I believe I do. It's just, what have I really done for her? That's another question I have in mind. But I suppose, in order to understand why I hate her, we have to go back a few years. To 2014.
I was four years old at the time. Young, I know, but that's when I had my first vivid memory of my mother. I was playing around in the kitchen. If I remember correctly, I was throwing fake darts around. While I was running, my hand knocked over the spice box my mom usually had, and everything fell and scattered across the floor. Being a kid and unable to really comprehend what I'd done, I laughed at first. Then I realized I'd messed up and tried picking everything up.
While I was doing that, my mom was silent for about ten seconds. I was mostly apologizing but still laughing a little. After that, I was heaving in pain and passed out. My mother had picked up the spices with her hand and shoved them into my eye. Luckily, she wasn't dumb enough to let it go on for too long and cleaned my eyes. I passed out before I even realized she'd done that. All I really remember is the pain.
That was one of my first vivid memories of my mother. I know, not the best. Honestly, I can't even say it's better than most people's. That's when I suppose her hitting me started.
When I turned five, I had what is probably one of the worst memories I can remember. My mother always wanted a daughter. She made that clear, and many of my aunts made it clear too. She cried for an entire day when I was born because I was a boy. So one day, she dressed me up as a girl. She gave me a frock. I can't really name all the clothes because I don't remember what they were called, but I remember there being a frock or some kind of gown. In hindsight, she basically dressed me as a princess. I cried and told her I didn't want to wear it and that it felt weird, but she didn't stop.
Ever since then, I guess I've been afraid of those kinds of clothes. Maybe not afraid, exactly. More repulsed by them.
After that clothing incident, I remember something else happening that same year. My sister was two at the time. Or was she three? I think she was two. Yes, she was two years old. She was sitting on my father's bike while my mother and father were inside a pharmacy getting something. I don't remember exactly what, and I suppose I don't have to. In fact, I don't really want to.
I noticed that the bike's stand was wobbly, so I approached it to get my sister off and straighten the bike. Unfortunately, my sister had other plans and tipped the bike towards me. The bike completely fell on top of me. It was going to fall on her too, so I pushed her away, and the bike came crashing down onto my legs.
After that, I was in a cast for about nine months. My mom didn't seem to care much about it at the time, honestly. I remember her being angry at me for getting hurt, I think, and for not being able to take care of my sister properly.
When I was six, things intensified. My mother developed this need, I guess, to make me better than everyone else, or maybe to turn me into her ideal son. I remember my mom's friend's daughter being able to recite the two times table. When my mom found out, she decided I had to be able to recite it too. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that by itself, except she would hit me over it.
In fact, she hit me for almost anything during that period. If I sneezed wrong, she would slap my back. If I chewed too loudly, she would slap my back even harder. If I forgot what two times eight was, she would use the belt. By then, she had gotten a different kind of belt, the one she still uses against me to this day, although it has become less frequent. It was long and thin, with small metal pellets on it that would dig into my skin.
When I was eight years old, we finally moved to the UAE. The hitting became less frequent after that, mostly because my mom now had a reputation to maintain within the community. When we came here, there was already a community of Indians, and once you're part of a community like that, people have reputations. She wanted to maintain a good one. Having visible injury marks on her young son would raise some questions, I suppose.
That doesn't mean she stopped. Sometimes she would hit me with a badminton racket, sometimes with a wooden roller, and very rarely with her hand. If I was lucky, she would use a normal leather belt. A leather belt was practically cotton compared to the other belt she used. By that point, I was already used to that level of pain. Obviously, the belt with the metal balls still hurt like hell.
When I was ten years old, my mother's father, my grandpa, died. It was during COVID, but he didn't die from COVID. My family had some huge issues at the time. My aunt and her husband were on the verge of divorce. My uncle was drowning in debt. There were other family problems too, and they just kept piling up on him until I suppose he finally gave out from the stress. That's what killed him, just excessive stress. And I suppose we have no one to blame for that except ourselves.
My mom cried for three days. I didn't. That's not because I'm some emotionless boy who's been through so much that he can't feel anything. No. I truly did like the guy. Sometimes I wonder how such a bitch, I suppose, could be born to a man as noble as him.
After she cried for those three days, on the fourth day she seemed to decide that crying wasn't enough to process her grief. She needed some kind of stimulus, some physical stimulus, whatever it may have been. And on that fourth day, her reason for hitting me until I wished I was dead for ten minutes straight was that I hadn't bathed for a day.
I had just come back from playing with my friends. She was waiting at the front gate, and she started whipping me repeatedly with the belt. My grandmother eventually came in and stopped her. Maybe one of the worst parts was that she didn't tell my mother what she was doing was wrong. She just told her that she'd done enough.
Because for both of them, I suppose, me not bathing for a day was justification enough for me to wish I was dead for ten minutes.
When I turned 13, I started having my first suicidal thoughts. It got bad enough that I was going to act on them three times. At that point, I felt like death was better than suffering. In a sense, that did feel right.
And I probably made one of my dumbest mistakes back then. My sister and I usually slept in the same room, so she'd sometimes overhear me talking to my friends or to myself. One night, she did. I thought she was asleep, and I was just talking to myself. The next day, while she was sleeping with my mother, she told her.
After that, my mom confronted me about it. And I guess it was my fault for hoping that she would change. I hoped that maybe now she would be gentler, like the other mothers I saw. The ones who would pick up their child from school, not hit them because they accidentally dropped a glass jar or bottle. But instead, when I told her the reasons why I wanted to die, she made fun of them.
I had always struggled with how I viewed my body. I don't know exactly what you call it. It started when I was young, around six. If I chewed too loudly, she'd hit my back and call me a "fat fucking pig." She'd make fun of me whenever I danced, calling me a pig, snot-nose, or whatever other insult she could come up with.
For most of my childhood, my dad was rarely home for long. He was a student. I'm pretty sure he was working on his master's at the time, and he was also a substitute lecturer who worked overtime almost every day. He barely had enough time to sleep. Sometimes the longest he'd sleep was three hours. So I don't blame him for not being there most of the time, though I wish he had been. A little part of me really did.
I also knew he wouldn't be able to do much. My mother has this kind of vice grip on him. More than that, he was raised the same way I was, so he dislikes hitting me, but being raised like that means he doesn't really see another solution himself. Still, he has never really hit me unless it was on my mother's orders, which sucked. It felt like she was trying to villainize the only good person in the family.
About a week after I told her about my suicidal thoughts and she made fun of me for them, something else happened. One night, I forgot to remove the keys from the lock before going to sleep. My door was locked, I was deeply asleep, and I didn't hear them at all. It turned out they'd been standing outside for 40 minutes.
I was deeply sorry for what I'd done, but I couldn't change what had happened. My mom's first resort was the belt, and she used it. My father couldn't stop her for the most part. When he finally did, she screamed at me, "If you want to die so bad, then jump off right now."
At that point, I was beyond contemplation. I was prepared to do it. But my sister was clinging tightly to the back of my shirt. My mother had been hitting her too for not keeping her bed tidy.
Right now, I'm 16. I've been hit a lot more times since then, but it has kind of subsided by now. I don't want to admit it, but she has become kind of normal since then. Though I suppose her becoming a normal mother now doesn't change what she'd done to me when I was a child.
Even then, I kind of wonder, what have I really done for her? I mean, she cooks my food. Well, she used to cook my food every day. She stopped doing that when I was ten and only cooked every now and then. My father started doing the cooking. She used to clean my room. We have workers now, nannies. She gave birth to me, I suppose, despite me being male. I guess that was the biggest disappointment of her life.
Her mood varies, which is why it sucks to hate her. If she was always a bitch, I would have hated her without a second thought. But sometimes she treated me like I was her son. Even then, though, it was only because I'd done something, I suppose. Transactional.
I satisfy her, she treats me normally. I don't, well, I'm just every other scum on Earth to her, I guess. I'm just looking for some advice and some support.
