Long story

Yesterday, I was sitting behind the computer when my mother out of the blue came at me with the following. “From this month on your board (kostgeld) is doubled. You may be able to earn some back by doing stuff in the household. If that doesn’t work I’m going to give you two months to find somewhere else to live.” I was dumbstruck. On the outside I remained composed and I didn’t say anything, but on the inside I was screaming my head off. It took me several hours before I recovered from what she said. It just kept playing in my mind. I still don’t understand where she’s coming from. I don’t understand what I’ve done for her to attack me like that.

As I’ve told before my mother is rheumatic. She now has therapy and one of the outcomes was that we, her family, should do more in the household to relieve her of some of her work. We’ve already tried such an arrangement before, but it never worked because I was the only one who ever did anything. Both my father and my brother always backed out after a couple of days. And I stopped too after a while, because I always ended up feeling totally used, by all of them. Two weeks ago we all agreed we would help out again, but as you can imagine there’s not an awful lot I can do during the week as I have to work all week long. So I try to do as much as I can during the weekend, even though I’d rather rest and do nothing. Last Saturday I vacuumed the entire first floor, cleaned the sink and cleaned out and rearranged all the cabinets in the bathroom, which was all quite a lot of work. The only thing my mother could say afterwards was that “whoever vacuumed didn’t clean the dog’s blanket well enough.” I must honestly say I didn’t clean it very thoroughly, as my brother had already cleaned it on Wednesday. I could easily see he hadn’t vacuumed thoroughly, so I thought I could at least skip the blanket. But no, of course she noticed and of course she berated me about it. Not that she ever says anything about my brother’s poor vacuum ability. The fact that my brother vacuumed once in the entire week he was home (while he didn’t do anything else in the household) was this wonderful thing she couldn’t stop talking about, but nothing was said about me.

She has always treated us very differently, so I’m kind of used to it, but this feels so unfair. I understand she has a difficult life with a lot of pain, but that doesn’t mean she can take it all out on me. No matter what I do or say or how much I do, it’s never enough. And I don’t know whether it’ll ever be enough. I don’t think she understands how much it pains me when she says these things. She has always expected a lot more from me than from my brother and father, but I also get a lot less praise for the things I do. My weekend started out wonderful, but by Sunday afternoon I felt totally miserable…