The Discussion

The day after the gala was quiet, as always. Due to the fact that I didn’t sleep in my bed I could not sleep very long, so I went into the kitchen to make a coffee. Surprisingly, I met my Dad and his girlfriend there already – I had thought that they would still sleep. They had already started to prepare the breakfast, so I helped them and 20 minutes later we were sitting at the table, eating and talking about the last night. My feet were still hurting, I was still wearing my makeup and my hair were quite curly after all these hours. I was a bit afraid about washing them later because it would become hard with all the hairspray. But I decided to take the shower later on when I was at my Mum’s place because her hair dryer was better and I was still tired.

So the rest of the day we were watching TV and talking about organisational things – when my flight back would be, if there was anything I needed before that day, when we would go to the airport etc. As my Mum had come to pick me up from the airport, my Dad and his girlfriend would bring me back. It was a Saturday, so my Dad didn’t have to work or take a holiday. I had told my Mum that I would spend half of the 1st of January and half of the 2nd of January with her, but anyway at 1pm she called me and was angry because I didn’t have come to her yet. I explained to her that it had been New Year’s Eve the day before and that I had slept quite long and everything, but she was still angry. So I decided to stay some more hours with my Dad and give her time to relax a bit. It was quite difficult to deal with my Mum sometimes, especially when it had to do something with my Dad, because she is very jealous and always thinks that people do things only to hurt her. Even if it’s only coming too late for 10 minutes – you are doing it on purpose..

So in the late afternoon I finally packed some of my things and got into the car to my Mum. I wasn’t that happy to go there because I knew that she was angry or sad or disappointed – something of these, and I didn’t want to explain everything 100 times to her and in the end she doesn’t care about what I’m saying anyway. What counts for her is just her own opinion and point of view. So when I arrived I didn’t say anything, I just went to my room, unpacked my things and checked my laptop. I could hear her talking to her boyfriend in the living room, but I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) understand what she was saying. I was sure that they were talking about me, about my Dad or anything similar. I had told her before my arrival on Christmas that I didn’t want any problems or discussions – I was always trying to divide the time between Mum and Dad as just as possible, but she was never happy with it. She always accused me to spend too much time with my Dad and to love him more than her and his girlfriend and and and. And this time you could really count the time and you would come to the result that I had passed exactly as much time with my Mum as with my Dad. But for her that didn’t count, so I stayed in my room because it annoyed me that I was always the one who was doing it wrong. I watched a movie and waited for the moment when she would come in and ask me with a sad voice if I would stay in my room for the whole day and if I did things like that at my Dad’s place, too.

The moment came, but a bit different than I had expected. It wasn’t my Mum knocking on my door, it was her boyfriend. Actually, I didn’t know him that much because she got to know him one month after I had gone to France and since then I had mostly lived abroad. Therefore, I wasn’t really amused that he wanted to talk to me about “my behaviour” because he wasn’t my Dad, he wasn’t a person I knew well and I wasn’t a small child you have to learn how to behave. Furthermore, he didn’t know anything about the relation between my Mum and me. But I let him talk because I didn’t had a choice in fact. So he told me that I should take care of my Mum and treat her better, that she missed me and that she thought I would see Dad’s girlfriend as my new Mum. I answered without any enthusiasm, but finally he went away. I was really annoyed by that weird action, but I forced myself to go to the kitchen and have dinner with the two of them. Afterwards, her boyfriend left and we watched some TV in the living room. But as usual, my Mum couldn’t stop talking about the subject and I became very angry because she simply didn’t understand that the one who was suffering most was me and not her. I told her that I had really been looking forward to that time in Germany during Christmas and that she finally destroyed everything because she made me feel bad during my last days here. Then I rushed into my room and locked the door. Of course, after some seconds she came, knocked on my door and told me that we had to talk. I thought that she might have understood what is going wrong and let her in. We really talked (usually it was impossible that we talk in a normal way) for a while and I thought that everything was good again in the end. So we watched some more TV together until she fell asleep and I went to the bathroom to take a shower and get rid of all the hairspray in my still curly hair. I went to bed and hoped that she would be as understanding the next day as that evening.