Short Story

PILLOW TALK

The Sicilian Storyteller

It’s Six Sentence Story time with Denise at GirlieOnTheEdge. Yeah, it is.

“Other” is a word that rhymes with mother, which also happens to rhyme with smother, which begs the question: “Am I a dreadful person for wanting to smother my mother ?”

Mother wasn’t a bad person; there was no physical abuse  – just a major lack of tenderness which can leave greater, more permanent scars …. a perfectionist who found it very difficult to show warmth or affection, even to her children; I don’t remember her saying “I love you”, tickling me till I squealed or reading bedtime stories; what I do remember is proudly showing her a drawing I made in school with the inscription “Skyscrapers scrape the sky while butterflies flutter by”…. something my teacher called “highly imaginative and showing great vision” but mother said it was foolishness because butterflies can’t fly that high.

As a teenager I was forbidden to shave my legs but did anyway and not wanting my secret revealed, I wore jeans all the time, even to the beach in the middle of summer which also covered-up the fact that I used a self-tanner which turned my skin orange; mother watched as I scrubbed myself raw in the tub using a mixture of water and bleach – a humiliating experience –  but it was at that time she discovered my shaved legs, causing her to explode like a slow gas leak and, of course, I was grounded but it was worth it. 

Many days after arriving home from school I would find the contents of my dresser drawers dumped on my bed, simply because mother didn’t approve of how my clothes were folded; if I wanted to sleep that night, I’d have to put all my things away (or push them to the floor, which I often did) and I’d get hell the next day but it was a trip seeing her bulging veins and bugged-out eyes.

Years later when I had kids, mother would pop in unannounced and examine my house like the “White-Glove Lady” checking for dust; if my oven didn’t meet her standards, she would clean it (which, now that I have 20/20 hindsight, was a blessing in disguise because I ended up with a clean oven) and then she would depart as quickly as she arrived, leaving me with a spotless house but never once sitting down for coffee and a piece of pie or stopping to play with my children. 

Lately I’ve been having a recurring dream about smothering mother with a pillow and when I wake up, I’m smiling; I guess my earlier question bears repeating: “Does that make me a dreadful person?”

NAR © 2023

Sunday’s Six Sentence Story Word Prompt!
FOWC with Fandango — Explode

This is John Lennon & Yoko Ono with The Plastic Ono Band singing “Mother”:

42 thoughts on “PILLOW TALK”

  8. I had a friend whose Dad was in the Navy, and he used to go into my friend’s room and make a mess of everything, then make the friend clean it, and if the father didn’t like it, he’d mess everything up again and make the friend do it again. I can’t imagine what that would be like.

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      1. I don’t like to talk this way, especially about the father of a friend whose mother was a friend of my mother’s, but he could really be an insufferable a**hole, even when he was being a “nice guy.”

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  13. “just a major lack of tenderness which can leave greater, more permanent scars …. a perfectionist who found it very difficult to show warmth or affection” Did we have the same mother? You are absolutely not a dreadful person.

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    1. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me how many people I have met since I began blogging who have the same memories and feelings as me.
      I take little comfort in other people’s sorrows but it is reassuring to know not everyone had the “shits & giggles” childhood I thought they did.
      Thanks for sharing your thoughts today, Melissa, and confirming I’m not alone!

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