“I’m really proud of you. That’s what she’ll say to me next,” I thought. “How can that not be the next thing she says?”
I am thirteen years old and have never heard my mother say one word that could be considered positive reinforcement. Tough love was what my mom was all about. I knew she loved me, but there were times I did question it. The time I made a B in class and didn’t get dinner for two weeks.
Or the race I didn’t finish in the top five and had to run the course before school every morning for a month. Sometimes she surprised me and didn’t go around the bend, but I usually assumed the worst so when she was nice. I was always surprised. And suspicious. The less she seemed to punish me, the more suspicious I got. It was only the two of us in our three-bedroom house so it was hard not to notice when she didn’t speak to me.
She became less and less involved in what I was doing and most of the time I didn’t mind. I was wondering when the other shoe was going to fall and she was going to come back out of nowhere with all the things I had done wrong in the last three months. I started coming home a little bit later every night and prayed she would not flip. When she finally disappeared, I wasn’t surprised. I just hoped she never came back.
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