「故事·听力」My Brother Was Dying While My Mom Was Busy Partying

My Brother Was Dying While My Mom Was Busy Partying

Hello, my name is Elle, and I was born when my mom was only 16. You may think it sounds cool when your mom is more like your friend than your parent, but... it’s not. Not at all.

It’s weird to think that I am now 18, older than my Mom was when I was born. My mom had me with her first boyfriend, and he and his family moved away as soon as they found out about my Mom’s... situation. 

I still remember a little bit about how I was a little girl and my Mom was still finishing school and I was with her sometimes, and I was at her graduation. She tried to apply to college afterward, but it didn’t work out, so she ended up working at a store. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, but they still had to work, so I couldn’t just be at their place all the time.

Some of those memories are good ones, like when her friends would come over and I would hang out with them, but now I understand that they didn’t really like that, it was more like... they tolerated it. But most of my memories are bad ones - like my Mom changing boyfriends pretty often, I don’t even remember some of them. I think the longest was for 2 years, and it ended a little while after my brother was born, when I was 9. 

Since he was born, I had to learn to take care of him, because my Mom was always working, and my grandparents weren’t always able to take care of us. In a way, I felt more like a parent to my brother than my Mom. 

As me and my brother got older, she started to leave us alone more often than usual. Sometimes she would even forget to leave money for food, but at least we were fed in school. Yeah, she needed to work, but she would also just party all weekend sometimes, and when she was home and me or my brother tried to ask her to help us with our homework or something, she would say that she was tired. 

Of course our Mom wasn’t BAD, she would buy us candy or take us somewhere cool, like the zoo or the amusement park, and those would be the best days of my life. I guess she was a good friend, but not really a good Mom.

When I was 15 and my brother was 6, something horrible happened. This was the moment when everything changed. After a long week my mom wanted to relax, so she went to a party with her friends, leaving me and my brother home alone, again. My grandparents were busy, and she planned to be out for just a few hours. 

I don’t know what happened exactly, but my brother started to feel really sick, he was pale and red at the same time, and I didn’t know if it was food poisoning or a fever or something completely different.

I PANICKED and tried to call my Mom, but she didn’t answer, so I was searching through the house for some medicine, too scared to call an ambulance because they would ask questions like where our mom was. I tried to call Mom again, and she answered, but it was so loud and all she could say was, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU SWEETIE!” 

I was super angry at her, but there was nothing I could do... So I took my brother, sat with him on the bus, and went to the nearest hospital. Nurses were asking me where are our parents were and I said that they had to leave for a couple of hours and their phones had died. I didn’t have to lie a lot, but I had to come up with a few things so that they wouldn’t get too suspicious. 

My brother was generally okay and ended up having something like food poisoning in the end. My Mom came to the hospital and asked what had happened, and you could see that she was scared. We went home and she tried to talk to us and say she was sorry multiple times, but I didn’t want to talk with her.

When we arrived home, I finally told Mom everything I thought about her for the first time in 15 years. I said how tired I was of not being able to ever go out on the weekends because I had to babysit my brother, I said how I was tired of her forgetting about us and never helping us with anything, about how we barely had anything, yet she found the time and money to go to parties. I had no friends or anything because I had to babysit my brother every evening.

Then my mom told me everything that was bothering her since my birth: she had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer, or just simply going to college, but she made this one mistake that changed her life. She said that she never ever regretted having me or my brother in her life, but sometimes she just wanted to experience the normal life of a young girl. 

I said that I also wanted to have the normal life of a young girl. My mom started crying and said she was sorry and that she knew she was a bad mother and she was tired of feeling bad about herself all the time - like she was a bad daughter, a bad mother, and a bad person.