Mom and I over the years. Second stage.

During middle school and high school things were not much different. We lived trying to understand each other and to be well with each other but our communication was very bad, neither one of us could express what we really wanted to say and it is worth mentioning that we were both traumatized and hurt enough as to not have the ability to handle our emotions well when talking. It wasn't that we didn't love each other, it was that we didn't exchange messages in the right way and frustration and despair was the way to show that we hadn't made progress in our relationship, and this was repeated over and over and over again.

She is determined to make me see life as she sees it but I still don't agree, I try to explain with reasoning, from my perspective, but she doesn't want to listen to me, she's still not interested in what I have to say. We distance ourselves even more, we limit ourselves to living together only in the basics, I go out more with my friends, I go for a ride on my bike, I go out to train in the sports car, I move alone by van, by bike or by truck, I spend less time in home, I start to see her less hours a day, but even so, she wants to control my life and it frustrates her that, according to her, I use the house as a hotel and that I only get to sleep, it sinks into her bones that I don't "obey" because "she's my mom" and I should do what she says without questioning, "as long as I live under her roof, what she says is done." But I don't give him that pleasure.

I'm not a bad girl, I don't take drugs, I don't drink, I don't have sex, I don't hurt anyone, I'm not violent, I don't attack, I don't drive, I don't vandalize, I don't do anything that my mom would worry about during my adolescence, I just do what I want to do, I'm healthy, I'm smart, I go swimming, I want to go out with my friends, obviously, but for some reason mom is suspicious of me.

I enter the Yucatan Higher School of Arts, mom doesn't understand my decision but she accepts it, she doesn't stop me and supports me to study that career. My relationship with mom is not going well at the same time that the relationship between her and dad is worsening and deteriorating faster and faster. Dad leaves home and from this moment everything explodes between mom and me. The discussions begin to escalate and rise in tone. She doesn't stop screaming, I cry with rage and impotence, mom even kicks and breaks things, I don't know what to do, I get very scared, the words that come out of my mouth have a very different intention than what they cause in her and there is no way to stop the anger, it is not worth even trying anymore.

On several occasions I called my dad on the phone to please go and calm her down.

-Dad, mom is yelling and kicking things again, can you come over?

I started to see mom as a monster. 

This is how the worst stage of our relationship began, he said such cruel and selfish things to me that I always thought that if I didn't have the strength that I have, the ability to reflect, to reason, to study situations in depth, to believe in myself, to questioning his arguments, I would have committed suicide for all that he reproached me and blamed me. It was horrible, it hurt me too much.

Mom didn't joke about taking out all her frustrations on me, she blamed me for the problems between her and dad, she positioned me in a place in the middle of their relationship, she gave me responsibilities that didn't correspond to me, she demanded that I get along better with my dad than with her and the worst thing was that it was done to the victim. It seemed that he was fascinated to play that role. He came to tell me, and I quote: "You want to see me dead, you want your mother to die and then you would be happy." Yes, mom was a very bad monster back then. I started skipping my classes, preferring to pretend that I was going to school and sit in a park, alone, than wait for it to be time to go home. I repeated a school year, it was worth it.

I decided to apply to the exchange at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, she was very afraid that I would still go to the federal district alone, but I did, they accepted me and I left.

I was only away for six months, I had to return to Mérida to finish studying and graduate. I returned to my mom's house, already unaccustomed to following her rules after living a semester making my own decisions with no one to impose their will or control my life more than me.

Mom found a new boyfriend and now she's run away from home. I only came to look for clothes, or to see how my sister and I were doing. Shortly after, Astrid went to Spain for an exchange and I practically began to live alone. Mom stopped spending Christmas and New Years with me, I celebrated alone with dad, mom stopped cooking, I saw what to eat, she stopped controlling my life because I couldn't see what I was doing anymore, she wasn't there. He called me on my cell phone to check on me and that was it. I started spending a lot more time with my boyfriend, sleeping at his house from time to time, going out a lot more, now drinking, smoking, partying, not coming home. I thought that was freedom. There was no one watching my movements.

I started my project, I wanted to make t-shirts with my drawings. I started selling, I set up a workshop in the back room of my mom's house, I started selling more and I made her patio beautiful, what was once a mountain I turned it into a comfortable space to be. I literally did several repairs to his house, major repairs that meant major expenses, but good thing, because I was making money! And one day mom told me “I wouldn't pay that much for that shirt”. Wow, he doesn't like it, I thought, and it bothers him that his house smells of screen-printing chemicals.

Partly because I was fed up with the family situation, partly because I was fleeing from the people who had hurt me a lot, partly because of the urge to get away, not knowing anything about Mérida, and partly because I wanted to grow personally and professionally, with the money that I had saved by selling my "very expensive" t-shirts, one day I rented a house while I was still at my mother's house and let me know, I am going to live in Mexico City in a month.