History - Part three

No, I'm not still there, I'm not living in the past. I rather just keep getting thrown there. Small incidents. Big incidents. Every day life. It's one of my bigger flaws, my memory. I remember so much. And it's hard to describe the events. I usually refer to them as not-so-nice-things or something. Every time I try tell someone some of those events I get the feeling it's sounding like scenes from a movie. The trailer where they put all the really good action in three minutes, from a not so good movie actually, so after you saw the trailer the movie is boring or you just skip watching it. Somehow telling specifics incidents doesn't seem to make people see how it was (and in a way still is).
I have to repeat myself here, everything you grow up with you consider normal. Since you have nothing to compare with. I was positive that every friend I visited got beaten up by their parents the moment I left the house. My mother always acted nice and friendly too whenever someone came over to play with me. Or rather, I really didn't think it could be different at other families. There was always the layer that my mother showed when someone visited us. And it always was double bad when we were alone again. Always had I overlooked something in my behavior, my actions that my mother had jotted down in that special part of her memory, for which I had to be punished. Which could literally be anything. The way I had answered one of her questions, the way I had argued with a friend or not argued, the way I had shown the faintest idea of being sad or unhappy, the way I had talked too loud or too soft. There was no way at all to avoid doing something wrong, something that was overlooked before could turn into something I had to be punished for.
One of my jobs was to weed the graveled path that we had at the front and one of the sides of the house. Which was tedious in itself, but my mother was very picky about how it had to be done. The weeds had to be removed with the roots so it took like hours to get the whole path clean. One of the weekly chores. One day one of my friends wanted to play with me while I was weeding and she insisted on helping me so we could play sooner. My mother exploded that evening. I should have made it clear to my friend that I was to do that alone.
I still have hopes my mother didn't realize that no matter what choice I made it was always a bad one. I always had to ponder which decision would make my mother the least mad at me. She got mad because she believed I had made my friend pity me for having to do that job, which would automatically ensure she'd help me, which course I wanted because I was lazy. She didn't consider that the alternative (after having told I could do alone and that it was okay and soon done and not needing any help, really) that the only way to make my friend not help was to tell her I would get punished if she did. Which I thought would have pissed my mother off more.

My mother was great at cornering me. She taught me to look at someone while at the same time not looking at someone. Since both got her freaking mad. I am very good at watching something that's just behind someone's head when it's talking to me. If I looked down she said I wasn't paying attention. If I looked at her eyes she said I was too bold. Both was good enough for a smack in the face. It took me eight years after I left their house to be able to sleep on something other than my back (only because I was pregnant and couldn't sleep on my back anymore with my huge belly). My mother used to sneak upstairs to check on me and when she couldn't see my face she never believed I was asleep (which meant I was probably doing something bad). So I'm also reallyreally good at pretending I'm asleep. I also get really paranoid when I'm in bed and not able to hear everything or not recognizing sounds. I dislike everything that makes me unable to hear what's coming, closed doors, constant sounds that might drown other sounds.
Which isn't all that bad though, I can hear when my tea-water is boiling, I know what's happening in my house from sounds alone. Most of it isn't really interfering with anything. Except on bad hairdays. I mean over the years some really odd things I did moved more and more to the back. I'm not going all frantic anymore when I break something or get stains in my clothes which can't be washed out. Except, well sometimes it just breaks through again. I've worked too long to avoid certain reactions from my mother to not automatically fall back sometimes. It's not the excessive scenes that made me, it's the constant being on the lookout.