My Mom Is a Ghost

 A few days ago, I was trying to teach my mom how to send voice messages. It was tough—Mom didn’t want to figure it out. She’d press something, and if it didn’t work, that was it, no other options. After many attempts, she called Dad, and they managed to sort it out. The next day, she sent me a voice message: “Hi, everything’s fine here, how are you? Have you eaten? Are you at work right now?... Got it. So you’re working for another week and then heading back?... Yeah, got it. You can’t talk right now?... Okay, then another time. Dad was asking if you could talk on video, but I told him you can’t, so we’ll talk on video when you get home. Alright, bye.” When I listened to it, I couldn’t understand what was happening. It was a conversation with me, but without me. My mom was asking me things, answering for me, and believing it far more than she usually believes what I actually say. Yes, I’d eaten, yes, I was at work, but she didn’t know that for sure. As for going home, it was unclear whether I’d be leaving in a week or three days, but what did it matter? Mom had already decided I was leaving in a week. Also, at that moment, I could’ve talked, I could’ve sent voice messages, but there was no point—Mom had already decided I couldn’t and went offline after sending the message. And I could’ve talked on video with them twice a day; I never said I couldn’t. I didn’t understand the point of sending that message—it already had answers to all the questions, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t my answers. My participation wasn’t needed at all. When I told her about it, the result was the same. She didn’t take my words at face value and, deciding I was upset about not being needed in the conversation, said in a comforting tone, “Don’t worry, you’re always very needed here.” I realized fighting it was pointless and just agreed.

I understood that my mom has long been living in her own world, where all information passes through thick walls of bias, stereotypes, and other people’s beliefs. It’s like my mom no longer lives in this world—she’s replaced the beauty of the present moment and the real world with pre-prepared scripts that often differ from reality. So when something doesn’t fit her script, she starts to worry and fret. When I was reading Castaneda, there was a chapter where Don Juan’s ally took him far away, and he was trying to get back home. When he asked people he met along the way which way his hometown was, they’d point the way and invite him to go with them, but he kept running from them because they were all ghosts. Only now do I understand what he meant. My mom is a ghost too.

The next day, during a video call with my parents, at some point, the conversation turned to how I don’t tell them anything about myself. My dad thinks he’s worried about me, so he wants to know more, but when I say everything’s fine, he calms down a bit. My mom doesn’t understand why she needs this information at all—she sees me as a little kid, so I only talk to her about things a kid might say, like: I ate, nothing hurts, I have a jacket, my hat’s with me. She tries to pull information out of me under the pretense that other kids tell their parents everything, no matter their age, not realizing that’s not an argument for me. She also often brings up my brother Bogdan, who, as she says, tells her everything without even being asked. But she sees Bogdan as an adult, not me. So the more I tell her about myself, the more she starts worrying about me—I’ve seen this happen more than once. I don’t know what I need to do to make my parents see that I’ve grown up, and honestly, I don’t want to find that knowledge—it’s not that important to me anymore. When my dad tries to get something out of me, he uses a really good tool, so I always support him in it. He tries to dig a little deeper, but only one level down. When he asks something and I ask why he needs to know, he gives a reasonable answer and tries to nudge me on it, but when he sees it’s not working, he falls back on arguments like “because,” “just because,” or “I feel like it.” He’s great for trying to dig into something, but the thing is, if a person has a little shovel like that, it’s not for digging into other people—it’s for digging into yourself. And the deeper you dig into yourself, the deeper you can dig into others. That’s why my dad can’t dig into me—his little shovel just gets lost in my quarry, where BelAZ trucks are already rolling.