A mother's love

Chapter 16

Reena understood that she took Brian for granted. She knew that she was fortunate to have a teenage son who performed all of the household chores without complaint and who gave her no problems. If he wasn't in the kitchen cooking or in the living room eating with her he was in his room doing his schoolwork; his excellent report cards were proof of his academic dedication. She didn't communicate to him how much she valued him, she thought it would sound disingenuous given all that he had to do around the house, which made her feel no small amount of guilt which wasn't aided by the frigidity and laconism with which Brian interacted with her. He made her feel not just guilty but hurt, at times she perceived a malevolence to his disposition that made her feel like the victim of a deliberate campaign of malice being waged against her by her own son. She was of no illusions about the quality of mother that she was but she did think that Brian's unyielding attitude toward her was excessive. She felt that she was entitled to a minimum level of courtesy from him that he had never shown her. It wasn't her fault that things had turned out for them the way they had; his father was the one that had run out on them, and Reena thought that she deserved an enormous amount of credit for staying when she could have left just as easily.

She wondered sometimes if Brian even cared about her, if everything that he did was out of concern that he had for his mother's welfare or if he was jus acting out of a sense of duty that he couldn't ignore. The perfunctoriness with which he dispatched his tasks, particularly the cooking, she interpreted as a dismissal of her. Enough time had passed since he'd been burned by that frying pan of oil that she thought it was more than a little selfish of him to still be resentful about it. Nothing like it had happened since and she was the one who had tended to his wound with constant applications of ice and cold water. The care that she had provided for him during that episode was her finest hour as a mother, but, as was always the case with Brian, he offered her nothing in the way of gratitude, and the incident served as the defining point of irreconcilability between them.

There were things that Brian provided her with besides cooked meals for which she was grateful, most notable among them was the sense of security that he gave her. She could remain at ease knowing that he would always return home to her and she would always know where he was, which is why she felt like she had been betrayed when she went into his room at 11 p.m. one night to ask him why there wasn't any antacid in the bathroom medicine cabinet and found that he wasn't there.