I spent three hundred dollars on a brand-new phone for my mother, only for her to start saying that the smartphone was stealing her money and that I had personally siphoned off her bank balance.

I could never win the argument. So I offered to just reimburse whatever “loss” she imagined.

She got even more unhappy. She slapped a stack of receipts on the table and demanded I pay up.

“Where did you buy this piece of junk? It’s a ticking time bomb. Give me my money back!”

Most of the receipts were for men’s sneakers and athletic wear; the rest were household basics like brooms and hangers.

I felt a wave of suffocating frustration. Since when was shopping free? Why was I expected to pay for her? I bought her a new phone, and I just became the ATM?

“Fine. If you hate it that much, I’m taking it back to the store.”

But she would not let go.

As soon as I started working, my salary was used to pay for the family’s living expenses.

I was the one upgrading everything, from expensive things like the washing machine, AC unit, and cabinets, down to the cheaper items like toilet paper and cutlery.

However, Mom was never satisfied no matter how much thought I put into my choices. In fact, she seemed to hate my gifts.

Once, a colleague gave me some premium-quality beef. I brought it home for her, but she accused me of trying to trick her with “fake goods.”

I found it strange; my colleague had no reason to lie to me, and it tasted delicious when I cooked it for myself. I later figured out she probably had trouble with the cooking, so I ordered a pressure cooker and had it delivered to the house. I thought the pressure cooker would be a faster and easier way to cook the best stew and that it would make her happy.

But an accident happened again.

“Are you trying to kill me?”

It was a disaster.

Thankfully, nothing exploded, but the stew boiled over.

She always said I was bad at everything. Literally everything.

I had bought a top-of-the-line cooker perfectly sized for two people, but she insisted on filling it to the brim with water. And when it inevitably overflowed, she blamed me.

This was my everyday life. She complained that the AC used too much power; she complained that the toilet paper was too thin. There was never a moment of approval.

I felt like an unloved child, slowly eroded by her constant nitpicking until I was left small, timid, and crying in the dark.

The wake-up call came when I used my parents’ toxic communication style with a colleague, and she did not speak to me for a week.

That was when I finally began to question if that dynamic was normal. I was in pain. I clearly felt my heart go from aching to completely numb.

The most pathetic part was that I had become used to it.

Change felt impossible.

Mom’s face was a mask of cold indifference on the other end of the phone. Criticisms rolled off her tongue like a script she had rehearsed a thousand times.

“The color is ugly, it’s tiny, and it makes this horrible sizzling sound. I’m scared of using it.”

I felt a pang of sadness. The “sizzling” was obviously because she had not wiped the bottom of the pot dry before putting it on the heating element.

She had taught me to do that back when I was in elementary school. How could she forget to do that?

What baffled me even more was that she broadcasted this “tragedy” to the entire extended family. Everyone knew that I had bought a defective product that almost poisoned my mother.

I felt guilt-ridden, so I just told her to just throw it away and never use it again.

But she only used that as an opening to more criticism.

“Patrick is the sensible one. He’s the one who actually cleaned up this mess. He knows I can’t handle these complicated things, so he just bought me some canned soup. You just love giving me more work to do. You don’t care about me at all.”

I was speechless.

Canned soup was not healthy food. It was nowhere near the quality of the beef I brought home. She insulted it but would not let me take it back. When I bought the pressure cooker, she complained it was complicated to use but stopped me from returning it. I tried to teach her step-by-step, but she claimed it was too difficult to learn and kept making mistakes.

Using this as an excuse, she demanded, “My old phone is hard to use. If I had a new phone, I could check how to use it online.”

I was extremely busy with work, yet she was the one complaining.

Then, she started posting photos of delicious-looking ribs and pork knuckles on her social media every other day. Were those gourmet meals fake?

Since that incident, I gradually stopped answering her calls.

Deprived of her target, she went into a full-blown frenzy. She alternated between sobbing about how hard her life was and badmouthing me to anyone who would listen. But none of these soothed her bruised ego.

Finally, I could not stomach the harassment any longer, so I went home to check things out.

“Where did you buy this piece of junk? It’s a ticking time bomb. Give me my money back!”

The floor was thick with dust, looking like it had not been swept for a long time. I stepped forward, picked up the phone, and gently wiped it clean. My heart ached when I saw the spiderweb cracks across the screen.

I had bought this with my hard-earned money while I stuck to using the relic of a phone I got back in my college days.

“Mom, this cost over three hundred dollars. Even if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t throw it on the ground. I can’t return it as new anymore; I’ll have to sell it as used.”

She made less than two hundred a month, yet she felt entitled enough to sneer at a three-hundred-dollar phone.

I watched her in silence as she postured herself to look down at me with disdain.

“You’re just too stingy sometimes. A phone is something you use every day; you should buy a high-end one. Cheap things have no merit other than being cheap. You hated the one I picked out, so you tried to pawn off some second-rate garbage on me. You simply wasted money, and all it did was make me angry.”

She was the type who could argue a point even when she was dead in the wrong, but I had already realized her true objective.

Any functional device would be fine for a normal family. Why was she obsessed with the latest iPhone? Was it really because the expensive one was always better?

Ever since I started working, every payday was followed by a new “need” at home. Either something needed replacing, or my parents suddenly developed back pain, leg pain, or toothaches. They were at retirement age but had almost no pension. I paid for their private annual checkups entirely out of my own pocket.

There was a policy to buy into a pension plan with a lump sum, but I was just an average employee, and I did not have that kind of cash lying around. I thought the subject was closed, but ever since my cousin bought a premium insurance plan for my aunt, my mother had been dropping hints to me.

I truly did not understand the allure of this manipulation that had her so obsessed.

“Mom, if you like expensive things, buy them yourself. Better yet, buy one for me too. I’ve never used a thousand-dollar phone.”

“How much do you think I make? The economy is terrible. Nobody wants to hire part-time workers. I’m lucky if I earn enough just to eat, let alone buy phones!”

…

I waited through the silence, knowing exactly what was coming next.

“If only I had a pension. It wouldn’t even need to be much. A couple hundred dollars a month would be enough to live without worry.”

Her voice was a cocktail of envy, complaint, and entitlement.

“And yet you threw a three hundred dollars’ worth piece of device on the floor. That one tantrum just cost you months of the pension you’re dreaming of.”

I had always been the “good girl” who never talked back.

“I’m not as capable as you, the big-city professional. I can’t afford it, but surely you can? I bet you people in the city don’t even look twice at a few hundred dollars.”

“I’m telling you. Instead of buying a bunch of junk, you should just buy the best once. Isn’t ‘longtermism’ the trend in the city? Doing it right the first time is better than constantly patching things up.”

Her tone was heavy with the weary air of a martyr and so full of unearned wisdom.

“Patrick doesn’t make much; he can’t help us. And you live so far away; your help is always barely enough. If we had a pension, we could spend our own money. If there were extras, we could even help you and Patrick. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

I took a long, steady breath and made a decision.

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want this phone?”

Sensing she had me leaning her way, she snapped, “Yes. Take this piece of junk away.”

“Fine. I’ll sell it second-hand.”

I picked up a needle from the sewing machine and popped the SIM card out.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you I bought screen insurance. I can get it fixed for free, which means I can still get a high price for selling it.”

“Even fixed, it’s still damaged. I guess I’ll just make do with it.”

She reached out to snatch it back, but I blocked her.

With her income, she would never be able to buy a phone like that herself. Her old one was practically dust. She was notoriously careless with things. Dropping her phone on the floor was just entry-level damage. I had even seen it in the laundry and toilet.

“Even if I don’t sell it, I can use it. Everyone at my office has two phones anyway. I might as well catch up with the trend.”

I was not lying. My colleagues did have two or more phones each.

Mom’s face twisted with regret. But she was too embarrassed to show her greed openly while her “bigger goal” was still on the table.

On the way home, I checked her shopping history, and a cold chill ran down my spine.

A long list of men’s shoes, athletic wear, and fitness trackers. They were all on the “Buy Now, Pay Later” scheme.

It totaled over one thousand dollars.

I had worked so hard to get promoted twice. My salary was finally enough for me to survive. I also spent some of it to heal the scarcity of my childhood.

Mom always said, “I wish you and Patrick could just swap places.”

She wanted me to be successful, but she wanted my brother, Patrick Cooper, to be more successful than me.

However, reality did not go that way, and she resented me for it.

She said that I was “stealing his luck.” She called me selfish for moving away. She even refused to pay for my college and forced me to take out loans. She had to be the guarantor for those loans.

All of this looked like a conflict between Mom and me. But in reality, Dad and Patrick were the only beneficiaries. Patrick was the precious son. My parents would lose sleep if he had to spend ten dollars on a phone bill.

I used to wonder why they pushed so hard to hold him up while dragging me down, but their logic was always the same.

“He’s younger. He doesn’t understand these things.”

“You earn more. Once you get married, you’re gone. We can only rely on Patrick, so of course he’ll come first.”

“Why are you being so difficult? Patrick would never be this petty.”

In the end, their tag-teamed guilt-tripping always left me suffocated and defeated.

It was two against one. I never stood a chance.