Chapter 4The Wish

For the first few days after the baby was born, my mom's Facebook page was a highlight reel of a perfect life. Close-ups of the baby's tiny hands. A loving portrait of their happy family of three. She posted nine-picture collages eight times a day. The captions were triumphant.

[It just had to be a son. Now that I have a son, even the air I breathe is sweeter!]

[Finally did right by our ancestors. The family name won't die with us.]

[The happiest family of three!]

Too bad their perfect life didn't even last a week.

My dad called me in the middle of the night, his frustration practically sizzling through the phone.

"Your mother is impossible! I close my eyes for two minutes, and she's whining that her head hurts, her back hurts, her bones are falling apart, and I need to give her a massage. Who doesn't hurt after having a baby? Back in my day, women were back in the fields the next day!"

"I wake up before dawn to make her oatmeal, and she complains it's bland! I buy the best pork hock for a soup, slave over it, bring it to her, and she says it's too greasy! She's acting like a damn princess just because she had a C-section!"

"It's one thing after another, I swear to God! I'm done! I'm not waiting on her hand and foot anymore!"

My mom was even worse. She sent me a flood of tearful voice messages, with the baby wailing in the background.

"Your father is a useless idiot! He's going to be the death of me! Your brother is screaming his head off from hunger, I tell him to make a bottle, and he uses boiling water! The formula just clumps up! A pig could learn how to do it, but I've told him a thousand times and he still can't remember!"

"He sleeps like the dead at night. I have to shove him just to wake him up. I finally get him up to change a diaper, and he just wipes the baby's butt with a wet wipe and shoves him back into a new diaper without drying him off! It's been five days! Five days! And the baby's butt is already raw!"

It was like they'd coordinated. One after another, they gave me my royal decree.

"You have to come home! We can't handle this!"

In my last life, when I was the one taking care of her, she called me an ungrateful brat if I did the slightest thing wrong. If the water was one degree too cold, I was useless. If the chicken soup wasn't hot enough, I was trying to poison her. When my dad came home, she'd tell him exaggerated stories, and then they'd both scream at me.

Now that they had to do it themselves, they couldn't stand each other after less than a week.

I'd rather be a wage slave in a factory than go home and face the three of them.

Go home? Only if I had a death wish.

[I don't want to get in the way. It's better if you three just work things out and have a happy life!]

I really hoped they'd just forget I existed. And stop trying to drag me down with them.