Story 4
The Overlapping Mother
Since I was little, I had lived with my paternal grandparents.
By the time I entered elementary school, my grandmother on my father’s side had trouble with her legs, and by the time I was in fourth grade, she was bedridden. She had disliked my mother from the beginning, and my grandfather was the type who never sugarcoated his words. He often made snide remarks toward my mother over trivial matters.
My mother, while caring for my grandmother and attending to my grandfather, also looked after her husband and three children—including me—while working part-time at a supermarket about three days a week. She grew worn out, aging far beyond her actual years.
One day, when I came home from school, my mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. That was nothing unusual. I saw her cutting tofu in her palm for miso soup. I could clearly make that out, yet… for some reason my mother looked blurry to me.
“A-chan? Welcome back! Did you have fun at school?”
She turned toward me, still slicing tofu.
Something was definitely strange. Only my mother looked blurry.
About a week later, my blurry-looking mother became clear again. But then I began to see her doubled. Next to my smiling, real mother was always another mother standing to her right—her face twisted in anger, glaring at me. Everything else in my vision looked normal; it was only my mother who appeared this way.
I told her about it. She panicked and took me to various doctors, including an ophthalmologist. Despite her already exhausting life, she dragged herself to these appointments with me, and in doing so she seemed to age even more quickly. Her expression grew harsher by the day. Astigmatism and other issues were suspected, but in the end, no cause was found.
It was around January of my fourth-grade year when the doubling suddenly stopped. One night, I don’t know what my father said to provoke her, but my mother had a terrible hysterical outburst. My siblings and I were asleep in the bedroom when her screams woke us. She shrieked in a piercing voice, throwing things at my father and sobbing uncontrollably. My grandfather, alarmed, pounded on the door and called out, but she had locked it.
At that moment, I saw only one mother. And her face was exactly like the second one I had always seen—the furious, glaring one.
About two weeks later, my mother collapsed. She was diagnosed with depression. Prescribed a large amount of medication, the once energetic woman now often sat slumped, listless.
Right after I entered fifth grade, my grandmother died of pneumonia. She had been bedridden for a long time, her body weakened, and with a persistent low fever in the last two weeks, the doctor had warned us she was in danger.
My grandfather soon followed, dying in a traffic accident.
With the two of them gone, my mother’s burdens seemed to ease, and her depression gradually improved. The doubling I used to see disappeared; my mother appeared normal again.
I still don’t know why I saw her that way.
But now, I think the second mother—always at her right side with that pained, angry face—might have been something like her living spirit, showing me her suffering.
