Mother (62) Tried to Move a Distant Relative in With Me So I “Wouldn’t Be Lonely”
Money may not smell, but it does take away your health. By the age of thirty-seven, I had learned that the hard way. I work for myself: all day long I write texts, compile reports, and edit other people’s materials. The job is fully remote, which many people consider paradise, but in reality, by evening my lower back is falling apart, my eyes are watering from the monitor, and the sheer number of words leaves a constant buzzing in my head.
I work like this not because of some great love for art. I have a goal. Methodically, denying myself vacations and spontaneous purchases, I am saving up for my own apartment. My rented one-room flat has become everything to me — an office, a bunker, and the only place where I can take off my social mask and simply be silent.
My life is built around quiet. I sleep eight hours a night, because without sleep my productivity drops. I do not keep men around “for health,” and I am not ready to have children yet. I am comfortable in my solitude, where the only living soul is my heavy, fluffy cat Balu, who needs nothing from me except food and a clean litter box.
There was only one weak spot in my armor. My mother.
My mother is sixty-two. She is one of those women who sincerely believe that a woman without a man and a child in tow is defective goods. In her worldview, loneliness is equal to leprosy. The fact that I fully support myself and do not ask anyone for a single kopek means nothing to her. “Money won’t hug you,” “No one will hand you a glass of water,” “You’ll go feral with your cat” — I heard this repertoire every week.
But the worst part was that my mother had a spare key to my apartment. I gave it to her two years ago, when I was in the hospital with pneumonia and Balu needed feeding. The key stayed with her after that, “just in case.”
That November Tuesday had been awful. I was running around to the tax office, then across the city for documents. Outside, icy rain mixed with snow was lashing down. My feet were soaked, my tights were torn, and I wanted only one thing: to climb into a hot shower, pour myself some tea with lemon, and collapse onto the bed.
I got to my floor. Inserted my key into the lock. The lock turned only once instead of twice.
I frowned. Pushed the heavy metal door open.
The smell that hit me made me step back. In my apartment, where I always obsessively maintain the scent of cleanliness and an expensive cedar diffuser, there was a thick, bluish stench. It smelled of the cheapest onions burnt in bad oil, fried “doctor’s sausage,” and some kind of unwashed, stale dampness.
From the kitchen came my mother’s loud, booming laughter and the mumbling of the television, which I switched on maybe once every six months.
Automatically, I pulled off my wet boots. Walked down the hall. On my light doormat lay someone else’s worn-out sneakers, covered in street mud that had already started to melt into a brown puddle on the laminate floor. Beside them were two huge checkered bags wrapped in tape.
I stepped into the kitchen.
The scene before me was so absurd that, for a second, my ears went numb.
My mother was sitting at my table. In front of her stood my favorite chipped mug, from which she was drinking tea. Across from her sat a girl. Large, soft-bodied, with thin greasy hair tied at the back into a mouse-tail ponytail.
The girl was wearing my warm terry-cloth robe. The very robe I hang in the bathroom. She was sitting there with her legs spread wide apart, eating burnt sausage with onions straight out of the frying pan — my frying pan, my nonstick frying pan, the one I do not even touch with a metal fork. And that was exactly what she was doing: scraping the fork against the nonstick coating.
My cat Balu was perched on the very edge of the kitchen cabinet, pressed against the wall, his eyes huge and black with terror.
“Oh, Irochka! We weren’t expecting you until evening!” my mother exclaimed happily, throwing up her hands when she saw me in the doorway. “Why are you so early? ……… continued in the first comment
My mother, 62, tried to move a distant relative in with me so I “wouldn’t be lonely”
Money doesn’t stink, but it does take a toll on your health. By the age of thirty-seven, I had learned that like iron law. I work for myself: all day long I write texts, compile reports, and edit other people’s material. My job is completely remote, which many people think is paradise, but in reality, by evening my lower back is giving out, my eyes are watering from staring at the monitor, and my head is buzzing nonstop from the sheer number of words.
I don’t work this hard out of some great love for art. I have a goal. Methodically, denying myself vacations and spontaneous purchases, I’m saving up for my own apartment. My rented one-room flat has become everything to me — an office, a bunker, and the only place where I can take off my social mask and simply be silent.
My life is built around silence. I sleep eight hours a night, because without sleep my productivity drops. I don’t keep men around “for health,” and I’m not ready to have children yet. I’m comfortable in my solitude, where the only other living soul is my heavy, fluffy cat Balu, who wants nothing from me except food and a clean litter box.
There was only one weak spot in my armor. My mother.
My mother is sixty-two. She belongs to that breed of women who sincerely believe that a woman without a man and a child in tow is defective goods. In her worldview, loneliness is equivalent to leprosy. The fact that I support myself and don’t ask anyone for a single kopeck meant nothing to her. “Money won’t hug you,” “No one will bring you a glass of water,” “You’ll go feral with that cat of yours” — I heard this repertoire every week.
But the worst part was that my mother had a spare key to my apartment. I gave it to her two years ago when I was in the hospital with pneumonia and Balu needed to be fed. The key stayed with her “just in case.”
That Tuesday in November was awful. I had been running around the tax office, then all the way across town for documents. Outside, icy rain mixed with snow was lashing down. My feet were soaked, my tights were torn, and I wanted only one thing: to crawl into a hot shower, pour myself tea with lemon, and collapse onto my bed.
I got to my floor. Put my key in the lock. It turned only once instead of twice.
I frowned. Pushed the heavy metal door open.
The smell hit me so hard I actually stepped back. In my apartment, where I always obsessively maintain the scent of cleanliness and an expensive cedar diffuser, there hung a thick, grayish stench. It smelled of the cheapest burnt onions fried in bad oil, fried bologna, and some kind of unwashed, stale dampness.
From the kitchen came my mother’s loud rolling laughter and the muttering of the television, which I turned on maybe once every six months.
Automatically, I pulled off my wet boots. I walked down the hall. On my light-colored doormat lay someone else’s worn-out sneakers covered in street mud that had already begun to melt, spreading into a brown puddle across the laminate floor. Beside them stood two enormous plaid bags wrapped with tape.
I stepped into the kitchen.
The scene before me was so absurd my ears rang for a second.
At my table sat my mother. In front of her was my favorite mug with the chipped rim, from which she was drinking tea. And opposite her sat some girl. Large, doughy, with limp greasy hair gathered at the back of her head into a rat-tail ponytail.
She was wearing my warm terry-cloth robe. The very same robe I keep hanging in the bathroom. She sat there with her legs spread wide and was eating burnt bologna with onions straight out of the frying pan — my Teflon frying pan, which I don’t even touch with a metal fork. Yet she was scraping it with a fork, grating against the nonstick coating.
My cat Balu was perched on the very edge of the kitchen unit, pressed against the wall, his eyes wide and black with terror.
“Oh, Ira! We weren’t expecting you till evening!” my mother cried happily, throwing up her hands when she saw me in the doorway. “Why are you so early?”
I said nothing, feeling a cold, heavy fury beginning to rise inside me. I stared at the greasy stain already spreading across my robe over the girl’s stomach.
“Surprise!” my mother jumped up, fussily adjusting her sweater. “Meet Tonya! Aunt Lyuba’s niece from the Voronezh region. Tonya came to our city and got into a technical college to study merchandising! There are no places in the dorm, they said she has to wait a month. And they don’t have the money to rent a place, you understand — they’re from the country.”
Tonya belched contentedly, wiped her lips with the back of her hand right on the sleeve of my robe, and grinned.
“Hi. Your Wi-Fi doesn’t really work in the kitchen. Did the password change? Aunt Galya gave it to me, but it won’t load.”
“What does this mean, Mom?” My voice came out dull and completely emotionless.
“Irochka, I only wanted what was best!” my mother switched into her trademark coaxing half-whisper and tried to take my hand. I pulled it away. “Just think about it! You must be howling like a wolf here all by yourself! You sit here all day long without saying a word to anybody, just tapping away on your keyboard. And now there’ll be another living soul in the house!”
She waved her hands toward the chewing Tonya.
“She’s a quiet girl, a village girl! She’ll wash the floors for you, cook soup! You two can sit together in the evenings drinking tea, watching TV! Look how wide that sofa is in the kitchen — we’ll fold it out, it’ll make a perfect bed! And I’ll be calmer knowing you’re not alone in these empty walls. And we helped people too — Aunt Lyuba was crying with gratitude!”
I shifted my gaze to this “living soul.” Tonya, having lost interest in us, stretched out her greasy fingers toward my fruit bowl and bit into the one green apple I had left for myself for the evening.
At that moment, the last string connecting me to ideas like “filial duty” and “family patience” snapped.
I didn’t even take off my shoes. In my wet boots, I walked straight to the table, snatched the bitten apple out of Tonya’s hand, and threw it into the trash can. The dull thud of fruit hitting plastic made the girl flinch.
“Tonya, get up. Take off the robe. Right here.” I pronounced each word like I was hammering nails into the coffin lid of our family trust.
“Ira! What are you doing?!” my mother shrieked, jumping up from her chair. “The poor girl is stressed, she’s away from home for the first time! And you’re treating her like a dog!”
“No one asked Tonya when she started climbing into my things,” I said without even turning to my mother. “The robe. Take it off. Now. Or I’ll take it off together with your skin.”
Tonya, realizing that the “kind Aunt Ira” from my mother’s stories was nowhere to be found and that in front of her stood an angry, very tired woman, began frantically untying the belt. She dropped the robe onto the floor. On the stool where she’d been sitting there was a greasy stain — probably from the bologna. My robe, my cozy, soft robe, was now smeared with someone else’s grease and smelled of someone else’s unwashed body.
I picked it up by the edge with two fingers and, without looking, tossed it into the trash after the apple.
“Ira! That was an expensive robe!” my mother gasped. “Have you completely lost your mind from all that work? Throwing money away like that!”
“There will be nothing in my apartment that was touched without my permission,” I finally said, looking her in the eyes. “Now listen, both of you. You have exactly fifteen minutes. Oksana, or whatever your name is… Tonya. Pack your bags. Mom, you’re helping her carry everything out to the elevator.”
“And where is she supposed to go?!” my mother started shouting, blotches spreading ugly across her face. “It’s night! It’s raining! The child doesn’t have a penny, her mother was practically on her knees begging me to place her somewhere! You want to disgrace me before the whole village? So people will say my own daughter threw an orphan out into the cold?”
“I don’t care about the village. I don’t care about your promises. And I don’t care about your ‘orphan’ either. What I care about is that someone broke into my home without asking, ruined my dishes, and stank the place up with cheap onions. Time starts now. Fifteen minutes.”
I went out into the hall, flung the front door wide open, and stood beside it with my arms folded across my chest. The cold smell of wet concrete and other people’s lives drifted in from the stairwell.
Sniffling, Tonya started stuffing opened bags of grain, some clothes, and dirty shoes into her plaid sacks. My mother darted between the kitchen and the entryway, lamenting my “cold-heartedness,” my “cursed loneliness,” and how “God sees everything.”
“You’ll regret this, Ira!” she hissed, carrying the first bag past me. “When you collapse with high blood pressure and there’s no one beside you! Then you’ll remember Tonya!”
“When I collapse with high blood pressure, Mom, I’ll call a private ambulance. I won’t sit there watching some random girl finish my dinner and ruin my frying pans. Ten minutes left.”
They bustled around in the corridor, banging bags around. Tonya pulled on her worn-out sneakers, leaving dirty footprints on my laminate floor. I stared at those footprints and thought of only one thing: how long it would take me to scrub the apartment down with bleach.
When the last plaid bag was outside the door, my mother turned to face me. Her eyes were shooting sparks, and her mouth was pressed into a thin, vicious line.
“The keys,” I said, holding out my hand.
“In your dreams!” My mother fished the keyring out of her pocket and hurled it with force across the landing toward the elevator. The keys clanged against the concrete and skidded under the garbage chute. “Choke on your precious order! Keep trembling over your rags! But don’t ever come to me again — as far as I’m concerned, you’re dead!”
She grabbed Tonya by the elbow and dragged her toward the elevator, still shouting curses that echoed all through the stairwell.
I closed the door.
Silence fell over the apartment, but it was poisoned. The smell of onions and bologna had seeped into the curtains. Balu cautiously jumped down from the cabinet and came over to the door, suspiciously sniffing the doormat.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t have the strength. I picked up my phone and opened the first ad I saw: “Lock replacement. 24-hour call-out.”
The locksmith arrived forty minutes later. He was a surly man in a greasy jacket, smelling of tobacco and metal shavings. He silently looked over my door.
“Replace the whole system, or just the cylinder?” he asked, taking out a massive power screwdriver from his case.
“Replace everything. And put in the most reliable lock you have, so the old key can’t turn it even a millimeter.”
While he buzzed away with his tools, prying the old “heart” out of my door, I sat on a stool in the hallway and stared at one point. Numbers spun in my head: how much I’d pay the locksmith, how much a new robe cost, how much a frying pan cost. This was the price of my peace of mind. Expensive, but worth it.
“All done, ma’am,” the locksmith said, handing me five shiny keys sealed in plastic. “The fifth is the master key, the others are regular. Check it.”
I locked and unlocked the door three times. The new lock moved smoothly, with a quiet, almost noble click. It was the click of a trap snapping shut — one I would never fall into again.
The locksmith left. I transferred him the money, locked the door on every turn, and went into the kitchen.
First, I threw the trash bag with the robe and the apple core into the communal bin on the landing. Then I took out the bleach and started scrubbing. I scrubbed the table, scrubbed the stools, scrubbed the cabinet handles that Tonya might have touched. I washed every dish twice in boiling water.
Then I ran a bath — scalding hot. I sat in it until my skin turned red, trying to wash this day off me, my mother’s words about my being a “barren branch,” and this sticky feeling of betrayal.
My phone was exploding with messages. Relatives whose existence I had forgotten ten years ago had suddenly come back to life. “Ira, how could you?!” “Your mother is in tears!” “They had to take Tonya to the train station, she’s sitting in the waiting hall!” “You have no heart!”
I didn’t bother explaining anything. I simply blocked the family group chat, blocked my aunts’ and uncles’ numbers, and finally — my mother’s number as well. I knew that in a couple of days she’d cool off and start calling as if nothing had happened, ready to “forgive” me. But I had no intention of forgiving her.
Three hours later, the apartment finally smelled fresh again. The windows were wide open, and the freezing air had driven out the last traces of that “rural hospitality.” I lay down in my bed, on clean, crisp sheets. Balu immediately settled himself by my feet, purring contentedly.
Many people would say, “But she’s your mother! She meant well! You could have endured it for a week, helped the girl out.”
But I knew the truth. My mother didn’t want to “help me with loneliness.” She wanted to bend me to her standards. She wanted to prove that my apartment wasn’t mine, but “ours.” That my time was a shared resource she could dispose of in order to look like a benefactor in the eyes of her relatives back in Syzran.
If you give someone a spare key, they should know that it is the key to your door, not to your life. And if a person doesn’t understand that, then it’s time to change the lock.
I closed my eyes. Tomorrow I had to write ten thousand characters for a new client. And I knew for certain that I would write them in silence. In absolute, earned, entirely my own silence.
And that glass of water… well, I’ll buy myself the most expensive water filter and put it in the kitchen. It’ll still be far cheaper than tolerating strangers in my home for the sake of some mythical “help in old age.”
My keys. My silence. My life.