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08:54:00
In December she had no choice but to obey the rules of family life. She came home for Christmas. Mother noticed that she put on some weight but she stated that she was stressed and started eating chocolate to concentrate on classes. To be honest, she gained a substantial amount of weight after high school, so for her mother, it wasn’t surprising. Her parents were more or less normal. Mother was a slave for the father. They both worked when she was little, but when the father came home, he sat in front of a TV screen. Mother did all the cooking, all the cleaning, washing, washing up, ironing, and, of course, she took care of the child. Father never helped. His own mother had never expected him to do any housework and, similarly, neither his father had helped with anything around the house. However, Julia's father resorted to oral guidance. He usually commented that the soup wasn’t salty enough and that the cake from last Christmas was a little bit less tasty. It was an objective fact, not something mean on his part. There was one thing about the father that she actually liked: he never discouraged her from what she did, never told her that she shouldn’t invest in her education, he never suggested that she should start a family or have children. Mother, on the contrary, expected a grandchild and a standard loving relationship which she could boast about to her friends and family. When it came to relationships, they were both timid. They never talked about sex. They never talked about divorces and affairs. She supposed that in their blissful traditional ways they both thought that she was still a virgin.
Pregnant, she did enjoy those couple of days of warm home-made meals, singing carols and watching hours of Home Alone and Home Alone 2. It was like coming back to days when she was a child. A daughter who witnessed her parents’ arguments and romantic making-up in the background of roses and chocolates. Her father was terrible when it came to fights: aggressive, not to the extent of actual violence, but hostile and sometimes mad. Plates were thrown on the floor, glasses were broken, curse words thrown into the air. On the other hand, he never hit her. Occasionally, she hit him: at times he had bruises triggered by kitchen towels or a box of cereals. Hurt, like a wounded animal, he went away, sometimes for a day or two. He came back with bouquets of flowers and sweets. And then she heard them making love in their room. All the ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I love you’, ‘I want you’ sounded so cliché. They were a funny couple: seemingly adults, but when you got to know them better, more like teenagers. She felt that they loved her and that she was planned and waited for. They would love to have a grandchild. Another prolongation of genes and their love. But their love was their love. And she had never wanted to have the same relationship as her parents, she had never wanted to be a mother of a child, a child listening from the other room how she makes love to her partner.
She stayed there only for a couple of days. She was afraid that they would start to notice that something wasn't right. She was tired of this family perfection, as parents seemed to be after one of those big fights and now it was honeymoon phase all over again. She felt she was getting bigger. After shopping, she was exhausted and slept for hours buried in her blankets and large pillows.
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