Dear Mother, Dear Father
Dear Mother, Dear Father
上次我写过一篇文章关于朋友的女儿如何提高英文写作的:(点击链接读这篇文章)
昨天得知朋友的女儿又获奖了很是为他们高兴. 也向他们表示祝贺.
这里有详细的消息:
经得他们同意, 他们把原文让我发表在这儿, 与大家share. 他还说, 欢迎斧正. 朋友请您读后, 请发表您的高见. 这是10年级同学写的文章.
Dear Mother, Dear Father—
No. Not at all.
Eva took the sheet of paper, crumpled it up, and threw it into the recycling. It didn’t work; it was too intimate an address for what would come next.
She picked up her pen and tried again.
Mother, Father—
No. Still no. The words were too respectful for the parents that held all of her animosity and none of her affection.
How were you supposed to start off a letter that explained why you haven’t contacted your parents for seven years?
Eva sat back and stared out her bedroom window. An old brick wall from the apartment across the street stared back. Somewhere in the distance, a bird squawked.
She owed her parents an explanation; she knew this much. She was twenty-five now, and they knew nothing about how she was doing. They had the right to know why, after eighteen years of playing family, she’d just turned around and…stopped.
The day she’d packed up and left for college, she had told them only one thing: “I don’t want to have you in my life.” They’d first dismissed it as some sort of reaction brought about by a change in life phase. But eventually, faced with the short, brute responses to their bundles of letters, marked only with Return to sender, they could do nothing but comply. So the letters stopped coming. The money stopped coming. The Christmas gifts that were everything but heartfelt stopped coming.
But, Eva knew, her parents would still be blind enough to ask why.
“Why?” she muttered, twisting a strip of paper around and around her fingers. “Why?”
Eva is four. Her parents stand in front of a grant piano and watch her play, inspecting her every move with critical detail.
“You’re not good enough,” says her mother.
“You’re a disappointment,” says her father.
Her small, childish voice rings out, saying, “But I’m trying—”
“You’re not trying hard enough,” her mother snaps. “Don’t turn yourself into a failure.”
A failure. Eva let out a bitter sound. Everything she did—every move, every word, every pen mark and note ever played, was a failure. And she wasn’t allowed to explain herself; oh no, she would always, inevitably, be in the wrong.
Eva is twelve. Her parents’ voices fly over her head, courtesy of an almost-perfect-but-not-quite test.
“Why do you have a ninety-nine?” screams her mother.
“This is unacceptable,” yells her father.
“But it’s just one mistake—”
“You clearly haven’t been working,” her father says coldly. “Go back to your room and stay there.”
So many assumptions, and never a pause for her to stop working and actually live.
Eva is sixteen. She might as well be seven, though, given the way her parents are still treating her.
“Who cares about friends?” asks her mother.
“You’re staying at home,” orders her father.
“But I’ve never even been to a birthday party—”
“Your grades are the only things that matter,” her mother responds. “You’re too young to know what’s good for you.”
Too young. She’d always been too young for them, her opinion too insignificant to receive much thought. Her life had been planned out for her right from the beginning.
Eva is seventeen. She buries herself in the stack of college applications, trying helplessly to drown out her parents’ voices.
“You’re going into engineering,” orders her mother.
“Baking? Over my dead body,” snaps her father.
“But I want to—”
“It doesn’t matter what you want,” her father interrupts. “Your parents know best.”
There had been nothing for her to enjoy about being an adolescent, not when every day was a battle of wills. So she had gradually distanced herself from her parents over the years; to her, they become nothing more than critics that she only had to tolerate for a little while longer.
Until, finally, she could leave.
Leaving for a field she didn’t like, yes. But at least, stepping into college, she was free. Being away from home made it all the easier to disappear.
Eva is eighteen. She’s realized something now—that, in a strange new city with strange new people, she is no longer her parents’ daughter.
And there is no mother to tell her what she has to do.
And there is no father to tell her that they’ll always be right.
She lets their relationship disappear until neither side matters to the other.
Eva is eighteen, and now her parents are strangers.
She never saw her parents again.
She struggled to pay rent; scrimped and saved for a paltry bank account; and, despite her best efforts, sometimes still ended up living in someone’s basement.
But at least she never had to deal with her parents—the parents that had never considered that maybe, just maybe, they weren’t the only ones who deserved a voice.
Eva looked around at the peeling walls and shabby furniture. She thought. For a long time, she thought.
And then she knew. She wrote and crossed out and ripped up and wrote again, until finally, she had the perfect set of words in front of her, the last thing she’d ever send to her parents.
Mr. & Mrs. Greene:
All you ever did was talk. All I ever wanted was for you to listen.
Eva