I’m asking for respect

I’ve spoken to my teachers and my school counsellor before, and I’ve vented to my friends about my mother specifically. She’s the one person in my life whom I just feel I cannot be nice to, because she doesn’t want to be nice in return. I talk to her calmly, and she decides to just throw temper tantrums and, this has yet to happen this year but had occurred more than once a few years back, she sometimes stomps her feet and pulls my cheeks while smiling at me in an angry fit.

I hate it. I hate the way she treats me. I don’t even say treated, because she still treats me with disrespect and expects to be worshipped like some sort of deity. Everything she says is the truth and she’s never wrong. Everybody, especially me, is a liar and intolerably(to her) imperfect. She’s blatantly racist, lies to me about the most ridiculous things, picks fights with me over small matters, and misconstrue my words so that it looks like I’M the one provoking her and attacking her. I’m underage, and even if I do find work I can’t move out so fast because I know life isn’t that easy. It makes me sick knowing I’ll be stuck with her emotional abuse for years to come, provided she doesn’t suddenly start being physically abusive again too.

She is the reason I fear math so much, that when I couldn’t do a math paper during one of my exams THIS YEAR, I cried silently during the paper because I felt so damn hopeless. Every now and then I remember how she once sat behind me, and when I couldn’t do a math question (this was during primary school), she kicked me on the back, slapped me, and pulled my hair and shouted repeatedly that I was stupid because the question was so simple. Many years later, I realise she can’t even do the homework I have now because she’s been out of school for decades. So why is the question so easy, yet she couldn’t do it at the time?

I’m not asking for my parents to see me as some kind of civilised adult, but I’m asking for respect. Mutual, earned respect. My father once asked me what the “Green things on a tree were”(moss) earlier this year, while my mum kept trying to “teach” me how to open a pot lid and scoop up porridge. The fact that my own parents see me as so stupid childish to the point where I sound as if I am so incapable of living that I can’t even tell what nature is, despite the fact that my teachers and friends(whom I see most often when I’m not at home) see me as “mature” in some respect, clearly shows something wrong. I joke that I’m stupid, partly because I have internalised it from years of verbal abuse, but am I really so stupid to the point where I don’t even know how to do simple tasks? Are they going to teach me how to eat and spoon-fed me next?

I’m sick and tired of being treated as I am at home, I see loving families and while I’m happy for them there’s a tinge of bitterness sometimes. I dislike mothers to some extent despite being a girl myself. I’ve contemplated suicide so many times, called a suicide hotline, I don’t bottle my feelings up and I make it known to trusted friends. But as long as I continue to stay in this hellhole, I’m never getting away from her grasp.

I can only hope I’ll hang on and not actually step onto the road and get myself struck by a car, or jump out the window like I always think about.