「故事·听力」My Mom Is Looking For New Parents For Me
My Mom Is Looking For New Parents For Me Because She Will Die Soon
Hi! My name is Phoebe, I am fifteen. I don’t want you to be deceived by my optimistic voice. My story will be the most sad, frightening, and strangest one ever. Well, it's about how my mother decided to orchestrate an unusual casting call – in a search for new parents for me. Because she's going to die soon.
Everything happened very fast. Just… just like that: on one not very pleasant day, my mother felt bad.
Before that day my Mom felt weak and dizzy pretty often, so I had gotten used to it and did not perceive it as something out of the ordinary. Moreover, my mother’s attitude toward doctors and their clinics and their medical checks was pretty negative. In other words – feeling bad, for her, was not a reason to go and see the doctor. She preferred to always solve these problems in the same way – she would simply say that she was tired, and take a nap on the sofa.
However, after a while my mother could not continue ignoring her health problems – because she had started to faint. And not just at home, but also at where she worked.
My mother works in a huge hypermarket, with large sales floors and real labyrinths between shelves with goods. And when some shoppers panicked because they had almost run over my mother with their shopping cart… (Mom was lying unconscious near the pet food shelves…) her supervisor reprimanded her and insisted that she go through a full medical screening.
My mother tried to avoid it. Not only because she did not want to, but also because she had not renewed her medical insurance. But the supervisor said that if she didn't figure this out, she would get fired. So, she went to a medical clinic and got a checkup.
The results of the tests were not just bad. When we learned the truth, our life fell apart like a house of cards.
Oh, it's hard for me to talk about... Inside my mother’s head, doctors found a tumor. And this tumor had been growing for a long time already. It began long before my mother began fainting regularly… And even after it started, my mother did not see the doctor for a long, long time, and did nothing about it!
And now it was too late to operate and… too late to do anything, to put it simply. My mother neglected her state of health for so long, saving money by not paying for her medical insurance, that now it was not possible to cure her… You see? Totally impossible. There was no sense in even trying!
The only thing that we could try to do was to prolong my Mom’s life. But this therapy was very painful and would cost a fortune without insurance. So my mother decided that she would rather live a little bit less time, but will not become a senseless vegetable, lying in a hospital bed.
O, My God! Just listen to how that sounds! And imagine that I have to live with it.
After my mother learned about her terrible illness, she was totally ruined… but only for a few days. And after that, my mother became surprisingly calm and even… cheerful. She even began to dress up a little bit more elegantly than she used to, willingly and happily went to work at her hypermarket, as she decided to keep her job until… until the very end, and it seemed that overall, she was in pretty good spirits.
I could not understand this. Especially given that I knew about yet another problem that was on my mother’s mind.We did not have any
relatives. I never knew my father, and both my grandparents died when I was a little kid. So it looked like after her death, I was going to be under the guardianship of social workers.
But my mother trusted the social workers even less than the doctors. And so she decided that she would have to build my future while she still could. And she did it in quite an unusual manner.
When my mother suddenly invited her colleague Trevor, with whom she worked together at the hypermarket, for dinner on Friday night, I had not suspected anything yet. Even though it was pretty strange. You see, we've lived quite a closed life together, I never brought home my school friends, and Mom also did not invite anybody to our home, and all of a sudden, we are waiting for a man I had hardly ever heard of.
Anyway, the evening went pleasantly. My mother made some very tasty food, though usually she rarely bothered about what we ate. Trevor, even though his clothes were pretty untidy, looked like a nice person. Too bad he lacked a sense of humor — he did not tell a single joke during the whole evening, even though my mother tried very hard to create an easy-going atmosphere, and it was more than obvious that she did not want us to just be thinking about her illness.
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