Chapter 0 – Mother and I

My father is trash
I realized that when I was 10 years old, at his mother’s funeral.

“Greetings. Changjae is your stepmother.”

Until her mother died, her father, a human who did not even show her face.
My father brought a new mother to my mother’s funeral home.
Coming into the line of 40, she was a woman only half her father’s age.

“May the souls of the deceased refrain.”

My stepmother greeted me with an awkward face in a baggy mourning dress.

I saw that face and realized.
That this is the woman who stole her father from me and her mother.

A person who looked much younger and prettier than her deceased mother even in the eyes of a young child who knew nothing. My father must have abandoned me and her mother because he was obsessed with this woman.

They even desecrated their mother’s funeral.
I should have yelled at him to get out of here immediately.

… But I couldn’t.
I didn’t want to mess with my mother’s last road. She wasn’t a good mother, but she was, and she was my only mother.

I just bowed my head, pretended to be an adult, and did my best as a resident.

After the sad funeral.
The father said

“Changjae, stay at your stepmother’s house for the time being. I’ll come pick you up when things settle down.”

My father left me with my stepmother and left for another woman.

My father wasn’t just trash. He was an incorrigible bastard.
I only realized that after being entrusted to my stepmother.

The stepmother was also like her dead mother.
She was a poor woman who was equally used and abandoned by her father.

However, the difference between her real mother and her stepmother was that she did not just lament.

“Think of it as my home and be at ease. This is my father’s house, so it’s the same as Changjae’s house.”

Does this woman have no speed?
How can you smile like this?
Mother died resenting her father so much until her last moment.

My stepmother tried to treat me like her own son.
He always smiled and talked to me first, always cared about what I needed, and prepared food every day that I thought I would like.

She was the kind of person who hadn’t once said a word of hate in 10 years of raising her husband’s children.

But I couldn’t accept that kind of mother.

I only called her mother by title, but I never truly treated her stepmother like my mother.

It may be because she was brainwashed by her real mother for a long time.
What a heartless person her father was, and what a bad woman the woman who stole her father was, her biological mother had been constantly instilling in me.

Naturally, the skin of prejudice had to be washed in my eyes as I looked at my stepmother.
Being nice to me seemed hypocritical, and I felt like I had a different purpose no matter what I did.

“Father will be back soon. At that time, Changjae will also become a wonderful adult and surprise her father.”

I never really waited for my father.
I just wanted her stepmother to get fed up with me and leave. So she wanted her stepmother to prove that she was a really bad girl like I thought she was.

10 years like that.
As expected, my father never returned.
As if it were natural, my stepmother did not abandon me.

10 years. 10 years.
10 years of blossoming in her twenties, the stepmother spent raising other people’s children.

A change came to my mind too.

I know that you can’t take care of someone else’s child for 10 years with hypocrisy. Her stepmother gained nothing else by raising me.
Only then did I realize How childish and stubborn I was as a human being.

I was ashamed.
How can I repay my mother?
What should I do to give back 10 years of my mother who was taken away from me?

Thinking
Contemplating,
After thinking about it again.

I decided.

If my mother still hasn’t forgotten her father, if that’s why she’s been raising me all this time.
I promise to make my mother happy, not my father.
I decided to take the place of my father.

But… The idea wasn’t very good.
Their hasty actions only left scars on me, my mother, and each other.

After that, when I finished high school and became an adult, I ran away from home and enlisted in the military.
Even after joining the military, I never once contacted my mother first.

──I did.

“It’s Changjae. Don’t worry. Leave it to mom Understand?”
“Mother…”

How did this happen?

“Close your eyes and think of the girl you like. Her mother will take care of the rest.”

My mother unfastened the belt of my trousers with her trembling hand.

──At the crossroads of life and death, I had my pants removed by my mother.