She initially had zero intention of informing him he was a father, successfully keeping it from him throughout her pregnancy, throughout Christine’s birth and only finally revealing the news to him when Christine was old enough to question his absence. She could have made up a story, but in a mystifying show of complete contradiction to her persona, she told Christine the truth and even went as far as to introduce the two of them.
Who knows what her mother was thinking, or what she had to gain from it. She wasn’t capable of guilt, guilt was an emotion synonymous with the empathetic and her mother was as apathetic as she could get.
Understandably, her father kicked up a fuss at the time, as any parent would or should, had information like this been kept from them, only to discover they had a child much further down the line, but his words and anger didn’t count for much, having become so unreliable later in her life. Perhaps that was her mother’s goal, to show Christine his true nature and nip her dreams of having a father in the bud.
At least she couldn’t accuse her mother of not being consistent, consistently in a foul mood, turning her nose up at anything and everything she didn't consider up to the standard of quality she had come to expect, consistently rude to others and consistently heartless.
She was a self-proclaimed snob and proud. She had not a shred of interest in adventure or anything that broke her routine, reluctant to try anything new. She had zero interest in other inferior countries and not the taste buds for food she wasn't accustomed with.
Her mother was consistently a woman of habit and age had not dulled her perception towards life, on the contrary, she was as much a stubborn bloody mule as ever, only now equipped with a lifetime worth of reasons to be so and an unwarranted bitterness towards the youth that she believed were more useless, unambitious, lazy, unreliable and technology obsessed than they ever were in her day.
She never expressly made her opinion clear about Rachel's frolicking, but Christine wouldn't put it past her to disapprove, heck, she wouldn't put it past her mother to think that she was responsible for her daughter’s choices with lax upbringing.
Consistency was most definitely her forte.
She stood up and stretched, her knees aching from all the kneeling and crouching.
“Mother, how about we go for a walk? I've just about hit the peak of my patience waiting for that man. If I find him, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. Now, would you like to witness that?” Christine asked, having to raise her voice for her mother to hear, to which her mother just shrugged and grunted. This wasn't unusual behaviour for her, if anything, the grunt was typically about more than Christine could ask for, but now, in light of her best efforts to use this trip to patch broken relationships, she wasn't going to encourage typical behaviour.
“That's not really a yes, mother. If you don't give me a reasonable answer I'll simply leave you here to pout by yourself”.
“Considering the circumstances, that would be ideal. As you may have noticed already from my aloof attitude, I'm not all that interested in your half baked itinerary. I'm not happy that you forced me on to this abhorrent excuse for modern engineering. It wasn't my decision to leave my home”.
“Come on, mum, don't be like that, I certainly didn't drag you onto it”.
“No, what you did was worse”.
Christine sighed.
“Stop being so melodramatic, I'd hardly call giving your maid paid leave and taking you away from your rigid schedule for a while worse. Your maid looked as though she had just escaped the slave trade, I'm sure she was over the moon to get a much deserved break for once”.
“That woman doesn't work nearly enough to deserve a break and I pay her more than enough, I didn't need you giving her more than she deserves and in doing so making me look like the villain”.
“You can be irrational at the best of times, God forbid she sees you at the worst”.
“She was lucky to have the job she had, she should have seen that as a blessing given the conditions of her backward third world country”.
“It isn't third world, mother”.
“Pft, then why are they all here seeking a better life, benefiting from hard working people like myself and conceiving spoilt, lazy, self-entitled, selfish sprogs like the one you have, to leech off of the success we founded out of blood, sweat and tears for them”.
“Watch your mouth, mother, that's my daughter you are talking about”.
“Don't I know, as they say, like mother, like daughter, it's just a darned shame that didn't apply to you and I”.
“On the contrary, I'm precisely the person I am today because of you, so if I seem controlling, sometimes judgemental, God forgive me, it's because of the person you shaped me into”.
“I'm not responsible for you becoming… this, that's the result of your own foolish life decisions. I wanted more for you and you were content with being an average nobody, don't you dare try to draw comparisons between us, frankly it's insulting”.
“Now you are just getting personal. Who is acting like a spoilt child now? How the heck did we even get all the way here, I asked you a simple yes or no question and you are detracting from the point to vent all your personal vendettas, do you want to go for a walk or not?”
“I have to get personal, it's the only means of which to penetrate your thick walls, not something your husband seemed to have an issue with when he got you knocked up, look at him now…”
“Mum! Stop it! I'm not
