I send my mother 1.5 million pesos monthly for my postpartum wife. Coming home early, I found my wife eating spoiled rice with fish heads. Furious, I confronted my mom, who sneered, “She doesn’t deserve better.” Then, I checked the family safe and found…

this family. She is nothing but an incubator. I am your mother!”

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the cicadas in the trees seemed to have stopped buzzing. The ugly, naked truth of her pathology hung in the sweltering air between us. It wasn’t about discipline. It wasn’t about cultural tradition.

It was about absolute, psychotic territorial continue reading …