As soon as the mandate was released, I knew it would be me. I was the obvious choice after all. At 14 I was now the oldest. My mother had NEVER loved me. She didn’t beat me. But she dug her fingernails into my legs it left tiny specks of blood. She openly admitted that me just walking into a room made her angry. She constantly accus ed me of doing drugs for literally years before I had even tried pot until finally it reached a boiling pot. If I’m going to be getting in trouble for it anyway I might as well see what it’s all about. She kept me up every school night having screaming matches about anything and everything. My hair my clothes why I couldn’t be like my sister. How I was so bad that she had to be good. When she got her first few grey hairs she spent a full week screaming about how she was too young and it was my fault and mine alone for causing her so much stress. Now I’m not a saint. In fact as I got older I became the kind of kid your parents would rightly tell you to stay away from. But this was all many years later.