A/N: It surprises me that there aren't many diverse takes on Videl's mother on this site. From every story I've read, she is the example for every mother. But what if she was not? That's the concept I worked with. This was so extremely difficult to write and perhaps you can notice, because I have the feeling it's not a easy to read as the other chapters, like it's difficult to get through. Well, try anyway, you might like it. I made the most of it.

Disclaimer: Videl's mother is mine. The rest you can steal, but please be original and don't copy my Videl's mom.

Note: Don't you agree that Erasa is someone who would pierce her navel? And that Videl has more family than just her father?

Mother

You know how dead people are always remembered better than they actually were? Like they suddenly are the kindest people in the world. Or purely good. Or the best friend one could have. Or the most loving parent a child could wish for. One has to be really evil if he's not remembered better than he actually was. He'd have to be a child molester, a tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions, a betrayer, the killer of a popular figure. If the dead has done something unforgivable, he will never be forgiven at all. He will be remembered forever as an evil, cruel person, not worthy of living. Then everyone says he deserved his death.

It's strange… Saying that some people deserve to die. Like we are in a place to judge about that. I remember a widely criticized politician. He spoke out his opinions blatantly, insulting many and irritating even more. Many people wished him dead, because he was spreading hate and fear among different groups of people. He was loved by a small group of extremists, but hated by the majority. Until he was murdered because of his extreme views. All of a sudden, the politician was a hero. He was the person who said what everyone thought. He told the harsh truth. He was an advocate of freedom of speech. He was even voted second in the list of the ten greatest heroes of all time. People admired him for the same reason they once detested him. All of a sudden, he didn't deserve to die. What the hell? I mean, I wouldn't wish the guy dead, but doesn't that seem too much honour from the people who loathed him initially? What, in essence, has really changed, apart from his death? Had he not been killed, he would have been the same, widely criticized politician, loved by only a small group of extremists, hated by the majority.

It seems that death, especially a sudden death, has such an enormous impact that it shakes our perspectives and could lead to a 180 degree turn in our opinions. People we didn't like before are not so bad after all. Good friends become better friends. Hate is a strong word after all to describe the emotion one bears for another. It's like a tradition. Just like we believe we're not allowed to say bad things about the dead, because then you're heartless, then you have no feelings, then you have no respect.

Respecting the dead is one of the corner stones of our society. Sometimes it seems as though we're taking it to such a ridiculous level that we forget the things about the dead we didn't like and remember everything we did like and everything that was honourable and likeable. Isn't that a big character destruction? It makes me wonder how I will be remembered. Maybe they'd call me the bravest person they ever met. Or the best friend (!) imaginable. Or even purely good. And I'm serious, if they'd remember me like that I would twist and turn in my grave from disgrace. If there'd be anyone who says that or something like that at my funeral, I'd arise from the death and personally whop him from here to the moon and back. I want people to honour me for who I am, and not because they feel obligated to honour me. But that's just it I guess. These days it's respect for the dead because they're dead, and not because of the person they are. Huge character destruction.

I'm a hypocrite. I really shouldn't talk, I do the same with my mother. She was the best mother in the world. Also such a cliché, because, in fact, she was just another mother. My mother, yes, but not the best parent. I also remember times she wasn't as good as a mother as I remember her now. She was not exactly a loving woman. She was cold. Hard. Some might even have called her heartless while she lived. And I can't blame them. I'd rather not hear it, but sometimes she really appeared heartless. Like she just couldn't care about the feelings of others. And she wasn't particularly kind to me, not like any other mother would be. I remember her as a strong, honourable, good, but cold woman.

Perhaps that coldness is because of her past though. She's been through quite a lot and I suspect she never really learned to cope with everything that's happened to her. My grandmother died when my mother was ten and my grandpa focussed on his work to forget about the death of the woman he loved. He completely forgot my mother and my uncle. He really thought that it had no consequences for his children. If he had, I'm sure he would have gotten himself together and taken the responsibilities of a parent. Two parents, actually. The job of not only a father, but also a mother. He would have done it. I knew my grandfather well enough to say that. If only he'd known what to do back then…

My mother took care of herself ever since there was no one who could take care of her. Ten years old is young. And as my uncle left home to go to college, she was really on her own. She took responsibilities too high for her age. She cooked her own meals, she did her own groceries, she did her own laundry, she washed her own dishes, she cleaned the house, she called someone when the TV was broken, she did everything on her own, because my grandpa hardly ever was home. He left early in the morning and came home late at night, neither times at which my mother was up. There were intervals of sometimes weeks between the times that they actually saw each other, and when they did, it was only very briefly. It didn't help either that he travelled abroad a lot for conferences. He left my mother alone to fend for herself basically, leaving enough money behind for her to do everything she liked. Not that it helped. Money is not love and what's the worth of money anyway when you have everything in the world except the things that can't be required with money? The poor man couldn't help it. He had a broken heart and everything, even his children, seemed insignificant after grandma died. He was a very confused man, who, unfortunately, refused to accept help. If that isn't a family trait, then I'm not a snob.

When my mom became an adult and when she could see everything from a different perspective, she started to blame him for his absence. Blame him for all the years he missed. They never talked about it. My grandpa was too ashamed to talk about it and my mother was too proud to bring it up. As a consequence they never made up. Their relationship has been rigid and difficult for as long as I could remember.

Mama was often alone in the three years after grandma's death. Whenever she needed someone, she didn't have anyone. Yes, she had my uncle, but he lived on the other side of the continent. He'd sometimes come home for the weekend, but because the travelling was so time consuming, those trips were very limited. And loneliness is quite lonely. When my mother came home from school, she wasn't welcomed by anyone. No one asked how her day was, no one was waiting for her with snacks, she didn't even have a pet that could give her the love she craved so much. She was allergic to their hair. It's a pity, because she always wanted a dog. I remember walking with her in the city park and her looking envious when she saw dog owners walking their pet.

"At least dogs love you unconditionally. They don't make a difference between the poor or the rich, the sick or the healthy, or even the good and the bad." Is something she once said to me when I told her I was afraid of dogs (I'm not kidding you, I was deadly afraid of dogs when I was young. They were so wild and unpredictable and I took their enthusiasm as an attempt to attack me. Fortunately, after working with dogs on many missions as a cop, I've completely outgrown that fear).

As I mentioned before, my mother was ten years old when grandma died. Ten is still a fragile age, between childhood and puberty. And a very confusing age, in which your body changes gradually and you feel awkward and uncomfortable with yourself all the time. Mama looked at herself in the mirror often when her body underwent that drastic metamorphose. She tried to find something about her body that remained constant and that never changed, no matter how much the rest of her body changed. She found two things that never altered. Her navel and the birthmarks on her skin. Personally, I think navels grow bigger, but maybe my mom never thought of that, or maybe she just didn't notice it. She always cherished those two things about her body, as it was the only bridge between the cold, lonely adult and the happy child she was before grandma died. Years later she forbade me to ever take a navel piercing. Under any circumstance I had to keep it intact. And if I did pierce my navel, she promised me that she would rip it out personally. Not that I would ever take such a hideous thing in my navel, but every time I see Erasa's navel piercing, I have to think of my mother and her promise and I enjoy a private joke no one understands.

Eventually there comes a time when a girl suddenly gets cramps in her stomach and she whines that it hurts so much and that she is ill. And then she goes to the bathroom and finds a pool of blood in her white panties and the tears well up in her eyes because she is certain she is going to die. The first period changes something in a girl. She realizes something she has always been kind of fearful of… She is now fertile. She can get children now. She is now… a woman. It is so strange to be conscious of that. Most of the times a girl shares the moment with her mother. It's natural to share it with your mother. My mother, and me too actually, couldn't share the moment with our mothers. And her first period changed more for her than it does for any other girl.

When she had her first period when she was thirteen, she freaked out completely, because no one had ever explained to her that at a certain age girls start to menstruate. She ran to the neighbour's house in tears and explained that there was blood coming from her body. She really believed she was going to die. The kind neighbour calmed my mother, who was in hysterics, and explained everything to her and that she was not going to die. Later Mamma told me that it was the single most embarrassing moment in her entire life. And it would also be the most life-altering moment as the neighbour called the Child Protective Service when my mother told her - she didn't know any better - that her father was almost never home and that she was left alone to take care of herself for long periods of time. He'd done that for as long as she could remember, even before her mother's death. She didn't realize then that it wasn't normal that her father was away all the time. She didn't understand that it was not only the task of a mother to take care of her children, but also the task of a father. Who could really blame her?

The next part of her life was… vague. She never talked much about it. What I do know is that social workers took her from her home and put her in a foster family, as my grandfather was too emotionally damaged; not only because of his wife's death but also because he finally realized what he'd done and what the consequences of his actions were. The moment he was able to take care of her again, my mother was allowed to go home again. It took three years before my uncle finished college, got an apartment and took my mother in his house. She never again lived in the home she was born, because my grandfather was found 'unsuitable' to take care of his child. Why he was found 'unsuitable' is still a mystery to me. And as he died two years ago, I doubt anyone will ever know.

Mamma never spoke of her time with the foster family. Whenever it was brought up a blank expression appeared on her face and everyone immediately knew that this was a subject too sore to talk about. Everyone understood and if they could help it they never talked about it in front of her. Therapists have tried, but they never succeeded in pulling the story out of her mouth. Whatever happened, it must have been traumatic. I pretty much have an idea, although I will never know for sure. Fact is that those three years changed her just as much as the three years after grandma's death. I've been told by old friends of her that she was a cynical woman, unpleasant to be with at times, silent and sometimes seemingly devoid of emotions. Like she was on automatic pilot for the rest of her life. She became hard.

When she met my father, she fell in love with him. It was a strange relationship. My father was considered a capital fellow, always a nice company, while my mother was silent and cold, not a generally nice person. No one understood how those two really got together and why. My father later told me that he loved her because she was so much better than him. So much wiser. So much stronger. She had her principles and her honour and he admired that in her, not to mention that she stunned him by her beauty. Why my mother loved my father… well, that's something I'm trying to figure out myself. Two complete opposites, and yet it seemed to work for them. Perhaps it's because my father gave her so much love, something she'd never gotten much of. Maybe she loved the love she received, and therefore stayed with him not for him, but for the love. I could imagine that.

Then I was born. It was the first time my father saw my mother crying. There were not tears of pain, but tears of joy. She was so incredibly happy with me. She saw it as a chance to do it better than her father. She could finally make up with her past and raise a child who never had to suffer. She promised herself that she would raise me with the best of her abilities and with unwavering devotion. But her views on raising a child quite differed from the common views.

You know what the common views are. Protect your children, support them unconditionally, teach them, love them and teach them to love. My mother thought that was nonsense. The popular views on raising a child was, in her opinion, only producing a generation of soft, weak children who didn't have the thick skin society demanded of everyone. The children from this generation would be lazy, frail, dependant people, who threw themselves in one mistake after the other and sobbed about it afterwards. They would be generally incompetent adults, unhappy and unsatisfied because they couldn't handle the fall after the peak. That's why my mother taught me to stand on my own legs from day one. Her concern, her only concern, was making me stronger than she was, mentally and physically, so I could never be hurt by anyone. She was preparing me for the real world, a place without the security of a loving home and the love of a parent.

She was hard on me. Everything I did well could always be better. She never gave compliments. She rather gave critique. She made me do things over and over again until she was satisfied with the way I practiced them. But she never yelled to get her way. She had more authority in her left pinkie than other people in their whole body. I listened to her right away whenever she instructed me to do something. Not because I was afraid that she'd be mad at me. Mamma never got mad and if she was mad, her anger was never directed to me. She was so cool, so calm. But she could give me the look… The look of disappointment. I can still picture that look on her face, her brows knitted together in a slight frown, her lips pressed into thin lines, her eyes looking at anything but me and the sigh. Maybe the sigh was the worst thing about it. I dreaded that look more than anything and I would have done everything not to see it on my mother's face.

My mother didn't allow me much. Drawing? Dolls? Playing with the neighbour's children? TV? Useless. She wanted me to practice my martial arts, which she, and not my father, as everyone believes, taught me. And if I didn't practice my martial arts, I'd better do something else that kept my body fit. Swimming, running, football… Everything that required a certain amount of physical effort was okay. And schoolwork, because she didn't want me to have bad grades. That was about the only thing she and other parents had in common. So as a child, I didn't have any toys. When I was a baby I had of course, but when I was three years old my mother took away my toys and replaced them with sport attributes, books and other things that were 'positive' for me. But my mother's efforts to prepare me for society weren't appreciated by many people. The neighbours, for example, almost wanted to call Child Protective Service because the experienced sensei my mother hired to train me was practically kicking the shit out of me at age seven. While my mother was looking. That was also too much for my father, who had allowed the way my mother raised me so far but could not turn a blind eye to this anymore. It was insane, it wasn't good for me, she was turning me into half a man, I wouldn't be able to relate well to other people, I was getting too mature for my age, I'd become just like her.

"Whatever it takes, Hercule. Beat her up for ninety percent, and the other ten percent will make her stronger." Was all she said in defence, I later found out. My father made a scene but gave in eventually. Even he couldn't defy her authority.

And I got stronger. Not only physically, but also mentally. That same year, when I was seven, I got teased a lot by girls because I looked like a boy. It was before my father became famous and the girls occasionally stole my lunch, snickered whenever I said something in class, pulled my hair, drew on my shirt and made fun of me in front of other people. At first, it made me sad. I felt lonely. There was only on girl who liked me, Erasa, but the rest of the girls made me feel so miserable. I went to school with a big knob in my stomach, I couldn't sleep at night, I was that nervous to face them. After a few weeks I finally told my mother. And as I sat at the kitchen table with tears in my eyes, telling a story that would have broken the heart of any mother, she looked at me with a hard expression.

"So what? They can't hurt you anyway."

Now don't feel sorry for me. What my mom said might sound harsh, but in fact it was her way of saying she had faith in me. 'They can't hurt you anyway…' She expressed the firm belief that those girls, who were teasing me to no end, couldn't do anything, couldn't say anything, that could make me feel sad and miserable about myself. She believed I was stronger than to believe that. And if she believed it, it must be true, because she was always right. That line, that seemingly harsh line, was the best thing she could have said to me in that situation. Had she showed empathy and called the school to demand on high legs to do something about this situation, she would have deprived me of the opportunity to do something about this bullying myself. Had she called the school, the teacher would have tried to put an end to the situation, meaning he would punish the girls teasing me. The girls, who of course wouldn't see their mistake, would only get angry at me, and therefore the teasing would become a lot worse. All because my mother called school. And now, because she believed they couldn't hurt me, my mother gave me enough strength to take matters in my own hands. The next day I came to school and the first bully I came across received my first scowl, which would later become infamous. A week later, the girls were so impressed by me that they never again bullied me. Because of my mother, I learned to defend myself. I learned that people like that couldn't hurt me, that their attempts to make me feel miserable were in vain. It was a very wise lesson and it gave me the confidence I have today.

My mother learned me so many things that are valuable to me today. Whenever I was thrilled about something, she told me to handle it with more composure and not to please myself too much with empty matters such as a good grade, a goal, or good weather. She taught me to focus on the things that have to be done, instead of the things that are already done. A good grade is good, but the next has to be good also. A goal is wonderful, but can you score the next? Nice weather is lovely, but don't be upset when the rains comes down. This sounds like I wasn't allowed to enjoy the small things in life, but in fact it meant that, while I shouldn't be overjoyed about the small things, I shouldn't be disappointed about them either. She wanted me to be in a constant state of satisfaction, with no extreme peaks or falls. That way, no one and nothing, not even coincidence, I would never be disappointed. No one could ever hurt me.

If only she could see me now. It's like I'm living in a constant state of misery.

Her death was something none of us could foresee. We knew that she had a dangerous job, but the idea that she would die the way she did never crossed anyone's mind, not even hers. That she died so suddenly, so unexpectedly… so cruelly. To be shot on duty by the hostage taker of whom you thought you'd just gained his trust. And then to die with open eyes, the shock and the horror still on your face, carrying that expression for eternity…

Some people die of cancer or of old age, and their deaths is a process. Every day they die little by little until they go to sleep and never wake up. I heard that these deaths are excruciatingly beautiful. They rest in peace. Real peace, like they're in an eternal slumber. Their death itself is beautiful, the loss of a loved one is what makes it painful and bitter afterwards. But my ma wasn't granted that kind of death. She didn't die in peace. She died in chaos. Her death was caused by an act of violence. She lives on in a nightmare. Her last moments weren't shared with the people she loved, but she was alone. She was dying alone. It makes me mad. It makes me want to cry, because it's so unfair. A woman who deserved an honourable death was brutally slaughtered by a criminal she offered one last chance to better his life. She didn't deserve to die. She was the last person who deserved to die.

I'm a hypocrite. Like I already said, we're not in a place to judge who should die and who should not. We let a higher power take that judgement. For some, it's fate. For others it's coincidence. For yet others it's Kami. I don't care who or what it is. I hate him for taking my mother away from me. People say that some things are meant to happen and that you can only accept it, for you have no input or whatsoever, no say in whatever judgement a higher power takes. 'Their ways are mysterious.' But why? Why did she have to die? Never has fate or coincidence or Kami come to me and provided me with the answer I long to know the most, perhaps more than anything in the world. By what insane motivation have they decided that she should die, and not the man who killed her? Am I living in a world that is turned upside down?

And all of a sudden, the people who called my mother heartless call her the greatest woman the world could lose. Distant friends from all continents call themselves her best friend. Colleagues who envied her say that they wished her all the luck in the world, but that she wasn't allowed to receive it. And I… I say my mother is the best mother in the world. Not because she actually was, but because she was my mother. My mother, who worked at night just so she could be there for me during the day, when I most needed her. My mother, encouraging me with her presence when I was getting my swimming certificate. My mother, who brought me to school while all the other mothers were talking about her.

My strength. My hope. My life.

My mother… because she was the best for me.

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