A week ago my mother announced she'd be staying at a friend's house, for three weeks. Why? The friend's on holiday and would like her house looked after. What's the real reason, mother? "I need some space."

Oh, but my brother, my sister and myself are welcome to come and visit her at any given time. Conclusion: she wants to be away from my father.

She told my father three days before she left. She treated him like dirt, filth, shit, she treated him like one would not even treat the lowest form of apparent energy sunken deeply into darkness, because (in my opinion) such lowness does not exist: all is equal. My poor daddy was devastated. I've never seen him so upset.

I sat on the edge of his bed and listened to his mourning, talked to him and fed him as much clarity as I could. Sentences similar to I don't know if I should start looking for a new wife or not pierced the air and paired up with things previously said to the wife herself that were accidentally overheard by me. Now I'm haunted by the sounds provoked by words in such an order that they are formed into a meaningful composition: did I lose my wife, as well as my car last Thursday?

That notorious Thursday my mother had planned to come home from work and support my father all evening, as he'd just come home from hospital, having had an operation. But that same Thursday night my father had a very important business dinner, which, if he would attend to it, might result in him having more work. So he urgently wanted to go. Another feature of this disreputable Thursday is that the tax man decided to give us a visit. He ordered the keys to our Jaguar. So my father's dream car was taken away.

My mother did not want to lend her car to my father for him to be able to go to the business dinner in Amsterdam, under any circumstances whatsoever. She was strongly against him going anyway, she did not believe that going to the dinner would give him another job to work on, she did not want to leave work half an hour earlier in order to make things more easily organisable. She wanted that Thursday night the way she had planned everything in her head: she wanted my father to be lying in bed, immobile and handicapped, and she wanted to be his heroin, doing everything for him that he couldn't.

But things weren't that way. So nothing else was allowed to happen either. Or that is what it seemed like she thought. She did not help in any way. She even tried to moan at me about how inconsiderate my father was, after I spent three hours and a quarter figuring out the best form of open transport for my recently operated on and still fragile, sore and wounded daddy, organising taxis to stations, pre-ordering tickets beforehand to keep the costs as low as possible and instructing my father in how open transport works, what he should do and where he should go.

As soon as my father had left I burst into a million tears. All the stress, the upset, the strength and calmness I had to give and radiate to support my father through a practically wife-less evening, all the time I had 'wasted', neglecting important school work... I was not happy.

In the talk my parents had in which my mother announced her leave she had also told my father that something had snapped that Thursday.

After my sit on the edge of my father's bed, he rolled off the bottom like an invalid and decided to have one last try, one last talk with my mother, who had withdrawn to her private room at the top of the house, in all independent isolation. When he came down his face had cleared, somewhat.

"There is hope," he said, and gave an approving, single nod.

It made me cry. How can there be hope, if something actually snapped? How can he trust such words, after so many arguments, after fifteen years of nagging, after fifteen years of my mother trying to transform my father into something he's not, after fifteen years of my father doing his best to turn into the husband my mother wants him to be, after three years of the worst manipulation, getting worse and worse the better my dad gets at being who my mother wants him to be...?

It hurt me so much to see my mother treat my father like she did, it hurt me to the most extreme form of pain to see my father be so devastated, so heartbroken, so panicked, so distressed. And it hurt me also to have to be pissed off at my mother for what she did (to my father), to have to ignore her worried and genuine concern when she asked me what the matter was when my tears would not cease to stream down my sunken cheeks, merely because I could not answer her, because I felt it was, somewhere, not reasonable to be angry at her for how she treated her husband, seeing it was not me she was nasty to. I felt I was choosing sides and if I would admit it to her, I'd hurt her even more than I already have during my lifetime ever since I was nine, ever since I've detached myself from her...

And it hurts me even more to have to see my father fall for the phrase "there is hope" and to see him look out to the moment that his wife will return home and they will live happily ever after. It hurts me to have to know that it cannot be as simple as that, it hurts me to be able to hang on to the logic of something being missing in between "something snapped" and "there is hope". I hope, I so severely hope, that it won't be a shock for my dad when my mother does come back.

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I feel so