I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir

by Nadja Spiegelman

My mother wasn’t perfect. My mother was intense. Things didn’t happen because they were possible, they happened because she decided they would.

But, as anyone who has read a fairy tale knows, all spells come with a cost. The magic pulled on hidden sources. My brother referred to her exertion of will as “the fireball technique.” She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

When I was three, she’d urged me to go join the children in a playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg. “Mais Maman!” I’d replied, wrapping myself in the wings of her long coat. “Je ne parle pas français!”

I shed childhood with a vicious shake.

My mood did not lift. And I felt Parisian at last, still sad in the face of all that beauty.

“It was useful because we survived it,” she said. “It’s all still there—she’s the sweet aging mother whom I can take on vacation and try to please. I’m the adult daughter who built her life an ocean away. And she’s also still that person who can destroy me. I’m also still that little girl with no resources. And now we know that we can go there and return, the fire isn’t going to burn us alive. We can touch those things, and we can survive.”