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

by Nadja Spiegelman

I saw all the ways in which she worked to be a very different mother from her own. And I also saw how much the past, so long kept secret, pulled us into formations like a deep ocean current, from so far below that we barely knew we were not moving on our own.

She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

A woman’s body was a private thing. My body was a private thing. My body was a woman’s body. My mother was a woman. My mother was a private thing. There were dangers. There were secrets. There was something to guard.

But I recognized something familiar, though grotesquely exaggerated, in Laurie’s mother: the outbursts that made the house tremble and just as quickly disappeared. And I envied Laurie. I envied her black-and-blue marks and her bandaged wrists. I envied her clear-cut proof that something had actually happened.

I was unhappy there in the way presumptuous young people often are in their first jobs. I believed I could see all of the company’s dysfunction and the solutions to it. Yet, despite my extraordinarily clear memos, my superiors refused to let me overhaul the organization.

“I don’t want to change her,” I replied, shaking my head to clear it. I rose again to leave. “I just don’t want to eat lunch with her.”

I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.