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

by Nadja Spiegelman

the way everybody agreed, with knowing nods, that I certainly didn’t need a second slice of cake.

There were so few memories that we actually shared.

it made her furious to see me sitting still.

Sometimes I roamed the house before her return, trying to guess the thing that would set her off and correct it.

I felt it was not the sock or the shoes or the house but my body itself that refused to meet her expectations.

I envied her black-and-blue marks and her bandaged wrists. I envied her clear-cut proof that something had actually happened.

I knew that to cede even this much ground was to lose all sense of myself.

R on each page that detailed a fight with my mother, a reminder to myself that these events were “REAL.”

The absence of her anger terrified me as much as the anger itself had.

She was busy, she had deadlines,

I longed to. I didn’t even understand how she had become herself.

My mother met every worry with an unshakable certainty that I would be fine. Right then, I wanted only her sympathy.

“Mais Maman!” I’d replied, wrapping myself in the wings of her long coat. “Je ne parle pas français!” It took me years to realize that the private language I spoke with my mother was a language other people could understand.

I tried to remind myself we could each have our own versions. My mother’s was not more real than my own. But I never quite believed this was true.

But when she fought with her mother it was different. The pain was unbearable. It grew inside her, like an object with a physical shape. It expanded her chest and jabbed into her rib cage. Her hands trembled.

Four stories up might not be far enough to die. Her mother might not cry.

I had always been a heavy child, not fat but solid,

with rounded limbs and too much strength.

that the right thoughts and shapeless prayers before a weighing might bring the needle back down.

She was photographed for spreads in Vogue and interviewed for a book titled French Women Don’t Get Fat. I was asked to model for Teen People only to find out they wanted me to model the “curvy” body type in “Real Jeans for Real Bodies.”

My body didn’t look like my mother’s, and it was clear even then that it never would. But still I believed that she, not I, was what a woman was meant to be.

It seemed to me that either I would become like her, spare and androgynous, or never truly become a woman at all.

It is posed as a theoretical question, whether a mother would run into a burning building to save her child. It is not one that many people know the answer to.

According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours.

The present infiltrates the past.

Pure memories are like dinosaur bones, one neuroscientist wrote, discrete fragments from which we compose the image of the dinosaur. They are only flashes: the examining room table in the nurse’s office, the soft hand against the forehead. But memories we tell as stories come alive. Tendons join the bones, muscles and fat and skin fill them out. And when we look again, our memories are whole, breathing creatures that roam our past.

Somewhere along the way, the episode had passed from memory to story to myth.

“It had never occurred to me to actually not enter,” she said. “But I suppose to some people it would.”

Perhaps she had not omitted this story from her life because it was painful to recall. Perhaps it was painful to recall because it had been omitted.

I had a crush on him so big it flew out of me and above me like a helium balloon.

girl told me that she already knew she would never in her life be as happy again as the first time she tried cocaine. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the same with love.

Were all the things I had once thought taboo supposed to be swept away, one by one?

But my mother? She made me suffer. But being angry would have meant believing she could change.”

I believed my mother more than I believed myself.

She began to worry that her depression had a smell. Her unhappiness seemed to cling to her, to drip from her, staining the air where she had been.

Her traitorous body, all animal and no sense, chose life at all costs.

There’s no physiological difference between what you experience and what you imagine.

‘As if it’s not enough that we feed you, you have to piss us off as well.’

I envied how few minutes she lost of each day.

No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape a constant longing to be someone else, somewhere else. Doing anything was excruciating. Doing nothing was excruciating.

“Why?” I said miserably. “Why should you be sorry?” “Because,” she said, “I’m your mother. I’m supposed to protect you from all this.”

When I was younger, I didn’t know how to listen to the rain.

had had once, in an impossible past, a sprawling family tree of Spiegelmans so dense I could have disappeared in its shade.

“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 became defensive. “It’s not that I care whether Josée is good or evil in any objective sense,” I said. “It’s just about whether or not I can love her, or even whether

I have

“It’s not about forgiveness,” my mother said. “I just stopped needing her to love me. And I don’t need you to forgive me, either.”

That’s when I decided to have a second child. It was to break something between you and me.”

Yet I worried that I did not understand how she had forgiven her mother because I hadn’t fully forgiven my own.

More and more these days, she