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

by Nadja Spiegelman

seemed burdened by the powers that I continued to ascribe to her.

“It’s not just a bubble in her stomach that’s going to pop and go away. We need to do something about her,”

me to eat plain nonfat yogurt with artificial sweetener for breakfast.

“You don’t ever have to see that asshole again,”

felt as if I had received an undeserved gift.

Their

voices wavered,

their faces were so taut they could barel...

They loved him now, with a simplicity they could not manage before.

There was little of my grandfather left to forgive, and perhaps, I thought, this was all I would ever find: the ripples in the water, the lingering smell.

my French too fluid to excuse it.

Whenever I managed to slow my mother down long enough to indulge in sleeping or eating, it alleviated my guilt at my own slow pace.

“Your father didn’t even defend you,” she repeated. “He never even had a discussion about it with you!”

She often took us on detours into the safer, better-traveled grounds of the past,

she told me parenthetically,

I could only imagine how angry with me she would one day be.

“It’s j’ose être.”

dare to be.

as her mother switched breasts. “You have to love a baby for that,” she said. “It’s not like she had nothing else to do.”

Little girls did not ask questions.

I avenge my mother and become war-hardened for later.

Somehow, in her memories, the song her daughter had sung to her had become the song she used to sing to her own mother. And through the haze of overlapping generations, the unrequited love was real.

The scene was a hollow vessel, far too small to contain their past.

In the end, she said, it was only those you’d hurt intentionally that counted.

didn’t judge her while she was alive and I’m certainly not going to judge what she does with her death.”

You have to know that a child chooses to come incarnate himself on Earth, and if it doesn’t work out, he’ll just go back up and re-create himself in the stomach of someone else.

I think we really feel very sorry for ourselves for so little.

all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.

She had very little patience for those who’d grown frail.

I knew how happiness slipped into the present only in bright, brief flashes. Most of the time, it belonged to the past or to the future: “I was happy” or “I will be happy” and not, or almost never, “I am happy.” Even trying to savor the moment tinged it with nostalgia.

She was hard and tight as a metal coil, and I was shapelessness and mush.

I was the narrator, giving shape to memories that weren’t my own.

Inside myself, I had retained the vivid emotions of my adolescence. But there was no external record of those dark difficult moments with my mother, the ones that I was now becoming less and less certain I remembered.

I don’t want an apology, but just, oh just an acknowledgment.”

“It was useful because we survived it,”

was embarrassed by how easy my life was, and how little I had done with it.

“It’s already so difficult to see oneself in a photo, or on film,”

“To be written about must be worse.”

It still felt as if my mother could talk me

If I allowed her to speak without contradiction, even once, I felt the enchantment would be cast and unbreakable.