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

by Nadja Spiegelman

While other people joked bitterly about becoming their mothers, I longed to. I didn’t even understand how she had become herself.

According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why.

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

I have always felt at my safest around anger directed at someone not present.

Very little brought me more pleasure than having somebody appreciate a gift or a gesture. Those were the moments I held on to, turning them over in my mind like sun-warmed stones.

I smiled, but I didn’t even need to smile. My veins were filled with light. An uncomplicated, inexplicable joy surged through me, taking me by surprise. I tried to keep it in my peripheral awareness. 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.