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

by Nadja Spiegelman

The things my mother did not see about herself, I did not see, either.

My mother disdained most dangers as American constructs, invented by timid women who washed their vegetables.

We knew, my brother and I, that it was only fear that led to danger. My mother cast around us her conviction that we would always be safe, and it held us like a force field. —

“I realized that I could reinvent motherhood,” she told me now. “I was so far from all this in America. I had no blueprint, no rules. And so I invented it. Every piece. I had no idea what I was doing. But I knew that it was going to be different.”

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.

My grandmother was beautiful long after she was beautiful. She carried and dressed herself in a way that left no question.

Even at a young age, I was aware that my aunts were trapped in their parents’ orbits, like moths with singed wings around a flame, though how I knew this I am not sure.

The past was always there on her body, but I couldn’t see it. It was in the scars that I traced with a fingertip as a child, in the strange things that set off her anger. It was even in my own body, a feeling of damage and danger that had no name and no explanation. It was underneath everything else: that deep foundation on which we were both built. But like her French accent, which forty years in America could not fade—and which her children, so used to her voice, could not hear—the past was too present for me to see.

There was room for only one of us to be a girl. There was room for only one of us to be a woman.

I did not want to accept the random disorder of a world without narrative. That is what magic was for me: meaning superimposed on chaos.

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

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

I knew in the way one knows the things that can never quite be said that it made her furious to see me sitting still.

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.

THROUGHOUT MY ADOLESCENCE, my mother’s reality threatened to overpower my own.

The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.

Some things were said so often that they became true.

I dreaded stepping on scales. It seemed to me that magic was involved here, too, that the right thoughts and shapeless prayers before a weighing might bring the needle back down. But it always rose, and that too felt controlled by magic, a punishment for some far broader badness than eating.

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.

The stories we use to create our sense of self—the stories we tell new lovers at five a.m. so that they can understand who we are—are also the ones over which we have most heavily embroidered. They have been altered by the moods and settings in which we have told them. They have been altered by what we needed them to mean each time.

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

She was a weight on the world. She was a black stain. She was poison. Her unhappiness choked the air from the room and pushed itself up against the closed windows.

“I’m saying that there is no objective reality, no true nonfiction,” she was saying now. Nonfiction was a construction, albeit a construction that followed different rules from fiction.

“Facts are transformed by being recounted,” she said. “They’re turned into stories.” “But still,” I said, “in a newspaper article there’s only one story to tell. One true story.” “No,” she said, “there’s always the question of what makes it in.

There’s no physiological difference between what you experience and what you imagine. That’s the reason we’re always telling stories, why in every culture there are myths. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we interpret them.

The separations between fact and fiction are ones we create, and the better we control our fictions, the better we can control our reality.”

But Paris was littered with ghosts of her past selves. She wanted a place so new it blinded her. A place that would pick her up and bleach her clean, a blank page on which a new story could begin. She wanted to go someplace no one she knew had been.

She twisted her knife into the most painful part of me.

“I wanted to freeze time so I could keep a baby version of you in my pocket.

She was suffocating in self-loathing.

Sometimes I envy very small children. You’ll see, when you have them. Until a certain age, they live purely in the moment. It’s magic. All these states of the soul, this despair, all of that doesn’t exist when you’re in the present.

“It means I didn’t invent her, that version of my mother,” my mother said. “It means she’s still there.

I felt very cozy beneath the black blanket of his outrage. I have always felt at my safest around anger directed at someone not present.

I thought, it was of the exaggerated archetypes people become in your memory, and how large and flat they then loom.

And I felt Parisian at last, still sad in the face of all that beauty.

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.

With my mother by my side, there were no obstacles. Everything sped up. Each day she spent in Paris was filled to the brim. Time was no longer quicksand, it was an ice pick with which to dismantle the world.

“I feel like a piece of paper when I’m in Paris.” As we turned around, she looped her arm through mine. “I have no weight here,”

The very difficult things, sometimes you create a hole in your memory, to protect yourself from them.

It had happened to me once, the unexpected resurgence of a difficult childhood memory. It had made me feel I was losing my hold on reality. It terrified me, already, that I was composed of a past that was so lonely, that was made up of memories and narratives no one else in my family could agree upon. It was too much that it might be unknowable to myself as well. I wondered often how many other memories lurked within me, dark and alien as cancers.

My mother had told me once that her life felt like literature to her. It was filled with resonances and symbolism. I had always felt similarly, and I wondered now if everyone did. The acts of omission and inclusion we made in our memories were creative acts, through which we authored our lives.