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

by Nadja Spiegelman

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

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

“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, and there was a long silence. “Angry? I don’t know what it would mean to be angry with my mother. That wasn’t possible for me then. I still can’t imagine what it would be, to feel anger toward her. I was angry with my father, for talking to me about her that way. That was easy. 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.

that’s because in the beginning she wasn’t desired by men. In fact, she wasn’t desired at all. “But that was before you were born,” I said. “Afterward, when she held you in her arms, Mina must have felt differently.” I had a firm belief that biological love manifested itself in women the instant they’d given birth. Josée told me that it seemed to her she could remember the warm, sweet smell of her mother’s milk, the gentle bobbing 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.”

This is so lovely a description