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

by Nadja Spiegelman

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 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 mother wasn’t perfect. My mother was intense. Things didn’t happen because they were possible, they happened because she decided they would. She once fit a couch through a door frame that was several inches too small simply by pushing with all her strength and saying, “Couch, go in!” But, as anyone who has read a fairy tale knows, all spells come with a cost. The magic pulled on hidden sources. My brother referred to her exertion of will as “the fireball technique.” She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

It would take me years to realize that not everyone had nightmares about bombs and planes. In those nightmares, I was not afraid. I was in the cool lucid place beyond fear. In all of them, I had a small child with me. In one, I drove us through a road filled with land mines. In another, I hid us in a basement while men with guns shot anyone who moved. When the shooting stopped, I crept out and found us water. My dreams were not about death. They were about survival. They diminished in frequency, but they never stopped. One morning in my late twenties, I awoke with the realization that I was also the child. The building had fallen and split me in two. The world moved on too quickly for me, looking back before the moment had even passed. Part of me had stayed frozen, floating above the West Side Highway. The self that had kept walking, had found water, was a different me, profoundly altered.

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. 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. 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.

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

bracing. I had worried that I had too much love inside me, that I would drown people in it until they pushed me away.

place. I learned a new kind of awe for my mother. She knew how to edit images with the same ease that others could tweak sentences. She would alter small details and, as if by magic, the meaning of a picture would snap into focus. She shaped each project around each artist’s strengths, so that their visions shone through and her own efforts remained invisible. She worked constantly with her hands—printing, cutting, taping manuscripts in place. She gave of herself to her projects without any sense of self-preservation. She never settled for good enough. She drew on every last reserve of her energy until each book was best-it-could-be, and knew, too, when that was. Often the staff came into the office in the morning to discover that overnight she had made entirely new designs, new layouts, new covers. She would lay out our assignments for the day, then leave for her job at The New Yorker. When she returned, at seven or eight p.m., she would again sit for hours, tweaking and fixing our work, always easy with her praise, always in places it felt deserved. I began to understand why, when my brother and I were young, coming home to a dinner still unmade, a table still unset, my socks on the bathroom floor had made her explode into such fireworks of frustration and fury. I envied how few minutes she lost of each day. Even her train rides to and from her Times Square office were time she spent thinking about her work. I struggled to imitate her and yet could not stem the slipping ...

The small hole she had once made in the fabric of the city had been filled in without a trace. Paris had erased its memories of her.

But she wasn’t going to let one unpleasant experience change her. He didn’t deserve such power.

I had recently looked up the etymology of the word “past.” It was from the French pas, for step, from the Latin passus, for a stretch of the leg. In its earliest uses it meant journey. The past, then, was not a fixed place one could visit. It was not static. It was a voyage, constant motion.

“I think therefore I am. 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. When I was younger, I didn’t know how to listen to the rain. I didn’t know how to take hold of my breathing. I didn’t know how to stop the rushing thoughts in my head. I didn’t know all of these things.”

How did you forgive Josée?” “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.”

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.

My whole life, I’d lived in a city that reinvented itself as constantly as I did. New York was a blur of rising skyscrapers and changing storefronts. But Paris held time like a lake. It piled on like sediment, in geographical layers, invisible striations up the unchanging façades.

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

The acts of omission and inclusion we made in our memories were creative acts, through which we authored our lives.

“But I suppose that’s what old age is, in the end,” she said. “It’s a return to the simplicity of childhood.”

Her elegant reserve gave way to profound kindness when she let down her guard. I had the sense that once she’d decided to love someone, she never changed her mind.