I’ll be honest, I’m scared. There are so many voices in my mind weighing in, weighing me down. There is so much doubt.

“Who do you think you are?” “No one cares about what you have to say?” “You’re making a fool of yourself.” “You know, when you put it out there, you can never take it back.” “All this work, all this time, all this emotional anguish, and for what?” “What if your memory is wrong, what if you say things happened but they really didn’t?” “You’re not even saying the things you really want to say, you’re still holding back, you’re still afraid.” “It’s not going to make things better, it’s not going to change anything.” “There’s a reason we can’t read each other’s minds, no one is supposed to go that deep inside another person.” “What if in the end, you’ve written down your life, and you find you have nothing left inside.”

And yet every day I rise and the only thing I can think to do is to rush to the computer and start writing, to start talking to you. Sure, we don’t really know each other, but does anyone ever truly know another person. But damn it I have a feeling you’ve had some seriously shitty days in your life and hopefully some lovely ones too…. me too. Yup. My life has had plenty of both. Thus all the stories.  

The truth is I don’t really have anyone to talk to you; I mean I do, I have my kids, my siblings, friends, folks at work, but something is missing, someone is missing. I have this insatiable hunger for conversation, to tell and to hear stories.

I am nothing if not my stories.

See……..

My grandmother and I used to sit in the kitchen and talk for hours. When my son was a toddler, I went back home to Poland for several months. It turned out to be the first long visit of many to come, annually. Every evening after I put him to sleep, we’d sit together at their tiny wooden table and talk.

My grandmother told me thousands of stories, I’m not exaggerating, stories about my mother, stories about her own life. She brought out maps and showed me where she was born, in a place that was no longer part of our country. In incredible detail she described her childhood, the estate, “Olginiany” where she roamed carefree. They had horses, fields of grain, large forests; they made cheese, “Ser Krolewski” [The King’s Cheese] which was sold across the region. In the late 30’s, during some war or occupation it was all burned to the ground. They fled west.

She spoke about the wars as though she was still living in them, often with great emotion and a far off look on her face. She went back there in her mind, transported by the memories. She especially got lost when speaking about the war of her youth, during which she and her family lost their home. She was a teenager then, maybe sixteen. Her cousin, my great-aunt, fourteen years old at the time was arrested by the Soviets. My aunt was put on a train to go work in a labour camp in Siberia. It would be four years before my aunt would return back to Poland, before she was liberated. By that point, most of her fingertips had frozen off, in part deforming her hands. My aunt rarely talked about what she suffered in the camp. I knew that her father, who was arrested with her, died in Siberia. They were shipped out together but only she returned. As far as I know, only once in her life she provided a detailed account of those four years. Poland launched a national inquiry into forceful removal of Poles to the East, Siberia and beyond. My aunt was called to give her witness statement. Her words are written into our history.

My grandmother was spared that fate. She was warned by their neighbours that her cousin had been arrested and to she and her family needed to run. But she was not spared the bombings, the hunger, or the loss of family members who disappeared to be never heard from again. She was changed by war, any child would be.

She was a student of Polish history, but she had also lived it. She would not allow those memories to disappear; her oral history would be passed down to me, so that it would not be forgotten. She often asked me “How long have you been Polish?” It was a test. The correct answer was ‘over one thousand years’.

She also showed me books about famous painters and writers.

“Your great-great uncle, Melchior Wankowicz, he was a famous writer, a journalist too. There’s an institute named after him in Warsaw. Remember you come from accomplished people, people who gave so much, you can do anything.” She believed in me unlike anyone else. (After she told me this, I found it, and on my way home departing from Warsaw, I visited it.)

But she especially loved reading literature. She read me volumes. Thankfully my son napped in the afternoons, sometimes for two or three hours, we had a lot of interrupted reading time. She’d lay down on her bed, propped up by pillows, put on her reading glasses, and read. I’d sit at the end of the bed by her feet, my hands busy with sewing, peeling vegetables, pulling the cooked meat of a chicken; one day chicken soup, the next day chicken salad. Nothing ever went to waste; no food was ever thrown away.

When she read Sienkiewicz, one of our most famous writers, she believed in the kind of hopeless love I dreamt of. It took us a couple months to get through ‘Quo Vadis’, his most epic tale, with pauses to talk about all matters of the heart. It was all fiction she’d say; not just the story, but the the feelings, the grand gestures, the happy ending. Although, as I recall it, the ending wasn’t happy. Everything was written as imagined but not as real life. Except the Latin that is, her Latin was accurate. She had studied Latin in school and would get me to repeat basic expressions. This book was full of Latin them and it was written using a poetic, rich Polish vocabulary I didn’t always understand. She paused each time I interrupted her with “what does that mean, I don’t understand that word,” and patiently explained the word’s meaning and how it was conjugated or used in a sentence.

Our conversations weren’t just history or literature lessons, she went into the sciences.

“Marie Curie is Polish, the French claim her, but she is Marie Sklodowska-Curie, she is one of us.” My grandmother was a fierce patriot and never hesitated to list all the ways ‘we’ had contributed to humanity. “Copernicus too, he was born in Torun.”

She was so proud of all that Polish writers, scientists, mathematicians had accomplished; moderately proud of Polish politicians. On occasion, she’d read me the newspaper and editorialized the articles, helping me understand the Poland of the day. She was politically astute, immersed in our culture; she was a living library. A library housed inside a clever, witty, funny woman, who enjoyed beer on occasion, would randomly drop the ‘f’ bomb, and despite her regal upbringing, was sometimes wonderfully inappropriate, especially in her remarks.

“Always wear clean underwear,” came her voice from the kitchen. I started laughing. “Why Grandma?” I swear she loved that question, ‘Why Grandma’; the stage was set for her to drop one of her awesome one-liners.

“In case you get in an accident and there’s a handsome paramedic.” She was shrieking with laughter. So was I, shaking my head. Of course, right, ‘one must always be ready for that handsome paramedic to come along.’

She overflowed with life. That’s the kind of vessel she was, both bottomless and abundantly full. She poured so much love, laughter, wisdom, undiminished childlike wonder into the world, everyone knew when they were in her presence that they were in the presence of greatness.

My grandmother….

Anyway.  

There was a story to everything in her tiny home too. Every book, every dish, every piece of fabric. We’d sew together, she showed me how to patch holes, attach buttons, replace zippers. She taught me how to make homemade macaroni, how to use the most basic ingredients to make a feast, feast enough to feed an entire household.

When they still had a tub, she’d get in it and I’d kneel beside her with a sponge and scrub her back.

“Mocniej, tak jak szorujesz podloge.” [Harder, like you’re scrubbing the floor.] Her back would be red, almost raw, but she loved it. I’d wash her silver hair, using an old margarine container to scoop water into it and rise out the shampoo.

Then we’d walk together, slowly, down a tree lined promenade to the market, the fruit and vegetable vendors. I pushed the stroller and she walked with her cane, we had no reason to rush.

She explained the physiology, structure, ecology and distribution of every plant. We always had empty bags to collect whatever was of use; the flowers of the black elderberry bush to make cough syrup, mushrooms we could thread over the kitchen stove, dry, and save for making soups.

She had been a teacher for over forty years; it was in her nature to turn every simple question into a full teaching moment. Although I had heard some of her lessons hundreds of times, I listened without objection, it was so clear the teaching brought her immense joy.

“Jak milo ze wnuczka przyjechala Pania odwiedzic,” the neighbours would comment. [How nice that Your granddaughter came to visit you.]

“Tak, Dorotka przyjezdza co roku,” she’d answer, smiling ear to ear. [Yes, Dorotka comes every year.]

Many of the people had lived in that district since it was built at the end of the 60’s and watched each other’s children grow up, grandchildren arrive, and now great grandchildren. My grandmother’s grandchildren all emigrated, this was well known. So my annual return from Canada was marked by excitement, but when I arrived with my son, that news spread even quicker. A great grandchild had returned from abroad.

My grandmother ignored the fact that I was an unwed mother. She didn’t raise the subject, although she did tell the whole family the opposite. It made family visits terribly awkward for me; but I didn’t dare correct her. She was the matriarch of our family, her presence garnered the utmost respect from all my aunties and uncles, I saw the way in which they welcomed her.

However, the pretending made it particularly difficult when I finally had to tell her the truth.

“Grandma, I need to tell you something.” My son was asleep on the blankets on the floor in the room where we were staying. It was tiny, you could almost reach the walls on both sides with your arms spread open. She was sitting in the kitchen, already in her nightgown.

She looked up from the table. Her tea was weak, she called it “lura”, meaning dirty water. She had reused the same tea leaves throughout the day, by the evening it barely had colour or taste.

Her evening meal, “kolacja”, consisted of bread slices with butter, topped with cheese, or tomatoe, or deli meat. Meat, assuming it wasn’t Wednesday or Friday. Wednesdays and Fridays my aunt (my godmother) and my grandmother didn’t eat meat, a religious fasting.

She rarely used a plate. Her bread was on a small wooden cutting board, and she’s cut it into squares. One bite at a time. One square got a piece of cheese, one a piece of ham, one a teaspoon of jam.

“It all goes to the same place,” she’s laugh as I objected to the mishmash of tastes she so enjoyed.

I sat down across the small table from her. The day’s laundry was hanging over us. I had put it on the lines hours earlier, but it needed the entire night to dry, especially in the cold, humid fall air. The warm air from the fire under the kettle rose up and helped it dry. We were all short, the women in the house, so it was easy to move around the hanging pants, skirts, pillow cases, towels, undergarments. The undergarments always dried in the kitchen, didn’t matter the season, because our balcony was close to the sidewalk and my grandmother was concerned the neighbours might see them. She never understood why underwear should be any colour other than white.

Anyway, I sat down and reached over to turn off the kettle.

“Grandma, unfortunately, I am not with [my son’s] father anymore.” I wasn’t looking at her.

“I figured as much.” A very casual reaction to what I had just said. “You’ve been here for months.”

I had been there for months, over two already, and I didn’t have a ticket bought to go back to Canada yet. I had nowhere else to go.

“What happened?” she asked after a moment.

“It just didn’t work out.” I didn’t want to tell her the truth. She had seen this coming from a mile away; she knew this is where things were headed years earlier. In my infinite wisdom I ignored her sage advice and now I was exactly where she had said I’d be.

“Hmmmmm,” her silence was just about the worst sound in the world. It communicated a disappointment and a disapproval that cut deep. In an instant I had let her down, I had let down my mother, I had let everyone down.

“I’m just not what he wants,” I said quietly.

“You know, to make a marriage work ‘you need to not see some things, not hear some things, not say some things’. He is kind, has a good demeanor, so he…… (she couldn’t say it), but maybe you can ignore it, maybe you could just turn away…”, now her voice drifted off.

“I can’t, I can’t do it. I can’t ignore it, not anymore. I tried Grandma, I tried, I forgave, then I forgave again, and then again. I can’t do it anymore.”

“So you’re…” she didn’t finish this sentence either. Yes, I was the one walking away. I, the mother, was breaking apart our family, if you could call it that. She couldn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry, I really am, I am so very sorry.” I had let her down, after everything she had done for me, after everything she had given, after everything she had endured, I couldn’t just….

“What am I teaching that child?” I pointed to the dark room down the hall. “If I stay, what am I teaching him? Do I not deserve to be happy, to be loved?” I knew this was the point where I would lose the conversation.

“To be loved, oh child, what are you expecting? This is life, you keep dreaming of things that don’t exist.” She wasn’t being mean, her voice was soft, she was trying to pull me back to reality.

“But Grandma, I don’t want to, I don’t want to believe this is all there will ever be.” I started to cry.

“You have a son, it doesn’t matter what you want or don’t want, you should have thought about that before.” I knew exactly what she was saying. In our family, in our entire country, this was the mentality. It was understood that every mother was expected to be ‘Matka Polska’, Mother Poland. No matter what the man did, you stayed. ‘If you had a roof over your head, food to eat, what more could you ask for?’ If he beat you, you could separate, but you could never divorce. This was what the church taught us. I wasn’t being beaten, not at all, his transgressions were in the ‘acceptable column.’

“I’m not married, we’re not married, I can leave.”

Pointing out this fact was a risky move. Much like throwing a canister of gasoline on a fire and hoping it doesn’t explode but only burns out slowly. It’s naïve, it’s stupid, it’s the arrogance of youth. And in this conversation, it was by far the stupidest assertion I could have made. This wasn’t my get out of jail free card, it wasn’t an out, it was further evidence that I wasn’t capable of making good life choices.

“I know,” her disappointment deepened. “How will you manage?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, but I will.” We both knew I had nothing. The house she borrowed me money to put a down payment on, it had burned to the ground with almost everything I had less than a year earlier. I didn’t have work, I had nowhere to go.

“Come back to Poland, I will help you.”

“I don’t know, what will I do here? I can hardly read this language, I can’t speak well enough. I have to go back, I have to rebuild there.”

We had entered Poland on our Canadian passports, my son and I; we could only stay 90 days on our visitor visas. There were a few weeks left, I had to go back either way.

“I’ll be okay, I promise. I’ll give you back the money for the house as soon as I can. I’ll find a way.”

“All this…. just to chase some love that doesn’t exist.” She was a pragmatist, she would have done the sensible thing, and she would have known how to put her heart to the side and stick it out.  

“I might never be happy, I know that, but I don’t want to live life being unhappy. Don’t you understand, I don’t want what ‘she’ had.” I invoked my mother’s memory to my defence.  

“Hmmmmm,” she sipped her tea. The absence of words made me terribly nervous.

“Alright, go, I am here.” This was the closest I would ever get to receive her blessing.

“Polnoc,” [midnight], she declared. It wasn’t, it was barely after 9 pm, but whenever she said ‘midnight’ it was the cue for everyone to go to bed. She stood up, with one hand gripping the edge of the table to steady herself. “Dobranoc Dorotko,” [Goodnight Dorotka].

I reached out and took her left hand. I wrapped both my hands around it, and brought it to my face, against my cheek. Then I kissed her hand. “Goodnight Grandma,” I whispered without looking up.

She went to bed, I stayed in the kitchen. The small lamp mounted underneath a shelf hanging on the wall against which the table stood lit a small portion of the room. Outside the window, it was black, except for the tiny lights in hundreds of rooms in the buildings next to ours. The kitchen was warm. I filled the kettle and set it to boil. I needed to pour the boiled over water into another jug to cool overnight so we’d have room temperature drinking water for the next day.

I washed our dishes, wiped the table, the counter, put away the food.

I heard the baby stir, it was time for a feeding. I set a tiny aluminum pot on another element and brought milk to boil. The cream of wheat cooked quickly. I cooled the bottle in a cold water bath and tested the temperature of the food on my wrist. Nursing wasn’t enough; cream of wheat cooked on milk would ‘stick to his ribs’ my Grandmother said, ‘he’d sleep better’.

Shortly after we arrived I started feeding him as she suggested and she was right. A bottle in the late evening and he’d sleep until early the next day.

I hung up the apron I had worn all day, turned off the lights, and stood there in that tiny, silent kitchen for a moment. The worst was behind me, my grandmother knew.

I don’t why I thought telling my grandmother the truth was the worst, as though going back to nothing was easier. But she was my life. As long as I had her love, as long as I knew I could run back to her, as long as I had that last home, the kind of home only a mother can create for her children (or grandchildren in my case), I could face anything.