My mother gave me a blueprint for life, well more like conceptual drawings, with limited instructions.  I love her to the moon and back, but like any parent, just like I am now, she wasn’t perfect. It’s taken me a long time to understand this about her; the duality of being absolutely wonderful and yet falling short on occasion.

I too, at times, have fallen short as a mother. It is not for a lack of trying, but because in life I’ve learned, things are not so simple. Parenting is incredible, but it is also incredibly hard. Life is nuance, the fine print, the details; all of that changes how we live when we gain the perspective over time to see the consequences of our choices.

The point is…

My mother got sick and started disappearing from my life before we had a chance to talk; to really talk. She believed for far too long that I was too young for ‘real life’ conversations. She was wrong. And because we never talked, I didn’t talk either, to her or anyone really. When bad things happened, I didn’t say anything. Plus, I could see she had enough to deal with; being so sick and pouring herself into my younger brothers, trying to organize the future she wasn’t going to be a part of.

Life started kicking my ass very early. But we weren’t a family that talked about the hardest things; we lived through them in silence. So the blueprint, it was what I observed, without any backend discussion about when and how it is necessary to abandon the plan and try something else. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe in our culture there wasn’t the option to walk away from what was expected of us. I don’t know what she believed, I only know a bit of how she lived.

I adored my mother; thankfully, I hadn’t yet started rebelling as all teenagers do, so our relationship ended while it was still strong. We never had big disagreements, explosive fights, I never asserted what I wanted or who I was, I was still doing and living to make her proud. That’s where I got stuck in some ways… living to make her proud based on my immature understanding of the world, and my incomplete understanding of myself.

My mother was exceptional; she blessed me with courage and kindness, she had no ego or arrogance, she gave her best to everything and everyone in her life; that is, everyone except herself. But being very honest, my mother also poisoned me with guilt and fear; she taught me how to be silent when I should have been screaming. She taught me how to rationalize abuse when I should have been fighting back. Every time she allowed (please know I am using this word very cautiously) herself to be harmed, emotionally, psychologically, physically, and stayed despite it, she taught me to stay where I wasn’t safe.

I was fifteen the first time a boyfriend hit me. He was ten years my senior. (Let’s not get into that right now, I know, I mean I don’t know how, but I understand in retrospect how it was allowed to happen.) He got irritated about something I said and out of nowhere slapped me across the face. It stung. I felt the tension rise in my body, the muscles brace, it was adrenaline; fight or flight. I froze. I was silent. I just stood there, feeling the blood rushing to my cheek, feeling the throbbing in my head, the pressure by my eye, the swelling of my lip. His large hand had struck the entire side of my face.

He apologized, said he lost his temper, his patience, that he didn’t mean to but when I didn’t listen to something he was saying, he got mad. He was very sorry and promised it would never happen again. I did nothing. Worse yet, I looked down, unable to move, thinking about what I had done wrong to make this happen. This story is for another day.

Only a few months earlier one of the worst things to happen to me in my life happened. I won’t go into the details now. But, after the fact, I was taken to confession to ask for forgiveness, because that was the only my mother knew how to deal with life. Ask for forgiveness, pray, stay quiet, understand your place. This story too is for another day.

When I came home after he hit me I was still in shock, although I could feel the initial rush fading, followed by an exhaustion of the body. I went to my room and cried, in that moment I couldn’t go to my mother.

I had already seen my parents in heated disagreements many times. It was not an unusual sight. What would have been abnormal is seeing them sitting together having a civil discussion about something they disagreed on. What would have been strange is hearing opposing views without name calling, belittling, and demeaning words. But that wasn’t part of our family’s way of being.

It was not safe to get in the middle of their fights because those arguments didn’t always stop at words. I had seen my father grab my mother’s upper arm and dig in his fingers. I remember arriving home once, they didn’t see me as they fought. I watched from a distance as her flesh rose between his gripping fingers. He was applying so much pressure that when he released his hand, a red welt remained.

My mother caught sight of me.

“Dorotka…” I don’t know why she said my name the way she did except that for a second she was pulled out from whatever was happening and maybe she was seeing what I was seeing.

The blueprint.

She said nothing more and looked down. My father saw me, shouted something and stormed away into the basement.

She was in the kitchen behind the counter; her hands were resting on it, palms down, slightly apart. She wasn’t leaning onto her arms, although I could see she had positioned them to brace her, in case her body failed to stay upright.

I stood silently where the living room ended. We were only a few feet apart.  I remember thinking, ‘leave, just leave’. It was that simple when I was young.

She didn’t leave and neither did I.

Decades later as I came to understand their meager financial situation, the prognosis she might have already known or suspected, the guilt her religion had shackled her to, the community stigma she would have faced – I came understand it wasn’t that simple.

How? How could she have ever left? I couldn’t answer that for her then or now.

But then, how could she not have? If only to teach us something different. That’s easy to say now.

That’s the thing; my mother was a warrior for everyone in her life but never for herself. She was raised to be a martyr; she was raised for sacrifice, for servitude, for silence. Because we never really got to talk, in those serious mature ways a young woman needs, I was left to wonder if she knew that letting the abuse go on had been a mistake; a mistake one of her daughters was likely to repeat. Maybe that was the question I needed answered, maybe that was what I was searching for.

Now I had her letters, her thoughts, the messages she sent across the ocean believing they would never see the light of day, words intended for someone she trusted who would keep her secrets.

“They don’t belong to me,” I said to my aunt after my mother’s best friend left and I had the parcel of her letters.

“They were your mom’s, now they are yours. You can decide if you want to look at them.”

“But if I read them…. what if I see something I won’t be able to un-see. If I read them, that’s it, they’re in my memory.”

“Start with one, look at one, when you’re ready.”

Several months later…

I’m alone while the kids are at school, maybe it’s a day off from work for me. As is too often the case, instead of watching TV or reading, I start cleaning. I am programmed to use ‘free’ time for domestic work.

One closet in particular, where I’ve shoved things I needed to get to, requires attention. I open drawer after drawer and take out piles of papers, documents, envelopes. There it is; the brown parcel. When I came home to Canada I emptied our bags, put the travel documents away; jumped back into life and work. I didn’t look at them immediately, I wasn’t ready.

I opened the cover. Each letter was in a clear protective sleeve, most with their original envelope, organized by date, oldest letter at the front. I’d know my mother’s handwriting anywhere, although I couldn’t always read it, I saw the words through the plastic.

To touch something she had once touched gave me pause. Here our worlds were coming together yet again, separated by twenty-nine years.

On to her letters…

A few things to note…

• I am not a professional translator; these are my lay translations and they are likely imperfect. I did not editorialize or add anything. If the grammar is off it’s because I’ve kept the original Polish sentence structure.
• Where you see dots (………) I have removed things. Yes, there are things I don’t think my mother would have wanted me to share with the world. This is my decision and mine alone. 
• I’ve changed names, to maintain some level of privacy for the people being spoken about. Although there are very few of them, but in case a name does appear, please know it is an anonym.
• I’ve chosen to share her words because they’ve taught me so much about what it was like for her to rebuild her life in Canada; to lose home, to struggle to belong, to make ends meet.
• These letters contain important life lessons; they’ve been a gift to me, one I hope to pass along to others. In her letters, I’ve been given a glimpse into the the person she was, but I realize that her words are from a different time and a different reality, and that we are not absolute beings. Our opinions change, our world views change, we change. The limit of reading something from history is that we can not ask questions of the author, nor does the author have the benefit of seeing how it all turned out. Thankfully, for the most part, I think our lives have unfolded beautifully. But please don’t lose sight of these constraints.
• I’ve read a lot about the ethics of sharing the private communications of the deceased. The breach of privacy has to be weighed against the value of what will be gained by bringing their words to light. Like with so many things in life, there is no absolute right or wrong. It is nuanced. I believe she trusts me to know where to draw the line; my belief is all I have.

June 1^st, 1990

Dearest Grace,

You are wrong in thinking that I have forgotten our friendship or have underestimated it. I simply don’t have time. Now that my mother is here, I sleep a bit more and I don’t get up at night. First thing in the morning, I start taking care of the children, cleaning, laundry, cooking; I don’t always have time to eat anything myself before I have to run off to work. After coming home past midnight, I am usually exhausted, thus, all the letters I write are from work, on my break times – one letter takes me a week to compose. It is not easy to make friends at this age, but acquaintances are everywhere. I befriended a lady but she didn’t reciprocate. Never mind, she is also moving to a town near Toronto so nothing will come of it. Now, all I think about is if we will be accepted in English classes (they pay you to attend school like working); it’ll mean I might be with the kids a bit more. I am so tired that at the thought of work, letters, I don’t feel well. I love receiving letters, but it’s much harder to reply….….  Now when we have everything that a Polish person dreams of in Poland (color TV, VCR, sound system, two fridges, furniture, etc.) I’m longing ever more for the way things were.  Unfortunately, there is no way back……. – imagine what our life would be like in Poland? – With five children – I can’t………. Grace, I always think of you, I pray for you. That is all I can do until I receive my Canadian papers and we have more money. Now, I’m also feeling guilty – that my parents are alone without grandchildren and my sister is alone – when they’re no longer here (where was my conscience when I was deciding this move?). Now, I’m trying to figure out how to move us all back – how to get the children educated and married – look what this has all come to? My mother isn’t saying anything – she is carrying the cross for us – How many shades of love there are that many shades of friendship. All are different; all have something good in them. Don’t worry about our friendship.

Kisses

Ewa

It took me a long time to read that first letter, not only because of my poor Polish, but also because I’d forget to breathe as I took in her scattered thoughts. One after another, her description of the life we had lived in together came into view for me. She was right there, on that piece of paper, sharing her fears, regrets, worries, hopes, her kindness. The way she wrote is the way she spoke; the sound of her voice came alive inside me.

I sat on the floor holding her letter feeling as though she was with me.

We are so alike, my mother and I.