Silent Stories

I used to look like a boy as a kid. I remember looking at one picture from when I was three or four and not recognizing myself. A mystery to solve - why would my parents be celebrating the Worker's day with a strange boy? I knew I had been switched  at birth! This had to be my parents' true child! When I finally confronted my mom with all the anger and excitement my 7 year old self could muster and asked "Why would not not allow me to meet my older brother?!", she thought I had gone nuts. She tried to explain and kept insisting it was me in the photo. "You just looked different in this hat." I knew better. I'd made up a story about how my older brother (I always dreamed of having an older brother then) had to stay with the "other" parents and he only got to see his real parents once. The story kept changing - sometimes, we had been switched at birth, and I believed there is a mother out there who would have enough patience to comb my hair, or wash my hair without making soap go into my eyes, or would let me go out in winter without itchy wool pants. Other times, I envisioned us as orphans, both stuck with separate set of horrible step parents. All we had to do was survive until we can meet again...

Some memories from that time are so strange that I have a difficult time figuring out what actually happened. Did I actually spy on my father, wobbling home from his watering hole, making sure that he made it home intact? I had to make sure he didn't see me , cause that would make him furious at his wife's mistrust. How dare she hope to have a month's salary to add to household expenses? I was good at spying. But did I really do that at 4 and 5 when my mom couldn't leave the house late because she was taking care of my baby brother? Did I really pull off my father's pants soaked and smelling like pee when he'd passed out on our coffee table completely out? Did I actually gently peel his socks off and then struggle to pull down his pants (not a small job for a kid) and hide them under the pile of dirty clothes hoping that this will, somehow, make my mom less mad at my poor misunderstood and unloved father? Did he actually break her jaw in a fit of anger during one of his "returns" (after they separated, he'd come back every once in a while so that we, the children, could feel like we had a father)? Or did I imagine that, when actually, my mother was attacked on the street as we were walking to Vilnius grocery store on Kestutis street? We told this story so many times that it had to be true! So what that I knew every regular drunk hanging out on Kestutis street and none of them was violent enough to hit my mother. And yet, I saw it, right in front of my eyes, my mom wearing a long dark blue skirt, her dark brown curls bouncing on her shoulders as she was rushing across the street holding mine and brother's hands in each of hers. I saw the corner of the store, with number 5 on it. Some dark clad man turning around smacked my mother on the right side of the face so hard that she fell down. I would have chased him down the street, but I had to make sure my mom and brother were ok. And yet, I saw it right in front of my eyes, the closed door. The wavy oval glass in the door made the shapes behind it fluid and blurred - a tall dark shape of a man and a smaller dark shape of a woman with shoulder length curls bouncing on her shoulders as he violently shook her holding he by her shoulders. They were yelling. She was not afraid to yell back at him, even though his round eyes had that glassy look after way too many beers and shone with dispassionate anger. Anger that had no motivation. It was there. It was strong like that strong beer smell I could smell through the door. It had emptied his eyes from any humanity, and I adored it. He was my epitome of strength. And then he hit her. I saw his blurry long hand rise and land on the right cheeek with a loud crack. She fell. He threw things around the room. I was outside the door fighting my parents friend, trying to free myself and open the door and stand between them and tell him - "it's ok, I am here. You don't need to be angry. We will be ok." I could tame the beast. But I was not allowed. The friend locked us up in a room and I don't remember anything more until my mom's return from hospital. She couldn't eat anything by liquid eggs for weeks. She would speak with a clenched jaw. I stood next to her at a bucket of soapy water washing our socks and underwear. She sat down, the jaw held together by staples I couldn't see, looking really angry and closed her eyes. Fat tears flew down her cheeks like rivers of silent pain. I didn't get then, at 6 or 7, why on earth she'd cry. If someone had told me to eat egg yolk mixed with sugar for days, I'd be happy. In silent support, I carefully took my brother's wet socks from her hands, hanging limply on the side of the bucket, and started rubbing them on the grater-like washing board. I rubbed hard till my knuckles were red and sore, but I kept rubbing as my mom silently cried into her own shoulder. Her husband had beat her, but that was not the story to tell.

I am stuck between these stories. Silent stories which are never to be told because of shame. Silent stories which could never teach others who'd travel the same road. Silent stories which could never absolve guild, because they never really happened. Many years later, he said "well, we made mistakes, we were both young..." What was her mistake? That she was silent? That she yelled? That she desperately wanted us, the kids, to believe the story of a strong loving father?

She needed a story. A story of happy people camping at the lakes on weekends and eating round buns with salad inside. A story of Friday family dinners. A story of a husband that passionately cared for his family.

So what stories should we tell? Happy, pretty stories of families making it work? Or stories that hurt? Stories that show how these "mistakes of the young" actually destroy people?