Suddenly “schizophrenia” is something I say.
The word and the story it tells is spilling out of me.
I tell my boss; my father in law; my neighbor; my daughter’s new primary care physician.
Each time I say it out loud, I think,
“Should I have?”
And then I am enraged.
Why shouldn’t I say it out loud?
My mom hid it her whole life.
From me most of all, and the secrecy drove us apart.
We were living in Sherman Oaks when the ‘94 Northridge earthquake struck. I was sleeping.
My mom threw a blanket over my head and dragged me out of bed.
I woke up disoriented. Not because the earth was shaking, but because I was shrouded in muffled darkness I didn’t understand.
That’s how it was.
I tried to talk about my life to friends’ parents, but I did not know how to explain her.
It all came out as complaints.
A child complaining about her parent.
A daughter complaining about her mother.
The nearly universal refrain I heard over and over from anyone I told:
“She loves you so much. You are her whole world.”
I didn’t want to be her world.
I didn’t want to hide with her.
I wanted to feel light, and alive.
In law school I befriended a Russian classmate. We chatted occasionally about being daughters of Russian mothers.
“She wants me to be a lawyer and make children in the same breath. ‘When, when will I become a grandmother??’” Maria rolled her eyes and giggled. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I just graduated, take a breath!’” She looked to me for a knowing smirk.
The last conversation I had with my mom was about the detective work she was doing to spy on rapists.
“No pressure from my mom about kids yet…” I said. “I’m sure soon though,” I laughed, uncomfortably.
“Just a matter of time!” Maria assured me. “Russian moms, right?”
My mom did not pressure me.
My mom was never her whole self with me.
She compartmentalized, and she managed.
She found she could manage parts of her life where her mind did not betray her, and I was one of those parts.
I asked my mom so many times, “Why did you want to move to the United States?”
Her answer was always the same.
“For you. To give you a better life,”
I never believed her.
She could be so mean to me.
She wouldn’t let me in.
She told me I didn’t know anything about real life, and that I never would.
Even now I am uncertain about the details of my mom’s life. She had a way of talking that made facts feel fluid.
Once she sent me an email, so I know this:
“My dad’s name was Vadim Alekseyevich M– , he passed around 1983. His mom’s name was Polina M–, I never heard or met his father, like he didn’t exist.
“Babushka’s name was Varvara M–, maiden name K–“
I have a few other facts I’ve more or less corroborated through old family photos.
My grandmother was an engineer.
My grandfather was a general in the army.
My mother was born in Kiev. She had an older brother.
My uncle also suffered from schizophrenia.
My mom told me about it during a day trip. We were walking along Pier 39.
“Babushka was taking him to all kinds of institutions when we were growing up,” she said.
That’s all she had to say about it.
There was one other story she’d tell about him.
He liked to read in the bathroom.
“Always he was in the bathroom…” she’d say, and then she’d laugh.
She talked of her brother lovingly. Alyosha.
Her brother may have been the only one who could understand her.
I asked my mom once if she wanted to contact him somehow. She was Facebook friends with his daughter. Couldn’t Alyona let us know where to find him?
“Find Alyosha?” she asked. “He probably died already.”
I snooped through my mom’s email while I was packing up her apartment in Southern California.
The notepads on her desk were scribbled over with sentences that didn’t make sense.
Her Draft folder read similarly.
I read an email she wrote about the day I was born.
She recounted holding me in her arms when several KGB agents barged into her hospital room.
“They wanted to take you,” she wrote.
Then my father, who was in the room with us, convinced them to let her keep me.
A different email draft explained more. She was a KGB agent before she got pregnant with me, she wrote. She did not want to be a KGB agent anymore but they would not let her go.
Ah.
Was this the explanation I’d been looking for?
Did my mother flee from the KGB to the United States?
I spent three years of my late twenties researching the Soviet Union.
Immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States from 1985-1991.
Life under Khrushchev; Brezhnev; Gorbachev.
Soviet cuisine.
American presence in the Soviet Union.
Russian-American immigrants in the United States.
Who am I?
I am someone who has never been good at keeping secrets.
Stray Sentences 