"I'm not sure if I'll ever truly leave my childhood behind. A sticky fog seems to have descended around me and it obscures all possible paths. I feel discarded, and the awful memories of those early years press down on me like a sheet-metal lid over a well, all weighed down by an enormous boulder, leaving me with no chance of escape. All my shouting and banging from within feels useless. What's the point? No one can hear me.
It's like I am barely able to tread the water; it rises and soon it will reach the top, to the sheet metal lid. I will begin to gulp down my fear and choke on it until I cease breathing.
Or maybe somehow the water will swell and blow off the lid that holds my life captive and my fears will overflow and then subside, releasing me." - from Four Minutes by Nataliya Deleva
I always say that the best kind of art is the one that makes me feel like I want to make one myself. It's so good and it resonates strongly that it gives you the urge to create one yourself. Four Minutes is a very compelling read about childhood and the harshness of life. It's a short book with short chapters and unique structure inviting people to empathize. It makes me wish that someone would write the stories of my life turning it into a piece of literary writing. Or that I am talented enough to write one myself. Not in a biographical narration but in a lyrical dissection of my darkest thoughts.
Couple of months ago there's a tweet on my twitter timeline about a mother who was abusing her oldest daughter that was eleven year old in favor of her younger sons. At first I was sympathizing but then it clicked in my head that I was once that daughter. And I laughed.
It took me a very long time to realized that I was raised in deeply patriarchal household. I didn't realize until a couple of years ago when I was having a conversation with a friend who came from the same cultural background as me that it wasn't how working class households operate universally back in the 1990s.
As a kid I was always furious at how often my friends at school said that I must be the special child because I was the only daughter in the house. Furious because it's the complete opposite of being special. I was the maid of the house. I was the only one who did all the house works while my brothers played games the entire day. The only task they were assigned to was to fill the water in the bathroom with a pipe from the water pump. I was the one who washed dishes, ironed clothes, cleaned the floor, and all others. There was one agonising period when I went to school with my left hand completely burned, the skin turned crispy for days, because I spilled a bowl of hot oil on it when I had to changed the oil to reheat the meal for lunch when my brothers were, well, playing games.
When we went to our grandmother's house for cultural events with extended families, if a man went to kitchen to wash one or two dishes, even when it's his own, his wife would be sneered upon and people would say that she's a terrible wife because she let her husband do house work. So as a kid I had to do all the works to one day be a good housewife.
My mother often told me that I should be the first born instead of second because I was the one who did all the works. Or that I should have a sister. To share the works?
One time when we're all very little kids, my brother accidentally knocked down and broke a cup. My mother immediately blamed.. me. She blamed me because I was the one who put the cup there. On a bedside table. Where a cup should be placed.
One morning in 1998 my mother blamed me for breaking a pyrex tray when I washed the dishes the night before. I remember this clearly happened in 1998 because when I was washing the dishes in the kitchen my father and my brothers were watching the World Cup on TV which happened to be on the dining room next to the kitchen while my mother was sleeping on the bedroom at the front of the house. If I broke the tray they would absolutely noticed. It made zero sense but she was insistent that I did. I know I didn't. And I know how I must have felt that day.
These are just the tiniest fractions of my suffocating childhood. There are millions of other more maddening stories I could tell that stacked up and pressed me down like a heavy lid over a well.
This is not the literary story I want to write but rather the backstories that fuel the desire to turn a tragedy into a better understanding and acceptance of myself. Maybe I never will. But it is in a way cathartic to slowly let them out little by little. Hopeful that one day maybe the water will indeed swell and blow the lid off, releasing me.
