A Refugee In Love’s Debris
by Alexandra Savilo
Try as I might, I honestly can’t remember either of my parents as a child. To me, they were always two entities that may or may not have coexisted. I don’t really know what went on during those years. Moreover, I don’t blame either of my parents for their absence in my childhood. In fact, had they been more prominent figures in my growing years, I fear that the bitterness that tore them apart would have affected me in a much more profound and destructive way than I could have ever imagined.
Growing up, I saw that my parents seemed to put a great deal of effort into family outings. My father didn’t like garage sales, and my mother didn’t like watching television, so our family used to go to museums or theme parks. On these trips everyone seemed so very happy, and we always went out for dinner or ice cream afterward. But I often noticed they didn’t speak to each other, only to me. I never really wondered why that was, assuming that it was only natural that I was the center of attention. But as the years passed, I noticed they didn’t show any signs of affection to each other ever. The holidays were like obligatory events, like the fact that you need to get your boss a Christmas present to get on his good side and maybe get a promotion in the new year. Even though I had never really seen my parents argue until then, I had noticed that my life was very disconnected. The only person whom I always saw cheerful and full of life was my grandmother.
I don’t remember when my world of pastel-shaded family outings and holidays started to take on a darker tinge, but I remember a time when I could sense clearly that something was wrong, and I was very confused, and very unhappy. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on when my grandmother kept telling me to go into the basement so that she could read me a story. But I do remember her stories were very loudly narrated during those times, and I would keep asking her why.
“Because my love, in the basement, we are underneath the ground, and the sound needs a stronger push to get out.” It didn’t make much sense, and in that moment that I pondered, I heard yelling. I crept up the stairs to the basement door, only to find it locked. Locked from the outside. I pressed my ear to the door, and for the first time, I heard my parents screaming at each other and crying. What was wrong? In pure panic, I banged on the door with all my might and everything stopped. When the door opened, I searched them everywhere for a cut or a bruise, but I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t understand; who had hurt whom? I was too young to know that then that their scars were deep underneath their skins.
There were a myriad of excuses over the next few years that my grandmother would think up when times like this would arise. I remember one night we spent two whole hours beading the longest necklace I had ever come across. And she had picked the most difficult pattern with the most hard to find beads in the box. But over time she saw that these diversions no longer worked, and that my curiosity had grown beyond its innocent boundaries, and into the ponderings of a more adult way of thinking. It wasn’t so much about how I could make this situation change, but, why was it happening, and what were they arguing about, and perhaps, was there anyway that this could be resolved?
Shortly after, my mother moved into the basement, and it left my grandmother one less domain to creep and crawl into when the stormy tides rolled into our household. I loved my parents with all my heart, but I could sense there was something going on that I couldn’t control, something I couldn’t fix. And it pained me more than my parents could ever imagine. I knew that they weren’t arguing about me, they barely knew me, the person I really was; they preferred, like most, to see me as just a “child” and not much more. And I began to wonder in the times that we spent together, was it because they too had never spoken to each other that they fought? Did they too no longer know each other, and if so, would this eventually happen to me? Would I begin to fight with each of my parents?
I became quickly disinterested in everything that my parents had tried to occupy me with. Gymnastics were a bore, dancing was tedious, I didn’t like soccer, and every note that I played on the piano sounded like a parrot screeching in my ear. Soon, this anger within myself began to bubble in ways that I didn’t realize until years after. I had become sick and tired of my parents arguments, annoyed that after so many years they could not resolve their problems.
But more importantly, I was hurt and angry that they wouldn’t tell me what or why was everything happening the way it was. Perhaps this is why today I need to know everything about my mother, or about a person in order to feel that I can trust them. Being in the dark, even though my parents had likely done it for my own protection, made me feel so, so insignificant and useless.
After my mother and I visited cousins in Arizona, she moved out of our family’s home. It had been on my parents’ anniversary day. To me, it didn’t seem like it was on purpose, but more like my mother had come back after her vacation and decided that there was no point in postponing the inevitable. I guess what hurt me the most was that as she got into the car with my grandmother, not once had they asked if I wanted to come. And I didn’t know why, but at the moment there was nothing more in the world that I wanted than to be with them. But they just drove down the road as if they were any other car that passed by our quiet suburban street. It was as if nothing had ever really happened and there had never been any bonds to hold us together.
Today I look back at those years as if they are a muddled reflection of myself in a dark pool of water. It’s the truest form I’ll ever know of myself, and each ripple that blurs a part of me is just something I haven’t quite come to terms with yet. I have, however learned some very important things about myself. Some things that, I’m not entirely proud of. Being so isolated from the real world, it seemed to me the only place I could be content, was in a fantastical realm of my own.
It was in this make-believe world that I created what my friends tease as my Prince Charming Complex. In my parents I saw a marriage formed for all the wrong reasons, despite knowing at the point little to nothing of either of them. It took several years of painful observing to learn the unfortunate fact that, despite your deepest wishes, you can’t change a person fundamentally unless they so choose to. Perhaps we all are blinded by the prospect of love, and the many magical things that can come with it. That people see more in their crushes, or in their significant others than what there truly is, hoping that in marriage, or in another phase of the relationship, that part will materialize.
As sad as it may sound, I can never fathom this as truth. If I am to find my true love, whoever he may be, he must present all the qualities I could ever ask for on his own accord, because it is who he is, and not who he is to become. But in this realistic mindset I have trapped myself and fallen prey to envisioning what I could want in a partner. And it is this thought that haunts me into thinking I’ll never be able to fully love someone, or know for sure when enough is enough, for fear of enduring what my parents did. Two people who are wonderful and caring when they do not know of each other’s existence, two parents who are two strangers under the same roof.
In that dark, besmeared and muddy puddle I see a part of myself I struggle with everyday. It is the insecure side of my nature that questions every step of the way, and demands more than enough information about the people I am close to, or growing close to, for my own safety. I’m not afraid of people; I’m just afraid of what they can do to me. I’m afraid that in a world of six million breathing souls, I can feel alone and gasping for breath. In all my relationships whether they be platonic or romantic, I notice that I cannot open up to people unless they open up to me first. As a child my family kept me in the dark and there are still many secrets that hinder me from ever expressing my true emotions. If I cannot even somewhat predict how someone will react to what I will say, I will quite possibly never say it.
And so I sit now, watching my mother across the room with a glass of wine in her hand staring somberly into the night sky. She never wanted this to happen. No one does. No one grows up wanting to be in a divorce. And while thwarted love might leave you cynical, it often makes you long for love with a secret, desperate thirst. So as petty and childish as my present hopes and dreams of romantic love are, I cast them aside, which some of my friends consider further proof of my “Prince Charming Complex”. But to them I’d say, who cares about my Prince Charming for now, when my parents need their own? For now, I can only help them the best I can, and give them every ounce of love a child can, in hopes that it might begin to seal the wound that may never fully heal.
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February 07 2009 09:23 am | Uncategorized
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