continued from "Damn Are You Going to War?'

continued from "Damn Are You Going to War?'

Me and Grandma

Everyone, even a child wants to be the heroine of her story, but me I just wanted to walk again, and run run run. And I tried to bargain with God and said that if he let me walk again I would never stop running, and to this day I haven’t.

It was a miracle really that after a year I was one of very few that walked out of that hospital, wearing only leg braces, most other children went home in wheel chairs permanently paralyzed. I attribute my good fortune to an older teenager in a wheel chair who would come to my bedside everyday and talk to me then promptly pull me out of my bed until I ended up on the floor. I dreaded her visits. Because I had to then pull myself up by the metal legs of the bed and try to clamour back on. I did not understand why she was torturing me like that but in the end she saved me from permanent paralysis. The doctors back then knew very little about polio and did not realize that only exercise could help.

I did end up in my grandmother’s home in Chojnow until my Mother was able to pick me up and move me to Wroclaw where she lived and worked. For four years I was raised by my grandparents and did not know my Mother at all. She was very different from my lovable, laid back and laughing Grandma. She was a control freak, everything had to be her way or the highway. She saw it as a personal affront that I got polio and she now additionally needed to look after me and had to take me to physio on the street car twice a week. The doctors clued into this finally, as being a cure for polio. She saw it as an affront if I was sad or angry or had any emotion at all. My Mother was the only one allowed to feel and feel she did, loudly and forcefully and often her feelings ended up with a slap on my face, reddening it and humiliating me. I quickly learned that I should never express my emotions or say what I want in front her. If I said I liked something I would be assured of being deprived of it. I missed my generous and loving grandma, everyday.

Initially I rebelled and tried to express myself but after a number of times of physical abuse I caved in and hid my feelings and desires. When still in the rebellious, survival stage my Mother decided she couldn’t cope with me and sent me to an orphanage for an indeterminate time run by Catholic nuns. That clinched it. I knew if I ever expressed myself i would be totally abandoned. At the orphanage all the girls, mostly my age slept in a row on iron beds. We all had to wear ribbons in our hair and at night in order to press them we would spit on them and try to iron them on the railing of the bed, to look neat for the next day. I must have been around 5 or 6 years old. My Mother, probably feeling a little guilty, did what she always did for the rest of her life tried to make up for her mean streak with “things” so I was the only one there receiving care packages from home with chocolate, oranges and other goodies, that I would share after climbing up on a stool to reach the top shelf where the nuns had hid the box, with the others, making me very popular with girls who had no family.

I learned my first lesson of self-abdication, of my unworthiness, my non-existence, unless doing the bidding of my Mother and her whims. I developed a profound sadness about life that ran deep into the marrow of my bones. The only way to escape it of course and my mother’s wrath, was to make her laugh and I did. Even at that tender age I saw the absurdity of life and made jokes without offence. It sometimes changed her mood from anger to humour, never quite making it to level of happy. She was a very depressed negative soul who survived WWII by hiding and fighting in the Underground Army of Poland in the forests surrounding Warsaw. Actually she claimed that was the most meaningful time in her life, she saw herself as a fighter and champion of woes in the world, but not at home. As she used to point out to me often, nobody will tell you the truth except your family. And her truth mostly consisted of, you are ugly, a monster, no good, and wrong, always wrong, wrong words, wrong wants, wrong emotions and wrong hair. My clothes were picked out and bought by her I had no choice.

I began to believe my sole purpose in being alive was to show my gratitude to my Mother for giving birth to me, my reason for being was to please her. I did not have any needs or wants that were different from hers and she knew best. In other words I lost my soul.

When I turned seven the Communists in Poland finally allowed us to travel to Canada to be with my father who ended up living there after stowing away on a boat to Sweden. We arrived in Toronto in 1956. I still remember the smell of Kelloggs Cornflakes, my father’s favourite cereal and musty moldiness in the basement where he lived. Although he owned the house in Downsview, the top floor of the bungalow was rented out. My father learned quickly after immigrating to Canada that without money he had no value and wouldn’t survive. The government back then did not give aid to immigrants or refugees.

...to be continued…