1974

The next morning was cold and grey and I couldn’t for the life of me leave the bed. The children were downstairs, filling up the ground floor of the cabin with the extravagant energy they still had in those days. As I recovered from our walk of the previous day, I thought about our own winters that my sisters and I spent in the mountains. Back then, the conversations between our mother and Sally seemed so cryptic that my head would explode with curiosity. Their womanly bodies in the sauna, the cigarettes, and drinks—it was like seeing the mysterious glamour of all I wanted to be. Now those lessons were old and a weight on my heart. Because of work, Jack wouldn’t come until after the holiday had past, and by then Mary and Miriam would once again have made up their minds about him. Our bold independence of the men apparently was merely the peace of caring for the kids with no help, nor extra work, but that didn’t stop them from having opinions.

As much as I needed my sisters to sympathize with me, I also wished that they saw Jack in a good light. He was, after all, the father of my children and I didn’t want the boys to grow up having an ill opinion of their dad nor did I want their cousins to say something that would cause that. The conversations in the lounge, however, were like swimming up a river, where often I had to defend Jack’s behavior and then, to catch a break, I just gave in to the currents of criticism at why I allowed those things to happen. They made me feel little and frustrated and, in a way,  they gave my skewed reality some sort of shape: by the looks of it I was an influential being, capable of carrying so much of the blame for being unlovable; at the same time I was also insignificant, powerless to change any aspect of my life.

It was a confusing position to be, one that the bonds of sisterhood did little to help me understand. It wouldn’t be until many years later, when I could no longer proudly strip down naked in our family sauna, that I understood that my sisters also were trapped. Their bodies, like mine, were jailed, and their thoughts, like many of mine, were those of the jailor’s.