Made in Bulgaria

CW: Brief reference to sexual assault

My mother likes to say "I was made in Bulgaria, but born in New York." 

She flew to the States in the summer after the Wall came down, wearing a trench coat in July to cover the bump I made in her belly. Sweat beaded from her forehead, pooled in her armpits before leaking down her triceps and ribs. She passed the airport security agent. He eyed her with knowing contempt. He was stuck there, in his booth, in this land of in-opportunity, destined to remain in a country crumbling from within like Bulgarian feta. 

My mother meanwhile could escape. She, with a scholarship to her name, could fly away, pick up the piecemeal pieces of her life and move to the Upper East Side, elbow-to-elbow in subway cars, umbrella-to-umbrella down dreary sidewalks booby-trapped with slush, twelve hours a day in the lab, on the promise of the American fever dream. 

At least there was working electricity. And a chance for her daughter to make something of herself. Though whether I've made something of myself is a different story.

My mother was and is a scientist. Of course, in communist Bulgaria, you're whoever and whatever the government wants you to be. That's how she met my father, also a scientist. In the summer of '89, they canned vegetables together. One day, my mother feigned a toothache to get out of work. Exhausted, with fingers blistered and cracked like The Stone Desert across her knuckles, she lied to Youri the assembly line officer, told him she had an appointment to remove her wisdom teeth. Youri escorted her directly to the dentist's office himself. Without novocaine, they pulled my mother's teeth with a pair of stained—not stainless—steel forceps. 

I hate myself when I think I might become her. But I hate myself more when I hate myself for worrying about that. What's so awful about my mother anyway? Everything she's done in life she's done for me. And for my brother.

My brother is sweeter to her. Though it's not exactly fair. She was twenty-four when she had me, thirty-four with him. I was raised by a child and her man-child husband. No wonder I, in turn, became a wild child.

We were stoop kids: Ferris, Luke, Sarah, and me. We stole gin from our parent's liquor cabinets, pulled hey mister's to the bums standing outside bodegas in the Lower East Side, set up shop on random apartment staircases and took turns passing around the Poland Spring bottle filled with indeterminate liquor and Crystal Light. A few nightclubs actually let us in at night. The bouncers would up-down my barely pubescent body, see the outline of my boobs in their pushup bra, and nod us in past the freshly unclipped faux-velvet rope. I lost my virginity when I was thirteen. He was my boyfriend, a wrestler. The only thing I remember, aside from the pain, was feeling terrified his cauliflower ear might touch my neck while he grunted against me in sputtering little stop-start bursts. 

My parents split when I went off to college. What can I say? They came from a broken country. I come from a broken home. Growing up, I didn't know how unhappy they were. It's so painfully obvious now. My mother went to the lab, snapped the spines of mice to study the genes in their hair and skin. My father went to a separate lab, snapped spines for cancer research. At home, they snapped at each other. 

After they divorced, my father got fat. He developed a deep love for fried pork and other endless city delicacies my mother never cooked for him. In turn, he developed one of those enormous man-stomachs that’s somehow rubbery-fat and concrete-hard all at the same time, like a wheelbarrow of gristle. 

My mother started dating Alfredo, who I can't stand. He’s an optometrist’s assistant. Not even an actual eye doctor, he just files paperwork, greets customers at the door with a clipboard, brings trays full of frames for people to choose from. What my mother and he talk about when they're alone together, I have no idea. My mother's English isn't exactly Oxford-level. Nor is Alfredo's. When I'm home for the holidays, having dinner in her Upper East Side shoebox, the conversations are a patchwork of broken English, Bulgarian, and Italian pleasantries. Never anything more than pleasantries. With Alfredo at least. With my mother, it's pleasantries for the first few minutes, then we’re at each other's throats. She hates the freedom she afforded me, resents me for the better life she worked so hard to provide. I hate that she, after all of it, still can't be anything more than a mother to me. “Overbearing" is an understatement. 

I moved 3,000 miles from home to get away from her. But even that—running away from my problems—I inherited from her. Maybe it's not running away though. Maybe people just move on. We can't reasonably be expected to be the same person all our lives. The ones who stay put are the real psychos, I'm sure of it. 

Last summer, my mother took us to Bulgaria, my brother and me. It was our first time, her first since leaving. We saw where she grew up as a little girl in Sofia, a dirty gray tenement building with clotheslines draped from balconies, cats crawling over the parapets, almost cliché in its Eastern Bloc-ness. We traveled to the countryside. Long-lost cousins and witch-nosed great-aunts spilled out of the woodwork. They showered us in hugs and grotesquely moist kisses, smelling of meat-stuffed peppers and goat’s cheese. They jabbered their stroganoff swirl of Bulgarski. My brother and I barely kept up. We understand our mother’s mother tongue. But can barely speak it. Our kids, should either of us be foolish enough to have one day, will have nothing left at all. No language to tether themselves to, no import of identity beyond that of the iPad teat in all likelihood. 

Our mother meanwhile seemed to unearth something within her that night, there in the potpourri den of distant relatives. It was something she lost long ago. Somewhere in those thirty years between leaving home and coming back. I saw it only for a moment, flickering in her eyes in the candlelit glow, a glimmer, a barely perceptible spark. She was happy.

My mother in the Motherland somehow, finally, became more than just a mother. She became whole.