Added benefit - I'm not a quitter

One of my strengths is – I’m not a quitter. Somehow, through growing up amidst chaos and violence, I have gotten mad. I was so mad at my apartment being always filthy, at me always being hungry, at my mom never being with me, at my dad violating and abusing me, at my grandma hitting me and yelling at me, at my own self being small, weak, and quiet, at this way of life that I had no power of changing until I grew up – somehow, I decided to be stubborn. I decided – I won’t quit. I wont quit on the wonderful life that I can have when I grow up, I won’t quit on any pain that you are putting me through, I will grit my teeth and persevere, I won’t make a peep to let you know that I hurt, I will smile through any torture, just to show you I have power too. I have the power to stick to myself, to be who I am, no matter what – even if it takes me to bury it deep within for 20+ plus years and then go through the painstaking process of uncovering it. Why was I able to decide this, and why do others quit at one point or another? I wish I knew, to be able to help others. I’ve been searching for the answer for months, and the only one I came up with was – someone must have shown me the beauty of life. Something must have stuck in my mind, something that was worth living for, worth persevering. I think that that someone was my mom, my biological mom who was never there, who was a survivor herself, of greater violence and chaos then me, who came only for moments to be with me together, but who somehow managed to survive and to show me how.

My mom rarely cooked filling meals for me, like chicken and potatoes, but when she did cook, she made something exquisite, as exquisite as our budget allowed it to be. I remember every single instance of the things she fed me – maybe once each in my entire life. One day she made me breakfast of mild quarck mixed with fresh cream and topped with grated dark chocolate. Another time she bought a grapefruit – a beast nobody else dared to buy in the store (Russians were not used to it and didn’t know how to eat it) – and she taught me to slice it sideways, then sprinkle sugar on top and scoop out each translucent juicy triangle of pulp. In the spring, she has shown me that I can eat young linden leaves, tear them off the branch and pop them in my mouth. Apart from food, she has shown me other beautiful things – she has taught me how to knit when I was 5, and she knit beautiful things herself – she still does – she taught me a few tricks on how to knit very fast – I’m still faster than an average knitter. She mace a dress for me – a heavenly white jumper with the yellow sun appliqué – the dress she wasn’t there to dress me in, but the dress I wore and felt like the sun. She paid attention to little details - the seams on the dress had to be perfect, the tomatoes had to be dipped into boiling water this precise way to peel easily, the wool thread had to be looped through the other one this precise way for the pattern of the sweater to be perfect. When we talk on the phone, she still tells me those little things that she picked up in some magazine or heard on the radio – she said that to go out of depression, I had to swim with dolphins – not with any other animal, and not any other water therapy, but only dolphins. Only dolphins, she said, can heal my soul. I both laughed and cried at this – at how she remained a little child, at how she gave me this little child as a gift when I was little, and I cried at how she never had a chance to mature, at how long it took her to come forward with her life, and at how I missed her when she wasn’t there for me. Right now, she is the only member of my family that calls me every week, to check in on me – she is also the poorest. I feel I am regaining a mother that I never had.

I’m not a quitter not only because of my mom. There was my first grade teacher, my great grandma (in moments when she didn’t lynch me for bad behavior), and books. My mom taught herself how to read when she was little, and she taught me how to read very early. Books became my source of life beauty – whenever I felt like escaping reality, I hid in my great grandma’s room (the only room in our apartment that locked), and buried my nose in a book – her room was lined with bookcases, from floor to ceiling, the never-ending world for exploration. In books, I found confirmation to my decision of being stubborn – the knights never quit their quests, no matter what beasts they had to defeat; the princesses gave up their clothes and castles to go through the hardships for their only true love; the magicians fought their whole life from when they were kids to become big and mighty and powerful – through poverty, ridicule, and hate from other villagers; the superheroes never quit. Neither did I.

I’m sad that I had to go through hell to gain this strength and I wonder if it is possible to gain it without violence. Does it justify the abuse? Does it give my father the reason to say: “See, I only made you stronger!”? This will be a question for me to ponder, maybe a question to ponder my whole life.