Matryoshka
Marta Barnes
“It was dark. Daddy was there. But he wasn't my Daddy. We were on a boat. The boat was going down into the water.”
I said these words to my mother not long after I first began talking, around two or three years old. She told me years later that she got chills as I told her about what she later described as being my“past life”.
At the time, I couldn't differentiate between a past life and a present life. In my mind, they existed simultaneously within me and that made perfect sense. Nesting dolls that were each other and yet were not, but which occupied the same space.
“I was older,” I told her. “And the boat was called…the Lucy…the Lucy…”
I tried to snap my fingers together like I'd seen adults do when they searched for a phrase they couldn't remember, but my fingers didn't have the motor function yet.
“The Lucy-something”, I finished at last, the memory eluding me.
I remember the frustration – the word had been so clear in my mind I could taste it, but the edges of the memory were faded and blotted with void.
It was then that my mother started getting more than a little weirded out. The RMS Lusitania, she later told me, had been torpedoed in 1915 by a German U-boat on her journey from Liverpool to New York City. On board had been nearly 2,000 civilians – over 1, 000 of whom had drowned.
Needless to say I had no way of knowing any of this at the time. Which is why when she brings it up these days, still convinced I was speaking about how I died.
Unfortunately I didn't stop there.
“And my other mother was there,” I told her at last. “Not you. You weren't my mom.”
I can't imagine how it must feel for your first born to disclaim you as their mother, but I doubt it's great. Still, at the time I ploughed on ahead. The subject of my“other mother” came up often afterwards, usually when I was being precocious or ornery and trying to persuade her that I should get another cookie.
It all ended when my real mom fake-packed her bags and pretended to leave: a successful ploy to get me to appreciate the here and now.
I distinctly remember that was the moment that I said goodbye to not only that other mother (much to my real mom's relief), but also to that other life. It came to be that as I accepted the world around me as being the only one – but it came at the cost of the elasticity I previously felt when thinking of the other "me". I had to root myself. Look forward instead of back. The other world dissolved as the membrane between realities solidified – and I was to mentally remain at the other end of the 20th century from that point on.
There are some things that, as you get older, you can't work into the logic of adulthood. As a child, you start learning to push them away – dreams, imaginary friends, worlds created during make-believe. They begin to fade into that dark gurgling pool where memory is defined by images and feeling but not the concrete reasoning of hard fact.
But every so often I go fishing and reel in those memories again, examine them, and wonder.
