Magic water spouts, red poppies and cherry plums.
My first memories are all pretty much connected to my grandma Mami, who, like any hardcore Eastern European grannie, took it upon herself to “raise” me part-time because my mother just wouldn’t have the time or the mental capacity for another kid. One of those first memories, I am not even sure it happened or if it just got distorted with the passing of time, is pretty magical in a way: I might have been about 3 years old and was walking with my grandma on a sidewalk near her building, when a sort of water spout just gushed out, like from inside the sidewalk, and splashed for a few seconds before coming to a sudden stop and leaving a wet spot on the pavement. No pipe in sight, no hose. We were stopped in our tracks, grandma tightening the grip on my hand. Was that magic, or just a twisted memory, or maybe it has something to do with the communists… blame it on the communists.
Another clear memory from the same age is my grandma taking me in for a photo at the local photo studio downtown. I was wearing a knitted dress with a sewn-in vest, and she took my mother’s wooden brooch with painted red poppies and tried to pin my vest panels together but the photographer asked her to remove it. I remember getting up on a box and the photographer telling me not to move or blink. The agony – it felt like FOREVER. This was not a regular camera from the 80s, it was one of those huge ancient wooden boxes with the rear dark cloth covering the photographer’s head. You see, my country was a few years behind in terms of technological advancement… the communists might have had something to do with that, too.
I was born in Eastern Europe, in a ~200,000 people town in Romania, sometime at the beginning of the 80s, just when the country was pretty much starting to hit the proverbial rock bottom under communist oppression. That lasted until 1989 – debatable, as the end to communism only drilled an even deeper hole in the rock bottom…maybe that water gushing out of the pavement doesn’t sound so crazy anymore, eh? It was all a metaphorical preview of what was about to come.
At my birth, which happened unexpectedly early, I’m told, they kept me in the hospital for a few days, away from my mom, while no nurse really cared to clean me and change my diaper very often. Diapers were all cloth back then. So I developed some sort of irritation and my skin and flesh were well braised in baby pee. If you expect anything clean and sterile from a medical system on Eastern European land, you are delusional. Maybe it was also metaphorical that when my mom finally left the hospital with me, the car we were in caught on fire. Fire purifies (I’m totally laughing at my own bullshit right now). Spoiler alert, we made it out, no movie-worthy explosion, probably just smoke from the engine. Romanian cars…
If you ask, a lot of old people will tell you how, at first, communism was ok(-ish). If you ask my mother, “the problems she had raising me she didn’t have with my brother” who was born earlier in the 70s. If you asked me, I wouldn’t know. The only reality I know is mine, and this is what I can write about. Since starting occasional counseling a few years ago I realized how much my reality is determined by those first years of life, and with that, a lot of random memories started popping up. Fun fact, I have a pretty good memory, I can name almost all my colleagues from kindergarten just by looking at a photo.
It got even more interesting as I started sharing some of those memories with people I met in my current country of residence, Canada. Imagine, telling a Canadian you didn’t have enough food growing up, that you had a ration card that would only allow you like 1 kg of sugar per month, or 1L of milk per week, and those were not guaranteed, you’d have to properly fight for it – wake up at 3am and freeze to death in a lineup in front of the grocery store, then push past everyone to get your hands on that last bottle of milk cause you just had a baby at home. Electricity was rationed as well, so that we didn’t consume much, it would be shut down often so we learned to do homework by candlelight and warm up by the gas stove. Also try to explain to Western people that you knew all the pedos in your area, because they would visit often and pull their dicks out in front of you. Then you would taunt them, and then the boys would chase them away. Last but not least, how can you explain that you had freedom to be out and about unsupervised since you were 3 years old, playing with the kids on the block, climbing trees, eating cherry plums and mulberries – when not eating dirt, staining and tearing the only pair of shoes you got. My mother says things have changed now and kids can’t be out like that anymore. I say things never changed, except our fear.
Stick around for weird, random memories that may or may not show you how life in Eastern Europe was at the time. Some may be verging on horror, some on hilarity, but this is not the point of the writing. Please remember, our reality was different. Of course these experiences are deemed “traumatizing” for anyone but I can only laugh at everything right now …
It's Okay, I'm Eastern European. 