I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This Read Online Free Page A

She had strapped a sofa bed to the top of the car. She furnished my apartment in two hours flat.
    While other people joked bitterly about becoming their mothers, I longed to. I didn’t even understand how she had become herself.
    â€”
    T HE WINTER BEFORE my last semester of college, my mother and I were having dinner in a sushi restaurant in Paris. I was anxious about my upcoming graduation, unsure what I would do next or who I would become. My mother met every worry with an unshakable certainty that I would be fine. Right then, I wanted only her sympathy.
    â€œWell, of course you don’t get it,” I said bitterly. “You’ve always known who you were.”
    My mother shook her head. And then she began to tell me about a time, a time before. I scrambled for my digital camera, hoping to use its movie function to record her voice. I didn’t want to miss a word.
    â€œI think,” I told her a few weeks later, unsure how to broach the topic, “that I would like to write about you. About your coming of age.”
    â€œI’m flattered, but . . . are you sure?” There was a sadness in her eyes that I couldn’t place. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. I told her that I was ready. I wanted her to think so. I didn’t want to be protected anymore.
    My mother did not agree right away. She thought about it carefully. And then, having decided, she held nothing back. The boundaries between us fell, and fell suddenly. She let me in. There was nothing I couldn’t ask. She answered me with a searching honesty rare even in the privacy of one’s own thoughts. She made time for me in her overcrowded life. We talked at our kitchen table, in her downstairs office, on the couch. We talked until early-morning light streamed through the skylight and the cars startedhonking again on Canal Street. We went away together, just the two of us, to a country cabin and talked for days. I graduated from college, I moved into my parents’ house, I moved out of my parents’ house, I took my first job and then my second. We talked for years.
    Early on, my mother prodded me carefully. “You know . . . what we’re doing, it’s a lot like
Maus.
Like what your father did when he interviewed his father.”
    â€œOf course,” I replied, surprised that she thought I had not noticed. “That’s part of it. I want to write, and I can’t do it until I address what he did. I’m doing something parallel and yet it’s completely different. And also, I suppose, I’m doing the one thing he could never do.” My father’s own mother had killed herself when he was twenty. His father had burned her diaries.
    â€œThat was the moment,” my mother told me later, “when I knew I could trust you. I trusted you to know you were ready.”
    At first I used my laptop, the waveform spiking up and down on the screen as she spoke. Then technology changed and I used my iPhone. I didn’t trust myself to remember. Many of the stories were so difficult to listen to that I would wake up disoriented the next day, a vague blackness in place of our conversation.
    My mother and I spoke in French, the language so natural to me with her that I only noticed I’d shifted to it when I spoke to her on the phone in front of my friends. When I was three, she’d urged me to go join the children in a playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg. “
Mais Maman!
” I’d replied, wrapping myself in the wings of her long coat. “
Je ne parle pas français!
” It took me years to realize that the private language I spoke with my mother was a language other people could understand. But although I could speak French, I never learned to write it properly. So I transcribed our interviews in English, translating as I typed. My mother’swords rolled through my head in her language and out through my fingers in mine. Her memories became my own. One