The Woman I Wanted to Be Read Online Free Page B

June 1945, my father was still in Switzerland. By the time he came back to Brussels four months later, she had gained back much of the weight she had lost, but she wasn’t the same naïve, mischievous, fun-loving, passionate girlhe had been corresponding with and planned to marry. That girl was gone forever. This new young woman had endured true horrors and would carry the wounds forever.
    In his diary, my father wrote with great honesty about their reunion. He admitted that he barely recognized the girl he had been separated from for more than two years. She was different, a stranger to him. Lily sensed his unease and told him he was under no obligation to marry her. The love was still there, he reassured her as he hid his doubts away. They were married on November 29, 1945.
    The doctor warned them, “No matter what, you have to wait a few years before having a baby. Lily isn’t strong enough for childbirth and the baby may not be healthy.” Six months later, I was accidentally conceived. Remembering the doctor’s warning, both my mother and father were concerned. They thought they could get rid of the pregnancy by taking long rides on his motorcycle over the cobblestoned streets, but it didn’t work. Finally one morning my father brought home some pills to induce a miscarriage. My mother threw those pills out the window.
    I was born healthy and strong in Brussels on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1946, a miracle. Because of the price my mother paid for that miracle, I never felt I had the right to question her, complain, or make her life more difficult. I was always a very, very good little grown-up girl, and for some reason felt it was my role to protect her. In his diaries, my father confesses that at first he was disappointed that I was not a boy, but within a few days he had totally accepted me and fallen in love with my mother again.
    I have long suspected that if I hadn’t been born, my mother might have killed herself. If nothing else, my existence gave her a focus anda reason to keep going. For all the strength and determination of her personality, she was extremely fragile. She hid it very well, and when people were around she was always light and fun. But when she was alone, she was often overtaken by uncontrollable sadness. When I came home from school in the afternoons, I would sometimes find her sitting in her darkened bedroom, weeping. Other times, when she picked me up from school, she’d take me to have a patisserie, or antiques shopping, laughing with me and giving no hint of her painful memories.
    The people who went to the camps didn’t want to talk about it and the people who weren’t in the camps didn’t want to hear about it, so I sensed she often felt like a stranger or an alien. When she did talk about it to me, she would only emphasize the good—the friendships, the laughter, the will to go back home and the dream of a plate of spaghetti. If I asked her how she endured, she would joke and say, “Imagine it is raining and you run in between the drops!” She always told me to trust the goodness of people. She wanted to protect me, but I realized that it is also how she protected herself . . . denying the bad . . . always denying the bad and demanding that the good forces win and, no matter what, never appearing a victim.
    She did the best she could to put the war behind her. She had the two sets of tattooed numbers removed. And in a wonderful gesture of defiance, and to override her memory of the bitter cold she’d endured, she bought a very expensive, warm sable coat with the restitution money she got from the German government.
    I spent a lot of time alone as a child, reading and imagining a grand life for myself. My childhood went smoothly, though life in Brussels was often gray and boring. I loved my big school, I loved my books, and I was a very good student. I loved my brother and my girlfriends,Mireille Dutry and Myriam Wittamer, whose parents owned the best patisserie in