Why did Ima want to move so far from her family, from her friends, her home?
It’s a letter.
That much is clear, even though it’s not addressed to anyone, and it’s not signed, either. I don’t need a signature to know it’s my mother’s teenage handwriting, though; it’s identical to the writing in the diary, down to the bright purple ink. The color is bursting with personality, energy, life.
But the letter… there is nothing lively or playful about it. The words are dark, angry…. Accusing.
You don’t understand me. I’ve tried telling you again and again.
This isn’t working. Why can’t you see it? Why can’t you see ME?
It’s bad enough that THEY don’t understand me. That they don’t want me. (And by the way, don’t think I don’t know about the phone calls. They want me out, and I want out, too! I’m done, done, DONE with the pretending, with the acting, with the crumbling inside every day. EVERY SINGLE DAY!)
The intensity of the letter scares me. Horrifies me. Ima wrote this? Who to? What about? When?
And why?
The paper had fallen from her 1998 diary, so it made sense she’d written it around then. Who to… it must have been written to Bubby and Zeidy. Who else? And why?
Did she ever send it? Did she pen it furiously, only to stuff it into her diary and never actually show it to the recipient? Or was this a rough draft of some kind? Did she feel better after writing it, and it became irrelevant? Or did she give up on even trying to be understood?
And… I’m back to the why again. What had happened? Who was treating Ima so badly that she wrote something like this?
My mind whirls with questions, thoughts, rapid calculations. And 2001… wasn’t that the year Ima went to America? Come to think of it, why had she gone there in the first place? We’d grown up on the story of how Ima went to camp in the States, and the camp director was the mechaneches in a great high school, so Ima switched to a school there, but now that I’m actually stopping to think about it, there are so many holes in that story.
Who switches schools — switches countries!— because their camp director is a teacher in the new school?
Why did Ima want to move so far from her family, from her friends, her home?
Why did she go to an American camp in the first place? Did the aunts go, too?
And if… if she’d been so unhappy at home that she moved so far away, all on her own, why on Earth had she sent me to live here, right where she started?
I feel like all the loneliness, boredom, anxiety I’ve been battling the past few days have shriveled into nothing compared with this newest bombshell.
I read the letter again, and then again, trying to find a hint, something to explain what it’s all about. Something to tell me who my mother was, who she is, what happened to make her so angry (at her parents? At other people? Aunt Chana? Who? What? Why?)
And wondering why this is the first time I’m hearing about experiences that clearly changed the course of my mother’s life — and what it actually means for me.
