Claire Forster--Flashes Of A Life, Lived

Everything happens so fast, sometimes: One moment you’re here, the next moment you are elsewhere.\

Looking back onto my childhood, I feel like there is nothing but flashes. Flashes of lightning, illuminating short moments; stilts; snapshots. In-between: darkness.

Flashes of pain; cutting right through the first layer of skin, into the bone. In-between? Well, I suppose the pain comes in layers, and there’s nothingness to fill the gaps…

There is a flash, right there. I don’t know that I want to go there. But it doesn’t matter: it comes to me.

First –

I am at home. Dad is gone. Not working; it can’t be that: It is a Saturday. Weekend. People don’t work on weekends, as far as my six-year-old- mind is aware.

The bad thing is: Mom is home, and she is awake. How do I know? Screaming. She is screaming again. Still?

She wants to leave. Why? Daddy is bad. If I had the presence of mind, or the courage, or the stupidity to speak – maybe the wisdom of hindsight; it all feels the same, now – I might have interjected. Might have said ‘He did something bad. But you know, he is ill. Alcoholism is a problem, and he needs help.’ Or maybe I would have agreed with her: Yes, he is bad. We should get away. As far away as possible, so he can’t find us. Who knows?

But she never wanted my opinion, anyway. If anything, I had (again) been degraded to the role of a servant. Or is it a promotion, considering that, otherwise, I was just the daughter she had never wanted? Either way: I would have to serve, of course. She was wheelchair-bound. No friends. No colleagues. No other relatives nearby. Who else would help her pack? So, I did. And off we went.

Then –

She is screaming. Again. Still?

I don’t know where we are. Even the proverbial wisdom of hindsight cannot help me with this particular query. This is a place that women go to, I have learnt, when they want to get away from men. Any men. So, we are here, because – dad is dangerous? I think that is what she says; what she thinks. When she thinks. And speaks - speaks in actual sentences. Now, though –

Diapers. She wants me to get her diapers. I must have packed them. No: I should have packed them. But I must have forgotten. Because I am clearly stupid. A bad daughter. I didn’t think of the diapers, even though they are so important. I must find them; find them to stop the screaming. But – where to even look? I don’t know this place!

Running. I start running – away from her; away from the screams. There are corridors upon corridors. Closed doors. Noises of people, chatting; lowered and hushed voices, none of them familiar. All doors: Closed. No diapers. No help.

Overwhelm. Whenever I was overwhelmed, I started properly exploding into tears. Just bawling. Today, I would say “ugly-cry”, but not ironically. Not with self-love and self-indulgence. Just derision; contempt. That is how I learnt to consider myself; to treat myself. Especially, when my feelings leak out. After all, I have taught them (not well enough – when do I ever do anything well enough?) to stay contained.

Back then, though, the bawling alerted some of the other women. Word moved through the building, which I frantically raided; trying to find adult diapers for my raging mother. The head women – which is what I internally called her; still call her, even now, when my language should be more sophisticated and mature – confronted me. Extracted the story from me, about how my mother wanted to leave the country. Fly to South America (why South America? Did she even speak Spanish? Or Portuguese? Did she even speak…sentences?) to get away from my father.

And why was I crying? Didn’t that sound like just the dream?

Why was I always crying? Pointless! Irrational!

I was crying, because I was so afraid of heights; so utterly devastated by the idea of flying in an airplane.

I was crying, because I was a bad daughter and had not packed the crucial necessities: the diapers that my disabled mother depended on.

I was crying, because everything happened so fast – and all the adults: they explained what was happening and it all made sense in the moments they were saying what was happening, and why. But only a moment (flash!) later, the sense, the logic, the rationality was gone. And I was left to puzzle over the pieces; too stupid, I believe, to comprehend and make anything meaningful out of them.

I was crying for guidance, for orientation, for a hand to take mine and help me find a way through the darkness.

So –

They took me away. Away from my mother, who – I later learnt – was put into another mental institution. Away from my father, who took on the role of a ‘weekend dad’, visiting Sundays, while I spent time at a foster family with too many children and too little time to be particularly concerned about me.

My next memory flash takes me back to the Monday “after”. At my primary school we had this tradition to talk about our weekends. Share and bond, maybe. My teacher knew about my weekend, somehow. I believe that maybe the people from the Women’s Care Centre phoned in? Darkness; gaps in the narrative. What I do know is that I didn’t want to be left out of the sharing circle; didn’t want to be the odd one, who had nothing to say. I always had – have – something to say!

Focus on the bright spots. Tell the class about going to the cinema on Sunday, with your dad. They don’t need to know that he is only sober, sometimes, on the weekend, for a few hours. They don’t need to know where you have been on Saturday: hidden behind a curtain of tears. Just give them flashes of light; illuminating aspects of your (my) life worth focusing on. To get through the darkness; to fill the spaces in-between.

(Dr.) Claire Förster, born and bred in Berlin, Germany, even though she chose to leave in the UK for an extended period and still misses anglophone surroundings. She has been an impassioned writer since the age of ten. Writing was, and is, a kind of therapy for Claire. She usually escapes into fictional writings, recently exploring all sorts of (dystopic) versions of possible futures, and happily indulging in deconstructions of idioms and proverbs. When she is not writing, she might be found working as an ethnographer, greedily tapping into other people’s stories. Else, she might be inventing new ones as an improviser. Or spending time with friends: discovering new street food venues, visiting museums, or playing table-top RPG.