It happened on International Women’s Day on March 8, which we love to celebrate in that country so much. Fracture of the base of the skull, so it says on the death certificate. I learned about this story when I was growing up. As a child, I was sure that my father had died in a car accident. That was what my mom told me. As a child, when I answered a question (so shamelessly often asked by adults) ‘Where’s your dad?’ people, having received the answer ‘He crashed in a car accident,’ sympathetically fell silent. And I paused for a few seconds and, once satisfied with their embarrassment, continued: ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t have time to get to know him well.’ I really liked this ritual. In fact, the ‘sympathetic silence’ of many of them was a different kind of empathy that I didn’t know yet because of my age. But the adults knew that mothers usually say something similar to children when the father leaves a family. Or when something happens to the father, but something not as romantic as death in a car accident or plane crash. Yes, the version about the father who was a pilot and crashed during military exercises was also very popular among single mothers in the country where I come from. I could only dream of such a version of my father’s death, but my mother was not so romantic and chose a more prosaic myth.

I remember once, somewhere in my teens, I suddenly decided to say it out loud to myself. To put my lips together in this unfamiliar, but so simple word: pa-pa. It sounded strange. And for some reason it hurt. I chose to quickly forget about this topic and not try to hear this word with my voice again.

‘The Poem without a Hero’, Oxana Sankova © Anthony Teng Wen Chang

It is probably worth mentioning something else about this concept of ‘incomplete family’ in that country. If you do not use this name in its official meaning, then many such families remain ‘complete’ in a way when the father leaves the family one way or another. Or rather, they are quickly re-staged, reorganised. And it’s not about another man, not at all. The place of the fallen fighter, the dissolute father, is occupied by her Majesty, the Grandmother. Great and omnipotent. And this is not some simple fighter, this is a whole general. And in this way, the unity, or rather the trinity of the family, appears restored. A grandmother is usually the mother of the child’s mother. Before the birth of the child, these two women had already formed their own history of relationships with a lot of hidden (or not at all hidden) resentments and claims against each other, coupled with the long, proudly-worn loneliness of the grandmother herself.

And all this is often peppered by poverty. Yes, poverty is also a very common phenomenon in that country. And in these ingredients: an all-consuming double dose of female love, overprotection, drama, despair, poverty and love again, more than one generation of children of that country was raised. But I won’t go too deep into the topic of Grandma, as this phenomenon requires a separate article. Or even books. Which have already been written in large numbers in that country without my participation. In addition, my mother, due to her wayward nature, managed to quarrel with her entire extended family. So, because of my mother’s disposition, I lost not only my grandparents (except for rare meetings), but at the same time all the cousins and sisters born to mother’s six brothers.

As a child, I did not perceive all this as some kind of deprivation because when you are little, you just take the circumstances given to you for granted and live in them. Although I must admit, from time to time something inside me jumped when I heard something like ‘we celebrated the New Year with our whole big friendly (of course) family’. Apparently, there were perfect families out there somewhere. Although it certainly depends on who to compare it with. Although, compared to the dire situation of my next-door neighbour who lived with her alcoholic parents, I was maybe better off than I realised. Her mother was an alcoholic, her older brother also, and the girl always wore dirty torn clothes. Although this did not prevent me from celebrating the New Year at their house one day at the age of 7. And it was one of the most fun New Year’s Eve nights of my life. The same cannot be said about my poor mother, who was looking for me all night with the police. But I’ve already turned that into another story.

‘The Poem without a Hero’, Oxana Sankova © Anthony Teng Wen Chang

Now, being an adult, I understand that in childhood I had an unconscious feeling of some kind of inferiority inside me: others really have what can be called ‘family’, and my mother and I do not understand what that is like. Besides, in addition to the fact that mom refused to communicate with her own family, she also refused to have friends in her life (she was always a maximalist, my mom). She was saying: I don’t need anyone; I’m never bored with myself. My mom has always been some kind of detached island drifting in an unknown direction. So, I drifted with her, a random passenger. I am sure that she poured into me, into my blood, this feeling of being a lonely island myself. She didn’t do it on purpose, it happened subconsciously, automatically. I was just next to her and absorbing her. And I’ve never been confused by this feeling. Actually, I’ve never really wanted to create a big, friendly family. Although it upsets me because I like the idea of a family. But my nature does not seek it and does not yearn for it. But at some point in my life, I became afraid of this maternal vaccination. No, I don’t want to be (become) like my dear mother, so totally alone. I resist this, I create connections with others, I could call them islands perhaps, I try to get attached, even if not to some mainland, but perhaps to some archipelago of islands.

I do not know what conclusions to draw from all that I have written here. I think I’m going to make a call to my son, after all these reflections on family, I’d really like to know what this word means to him. Although it is risky to ask adult children these kinds of questions, there is a danger of getting unpleasant conclusions about oneself from their answers. Well, at least I hope that he doesn’t dream to be an island.