The Choice

choices, to show them that the more choices they have, the less they’ll
feel like victims. e most difficult part of my job is countering the
negative voices in my students’ lives—sometimes even their own
parents’ voices—that say they will never make it as students, that
education for them isn’t a viable course. You’re so puny, you’re so ugly,
you’ll never find a husband. I tell them about my crossed eyes, about
my sisters’ silly chant, how the problem wasn’t that they sang these
songs to me—the problem was that I believed them. But I don’t let my
students know how deeply I identify with them, how hate obliterated
my childhood, how I know the darkness that eats you when you’ve
been taught to believe that you don’t matter. I remember the voice
that rose up through the Tatra Mountains, If you’re going to live, you
have to stand for something. My students give me something to stand
for. But I am still numb and anxious, isolated, so brittle and sad.
e Ęashbacks persist, they happen sometimes when I’m driving. I
see a policeman in uniform at the side of the road and my vision
tunnels, I feel like I will faint. I don’t have a name for these
experiences, I don’t yet understand that they are a physiological
manifestation of the grief that I haven’t dealt with yet. A clue my body
sends as a reminder of the feelings that I have blocked from conscious
life. A storm that assaults me when I deny myself permission to feel.
What are my disowned feelings? ey are like strangers living in
my house, invisible except for the food they steal, the furniture they
leave out of place, the mud they trail down the hall. Divorce doesn’t
liberate me from their uneasy presence. Divorce empties the room of
other distractions, of the habitual targets of my blame and resentment,
and forces me to sit alone with my feelings.
Sometimes I call Magda. She and Nat have divorced too, and she is
remarried to Ted Gilbert, a man closer to her age, a kind listener and
stepfather. She and Nat have maintained a close friendship. He comes
to her house for dinner two or three times a week. “Be careful what