Intro

So, I should probably start this from the beginning.

I don't remember the time that I was born, but through my grandmother's memories I recall what happened prior to my being delivered on this planet.

I was visiting Lithuania for the first time in five years since my family and I moved to U.S. On this particular evening my grandmother was lying in her bed, covered with soft white blankets, hair undone, dim light shining on her night stand. I was in the bed next to hers, pushed together to make more space in the room, and for closeness sake too, I suppose. I had a camera in one of my hands, trying to record what she was saying so that one day I could remember her, so that maybe my future children could know their great-grandmother. That is if I ever do have children. I'm 28 now and from what I understand my biological clock is ticking.

Grandma wasn't happy about being recorded and about me holding the camera and pointing it at her, especially for what she was about to tell me regarding my birth and my parents. She said she was afraid that my father would find out, especially with this kind of recorded evidence. I told her that I will never tell or show this to him, but I simply wanted to have it for my own record. Still, I lowered the camera, recording button turned on.

"So your parents, well, your mom was pregnant, with you," my grandmother was saying. "It was maybe the eighth month in, huge belly. I was downstairs and they were living upstairs of the house, so of course I'd hear everything going on up there, you know." She clearly seemed uncomfortable, but I didn't say anything, just waited. "I heard the shouting and the screaming and then things were thrown about. She's my daughter, you know, my daughter, and she was pregnant, heavily pregnant, and that monster was doing it to her again." She stopped for a bit, breathed heavily a few times, then went on. "I couldn't wait anymore, so I walked up there, wanting to separate them, to get them to stop fighting. But when I got there, opened the doors, I saw that I didn't need to separate anyone. The bastard was on top of her, beating her. She was lying on the floor, blood everywhere, and he was beating her, a pregnant woman. What kind of animal would do this to his own wife, to his child? Tell me, who would do this?"

That was the story of my pre-birth and I learned about it when I was about 20 years old. I've never heard of this before, or since, but for some reason my grandmother felt compelled to share it with me. I think that my parents having visited about a year prior to my visit, and my father kicking my mom in the butt during the visit, probably stimulated my grandmother's share. Or maybe it was just the secluded intimacy we were having at that particular moment.

I don't know what I thought about it. I think I couldn't speak for a few seconds, or maybe I tried to comfort my grandmother, but what happened, what I learned, took some time to settle. I thought about how I could have died, how my father could have killed me in my mother's belly and how I would have ceased to exist right there and then. I don't know how I survived. God's grace, a miracle really. The shock of being beaten could have made her have a miscarriage, but clearly it didn't. My mother survived that time, and many, many more times, and I survived it also, somehow. Thank you God. Thank you. But having learned this family secret made me add more to the anger and resentment pile I've already held against my father. How could he do this? Who was he? What kind of monster could beat his own wife, especially when she was pregnant with his child? And why did my mother stay with him, after all of what he has done to her, after this? How could she have so little respect for herself, so little love for her body and life, that she would put up with this kind of treatment? And to us, her children, allow it to happen to us also. I was so angry and resentful against my father, and then also my mother. But my father, my father.. my father is the monster, horrible, terrible, evil wolf. I still hold some of that anger and resentment as I recount the tale.