Never Stop Walking_A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

by Christina Rickardsson

  There’s a knock on the door, and Rivia’s eyes meet mine. Here it comes, the moment I’ve been waiting twenty-four years for. I walk over to the door and open it. Brian, whom I’ve never met before, stands before me. He looks happy, friendly, and a little wound up. I tuck that away in the back of my mind as a positive sign. If he were bearing bad news, he wouldn’t look so happy, would he? I sit down at the table, and Brian sits across from me. My pulse speeds up, and my sweat glands start producing an unnatural amount of sweat. I start to wonder if he can see my nose sweating, which always happens when I’m nervous. He says that he’s located part of my family. My heart beats a little harder; my right hand travels up to my nose and wipes away some small beads of sweat. He’s found my mother’s sisters and some of my cousins. I smile and hear myself say, “OK, how nice. Have you met them?”

  He tells me that he’s talked to them, and I ask him if they remember me. I don’t have many memories left of my family other than my mother. But I do have a few memories of a woman I always thought was my mother’s sister. I remember how my mother and this woman pierced my ears. It hurt, but I was very pleased afterward.

  “They remember you, and they’re glad that you’re back. They’re really looking forward to meeting you. They told me a bunch of stories from when you were little,” Brian says.

  I smile, and even though it’s disconcerting to talk to a total stranger about my biological family that I hardly remember, I feel a delightful, warm sensation welling up in me. I ask Brian if the family said I was mischievous and climbed a lot. Brian laughs a little and says that’s exactly what they said. It feels good to receive confirmation that I had guessed correctly, and also that these people and I share more than blood, that we also share memories.

  Brian tells me that my family lives in Belo Horizonte and that they’re eager to meet with me. I’m happy to hear him say that, but now I’m thinking of only one thing: my mother.

  “And my mother?” I ask.

  I try to read his body language. He looks relaxed. His eyes don’t wander when I mention my mother, which they would have done if he hadn’t found her or if she were no longer alive. As a little girl, I had learned to read people’s body language quickly to gauge their intentions, whether good or bad. My heart beats hard inside my ribs, and I try to demonstrate control through my posture. I glance at Brian. He opens his mouth, and as he does, I focus all my energy on thinking positive thoughts, thinking that the words that will come out of his mouth now will be that my mother is alive. I know that energy and positive thinking won’t change the information he brings. And yet that is precisely what every cell in my body is focused on. And then I hear Brian say, “I have found your mother.”

  I have a thousand questions; yet, my head is completely blank. Something happens to my heart, and the muscles in my face tense. I squeeze my lips together harder, and my eyes well up. I look for confirmation that I’ve heard him correctly. “You’ve found my mother?” I glance over at Rivia, see that she has tears in her eyes, too, and she gives me a little smile, which I return, but I wonder if maybe it looks like I’m making a face. I ask Brian if my mother is doing all right and where she lives.

  Brian starts to tell the whole story of how he found my mother, mostly thanks to her name, Petronilia, which is an uncommon name in Brazil. Through the court records, he was able to locate her sisters, and from there he was able to determine that my mother is no longer living on the streets. In terms of her health, she’s doing well, but everything is not problem-free.

  I wipe away a tear that’s rolling down my cheek. He says that my mother also lives in Belo Horizonte and that they’re expecting me this weekend. I pick up the phone and call home to Sweden, to my brother. Patrick expects me to call as soon as I have any news. I hear his familiar voice. I tell him that I’ve just met Brian, that he’s told me about our aunts and cousins, and that he has found Mamãe. I hear Patrick repeat, “He has found Mamãe. Is she alive?” I smile and confirm with a yes. “How’s she doing?” he asks. It touches me that he asks. We have completely different relationships with our biological mother. Unlike me, Patrick doesn’t have any memories of her. For him, she’s the woman who gave birth to him and couldn’t take care of him, so I find this conversation particularly heartwarming. We chat for a bit, and I can hear that he’s moved. I tell him that he can call if he wants to talk more. I say that I love him and that we’ll see each other when he joins me in Brazil in a few days.

  This is the day when I, after so many years of not knowing, have learned that my mother is still alive, that she misses me, and that we’ll get to see each other soon. This is the day I’ve found out that I have a family here in Brazil and that they seem to be looking forward to seeing me. This is the day that makes twenty-four years feel both like an eternity and a few seconds. There’s nothing more I can say about this day.

  Everyday Life in Vindeln

  1990S

  A lot of things were different in Sweden. My Swedish parents warned me about going over to a stranger’s house or talking to strangers. In Brazil, my mother warned me about the police. Some of the policemen were not to be trusted. The trouble was knowing which ones you could trust and which ones you should run away from. So, I did the most logical thing: I ran away from all policemen.

  I ran the first time I saw a policeman in Vindeln. Vindeln had its own little police station—more like an office with one policeman who worked there full-time. He lived on the same block as I did. It turned out he was a nice man, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. Lisa—who lived next door and was now one of my new Swedish friends—and I were taking a walk through the village. It was summer, and I’d been living in Vindeln for about a month. We’d bought ice-cream cones and had just walked by the movie theater, which was about three hundred feet from the police station. Out stepped the policeman. I saw him and froze. I looked at Lisa, and she looked at me. The policeman turned and saw us. I looked at Lisa again, flung my ice cream on the ground, grabbed her hand, and yelled, “Run!”

  Lisa did not resist, but she looked surprised, and she was not moving very fast. I looked back over my shoulder and noticed that the policeman didn’t seem to be following us. What I saw instead was a mildly irritated Lisa with ice cream smeared across half her face. After we rounded the corner, I stopped to make sure we were not being followed. Lisa wondered what the heck I was doing, and in my broken Swedish, I asked her why she didn’t run. I practically had to drag her for half the distance. Lisa wondered why she should run. It occurred to me that maybe I’d done something wrong, because Lisa was giving me the weirdest look.

  “Don’t children in Sweden learn to run from the police?” I asked. Lisa looked at me as if I were stupid.

  “Why would we run from them?” she asked, surprised.

  “Because the police beat people,” I replied.

  “They do not! They’re nice.”

  “Nice?” I wondered aloud, skeptical.

  “Yes, nice. Aren’t they nice where you come from?”

  I didn’t know what to say, since I didn’t want to admit the truth. I instinctively realized it would sound rude, so I gave a response I’d learned from observing other Swedish children: “I don’t know . . .” And I shrugged slightly.

  Lisa and I started walking home again. At my insistence, we skirted the police station, even though that made the walk home a little longer. Lisa let me taste her ice cream. I asked her why she wasn’t that fast. I’d never seen anyone run so slowly before, and Lisa just told me she didn’t like to run. I didn’t understand how a person couldn’t like to run, but I was glad she shared her ice cream with me.

  In the early 1990s, about twenty-five hundred people lived in Vindeln, compared to the sixteen to seventeen million who lived in São Paulo. In Vindeln, you didn’t lock your front door if you went out, and if you did, you left your key in the mailbox, which frustrated me. It made no sense to lock the door if you were just going to leave the key ten feet away, where everyone could
find it. In São Paulo, there were high walls around the expensive buildings and sometimes dogs and guards. Of course, I preferred and continue to prefer the trust that exists in Swedish society. But I experienced a lot of culture shock as an eight-year-old in Sweden. Whether it had to do with food, religion, clothing, snow, school, friendship, or how the society was set up, yes, everything was different. When everything is new, it’s both frightening and exciting. Now I’m grateful for what all the culture shock did for me as a child, and what it still does for me as an adult. But it wasn’t always easy when I was little. I discovered that the longer I lived in Vindeln, the easier it became for me to understand how my new family and my new friends thought.

  I discovered the way I used to think was starting to change. I started to adjust, and it happened intuitively and at lightning speed. Did what I’d learned in Brazil apply to the situation I was in now in Sweden? What would my new Swedish buddies do in the situation I was in now? What would my Brazilian friends do? The next time I saw that same policeman, I turned to Sara, the pal I was with at the time, and asked her if we should run. Sara told me we shouldn’t run from the police, a piece of advice I followed after that, even though I always remained a little on my guard. Certain types of fear penetrate deep into the soul, and even to this day, a small part of me wants to run when I see the police.

  In my new family, I noticed that many times tough questions would be glossed over. I couldn’t really understand why grown-ups chose to do what I interpreted as lying to their children. When it came to questions about where babies come from, for example, there were eight-year-olds who in all seriousness believed that storks flew to people’s homes to deliver a baby to its parents. That was very confusing to me, and I cleared things up for the kids by explaining to them how babies were made. Not all the parents appreciated this.

  But even in my first week there, I met several children who would become my friends. Malin, who lived next door; Lisa, the girl who had “my” bed; and Nina, Sara, and Anna, whose mother, Maj, was a daycare worker. I remember one sunny morning when Mama, Patrick, and I were standing on the lawn next to our garage and Maj came over. Patrick was playing in the grass. He wasn’t even two yet. While Maj and Mama chatted, Patrick got hold of the hose that Mama had turned on to water the bushes by the corner of the fence. I caught the mischievous gleam in his eye, and then he took the hose and sprayed Maj with the water. She yelped, and Mama also got drenched, trying to get the hose away from him. The whole scene was so hilarious to me as I stood looking on, and I laughed and laughed, and I remember yelling and cheering him on. Patrick was very pleased with himself. Mama was laughing, too, and took off her glasses to dry them on her shirt.

  As I mentioned earlier, my first real friend in Sweden was named Maja. She stopped by one day when I was standing outside our house by the mailbox, holding Patrick in my arms. Maja was carrying a black cat that she let me pet. I asked the cat’s name, and Maja said it was named Kurre. Maja was nice and blond, and she was a bit like Patricia. I also got to know the parents of some of my playmates and one of my mama’s friends that she spent a lot of time with, Ann-Marie, and her husband, Kjell-Arne, who would be there for me later in my life when I needed them.

  I remember trying to think about what Mamãe looked like. But after just a couple of months in Sweden, I noticed that I was having a hard time picturing her. I panicked. I couldn’t picture my real mother. I knew what she looked like, but I couldn’t visualize her. What was going on? I knew that she had short, black hair, that she had brown eyes, and that her lips looked like mine. I remembered how tall she was and what her body looked like. I remembered all the details, but I couldn’t picture her. I had trouble breathing. There was a tightness in my chest. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t breathe. Should I yell for my new parents? But then they would see me completely distraught and think I wasn’t happy in their lovely home. I tried to calm myself down. I thought to myself, Breathe, Christiana, breathe. You’ve been through worse. No need to worry. Everything’s going to be OK again. Think about Patrique! You deserve to suffer a little, you know.

  As an adult, when I look back on this incident, I understand that I was suffering a panic attack. It was intense, because it lasted awhile, and I was in extraordinary pain, both physically and mentally. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t call out to my new parents. After all, they had been very nice. I think it was a combination of factors. I didn’t want to disappoint them. They had given me and my brother so much, and it would be very unappreciative of me. Also, if I let them help me, it would mean that I’d let them into my life, and I was not ready to do that. But most of all, I think that my pride wouldn’t allow me to do it. I was tough, and I could handle things on my own. I was too proud to ask for help, a weakness that has followed me for a large part of my life.

  So, I calmed myself down and pushed aside my anxiety. I couldn’t accept that my memories of the people I loved would fade away. I couldn’t accept that my memories from Brazil, good and bad, would fade away. If I let it happen, I would lose myself. I would lose who I was and wander eternally in darkness. I would fail Mamãe, Camile, Patricia, the boy I’d killed—and I would fail myself and my brother. It was my job to tell him the truth, tell him how wonderful and loving our mother was. I couldn’t forget. Camile had told me that as long as we held each other in our hearts, as long as we remembered each other, we would always be together. I needed to hold on to her, and to Mamãe, and all my memories. I decided that if I thought about them the whole time, they would always be there for me. I lay down on my back, stared up at the ceiling, and started replaying all the memories I had from my time in the forest, things that had happened on the streets, Camile and her stories, Mamãe and her sacrifices, her suffering, and her love. I thought about the boy I’d killed, and I cried. I ran through everything I could remember from the orphanage, and I remembered my last moment with Mamãe. I still held all the memories of my life in Brazil up until the moment I, my brother, and our new parents stepped into our big red house in Vindeln. If I did this every night before I fell asleep, I would never forget the people I loved, and I would never forget who I was.

  What I didn’t know then was that when you try to hold on to the past as hard as I was, you sometimes miss out on living in the present. I wish that someone had told me, Christina, live in the moment and dream of the future. That doesn’t mean you lose yourself. But stopping where you are now will cost you more than you can imagine.

  I remember my first summer in Sweden being fun, full of playing with my new friends, but I felt different. First of all, none of them looked like me. A few of the kids had told their parents that I was brown—not in a mean way but more out of curiosity. Some of the parents were a little uncomfortable and unsure how to explain to their children why I was chocolatey brown. They often replied that I came from a country where it was super warm and the sun was always shining, which is why I was brown.

  I thought that explanation was kind of weird, since there were plenty of white people in Brazil. Plus, I was astounded by how naïve the children in Sweden were. They seemed to think that all adults were nice and that you should always do what they said. The only thing I heard that deviated from this belief that all adults were nice was people saying you shouldn’t go off with strangers. Hello? Surely everyone knew that!

  The children here didn’t seem to have any concerns besides falling off their bikes and scraping their knees, not getting the exact doll they had wished for, not being allowed to watch unlimited amounts of TV, having to go outside and play, or not wanting to go to bed at a certain time. It was very confusing to me and hard to fathom.

  Naturally, all the things I’d experienced seemed completely unreal to them. Whenever I mentioned something that had happened to me, I always regretted it. They really couldn’t relate to my experiences, and their emotional lives just weren’t the same. When I did share things, they thought I was making them up or that they had come out of some wicked fairy tale. So, I started m
aking things up. I might as well turn it into a good fairy tale. For example, I made up a story about how I had wrestled a lion and that I knew karate, which I absolutely did not. I could have easily taken them all in a fight, so I might as well say that I could. I made up all kinds of things. I lied to my parents as well. Whenever they wondered something and asked about Mamãe, I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by telling them that I loved Mamãe and not them. So, I told them what I thought they wanted to hear. I minimized my birth mother, pretended I thought she was dumb and that I was happy to be in Sweden. I wanted to fit in, even though I really didn’t. I wanted to be nice to my parents, because I understood that they genuinely cared about me, but on the inside a part of me wanted to scream. And I argued with my new parents a lot. I would yell at them that they couldn’t tell me what to do, that they weren’t my real parents, and that I could do what I wanted.

  At times like these, a part of me came back to life and tried to cry for help, tried to get someone to see how unbelievably sad and broken I was. But no one saw or knew what to do about it. So, Dad would grab me by the ear and lead me to my room and tell me I couldn’t come out until I’d calmed down. I had to learn all on my own to suppress the flames and try to become someone who wasn’t me, someone who could fit in, someone like the person my parents, my new friends, and their families expected me to be.

  Then it was August, and the start of school approached. I’d learned Swedish in just two months. However, I did have an accent, and I’d forgotten almost all of my Portuguese, or as I called it then, Brazilian. I had to start in first grade, one grade below my friends who were the same age as I was. But it took the teachers only a few weeks to realize that I knew enough to switch to second grade. I did everything I could in those first few weeks to show that I was a super good student. I realized there was a chance the kids would tease me for being older than they were. And I didn’t need anything else that might cause me to be bullied or excluded.