Never Stop Walking_A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

by Christina Rickardsson

  Mamãe Petronilia

  2015

  It’s remarkable how you can lose something and then get it back. One thing we all have in common is that we don’t know what life has in store for us. From the moment we’re born, we’re part of what I call the lottery of life. I was ripped away from my biological mother when I was eight years old, got an adoptive mother who then died of cancer, and here I stand now, thirty-two years old, about to be reunited with my biological mother. It’s hard to describe exactly what I’m feeling. I don’t even know. I’m glad that I get to see her again after twenty-four years, but a part of me is scared. What if I don’t feel like she’s my mother when I see her? So much has happened to me in the years that have elapsed, and obviously for her, too. What if we don’t feel anything for each other? What if I lose the image I have of her as my hero? What happens then, to my story of my childhood? What happens to my memories?

  Rivia and I stand beside the parked rental car. We’re in Belo Horizonte, which is about two and a half hours by plane, inland from São Paulo, and then six hours by car from Diamantina, where I was born. This is where Mamãe lives now with her sister, my aunt Vitoria.

  Brian hasn’t told me so much aside from that Mamãe is sick and not doing well. I haven’t wanted to hear any more, either. I want to draw my own conclusions and hear about Mamãe’s illness from the family. And now here I stand, feeling both elated and scared stiff at the same time. We leave the car and start walking down the little paved slope, about one hundred fifty feet from the address where Mamãe lives. I’m holding on to Rivia’s hand tightly when, about thirty feet from the apartment building, I see three older women open the gate and step out onto the sidewalk.

  It’s strange how the brain works. It’s strange that a face you haven’t seen in twenty-four years and no longer remember is just suddenly there. I look at the three older women, and without a doubt I know which one is my mother. It’s also funny how the body can behave. Without my brain having had a chance to send any conscious signals to it, my body has already started walking toward Mamãe. I see her smile, and I recognize that smile from when I was little. I look her in the eye and see love and warmth there. I hear her talking to me and recognize her voice, even if I don’t understand what she’s saying now. We hug and I feel my eyes well up, but I hold back the tears. It’s strange that a person can maintain so much control while at the same time things just happen that are out of one’s control. I take a step back and greet the other two women, Mamãe’s sisters, Vitoria and Elsa. There’s something familiar about Vitoria, and I realize she must have been the one who was there when I got my ears pierced. We hug, and they seem genuinely happy to see me. I hear my name, Christiana, over and over. I’m Christiana here and no one else. It feels weird, but good.

  I hug Mamãe again, and Rivia has already started translating. My family welcomes her just as warmly. While Rivia chats with the others, Mamãe and I get a few seconds to ourselves. I look at her. The woman who was so tall when I was little is now shorter than I am. She has short, curly black hair streaked with silver here and there. Her eyes are dark brown, her teeth straight and beautiful, and I realize they’re false. She looks like she’s generally doing pretty well. She has big ears, well, bigger than my own measly ones, anyway. We look a lot alike, and I see the similarities between her and Patrick, my brother, even more. Mamãe and I have the same nose, and without my thinking about it, my right hand has traveled up to the right side of my upper lip, and I poke and dab at it with my index finger a few times. I look at Mamãe again. Mamãe smiles and says something. She speaks slowly and sounds a little forced. Rivia explains that she says she used to have a big beauty mark there and had it removed. I smile. Now I know what was missing. Mamãe is wearing a colorful dress that goes to her knees and over that a pink cardigan. She’s pretty. She looks happy. I chose a pair of black shorts and an orange top. The dresses I packed just for this moment are still sitting in my trunk of a suitcase. We decide to go into the apartment, and as we all walk up the stairs, I feel an enormous frustration that I don’t understand the language. Everything depends on Rivia now. God, how grateful I am to have her here. I think that I must have done something right to have such a wonderful friend.

  The door opens, and we step into a nice, bright apartment. On the white wall immediately to our left, the family has put up countless pieces of paper on which they’ve written various things. I understand a number of them: “Welcome Home,” “Joy,” “Happiness,” and they’ve made lovely drawings on the slips of paper. I stop by one of them and see that they’ve drawn the Swedish flag and the Brazilian flag, with the words “Family United” between them. That makes my eyes well up again. It means so much to me that they drew the Swedish flag there and that they see our meeting as uniting. When I look at the two different flags, I see myself: my countries, my different families, my different friends, and my different lives. Mamãe sees my tears and all but apologizes for not crying herself. She says that she’s gone through so much in her life that she doesn’t cry very easily anymore. I give her the warmest smile I can and say that I really understand and that I can cry for us both. I don’t know how much of that Rivia manages to translate before my aunts get going at full speed.

  We walk into the little kitchen. I give Mamãe the present I brought for her, a yellow Bon O Bon box, the same kind that I once received from her at the orphanage so many years ago. Mamãe smiles and accepts it. Her eyes start to light up, but I’m not sure it’s because she remembers that those are the same chocolates she brought me when I was little. From the mischievous glint in her eyes, I can really tell she has a sweet tooth. My aunt comes running over with a worried look. She says that Mamãe is a diabetic. I nod and say I’d better take the box away from her. When we do that, Mamãe immediately looks displeased. I can’t help laughing as I notice that neither she nor I are people who hide our feelings very well. As I smile at Mamãe, I feel a little disappointed that she doesn’t seem to remember. Sad that something that came to mean so much to me didn’t mean as much to her. Still, there is something moving about the way she takes the box. Mostly I’m disappointed in myself. Here stands the woman who meant so incredibly much to me, and all I brought her was a box of chocolates! What am I, five years old or something? I should have bought her a pretty gold necklace with a locket and a picture of my brother and me. In all seriousness, can you imagine? A box of chocolates that might kill her or make her sick if she ate it! But the box of chocolates really was the most obvious choice for me. I associate it with one of my most wonderful memories from the orphanage. And I wanted to show Mamãe that I remember, that I value everything she did for me, and that I really am her daughter who’s come back. Sure, I’ve changed a lot, but I’m her daughter.

  We get a short tour of the apartment, and Mamãe shows me her bedroom. She sits down on the bed and says that she wants me to sleep there with her tonight. It hits me how naturally she suggests that, and I feel so much warmth for her, sitting there on her bed. I wonder if I feel so comfortable with her because of everything we’ve been through, the history we have together. Or whether it’s because I recognize her style so well. She’s just like I remember her: gentle, warm, stubborn, nice, funny, loving, and at the same time I can see the temper. I see myself in her in many ways. But I think most of all I feel so comfortable with Mamãe because she’s just like I remember her being when she was my security, my love, and my everything.

  I smile and say that I have a hotel room but that in the future, when I come visit, we can sleep here together. She looks a little disappointed, but I tell her that there’ll be more visits. I don’t feel ready yet. After all, so many years have passed, and I need time, time to digest and time to catch up and understand all the emotions that are surfacing.

  We walk back to the kitchen where my aunts have laid out an enormous spread. We sit down and eat, and the homemade food is fantastic: chicken, rice, little empadinhas with various fillings, vegetables, olives, meat, more meat, and che
ese puffs. Of course, we drink Skol, a Brazilian beer, with the food. In the midst of the hum of voices, I think, Here I am now, sitting here with my mother and my family, but I don’t speak Portuguese. On the spot, I make up my mind to start studying Portuguese as soon as I get home. It’s bizarre how a language can just disappear from your head. I glance gratefully at Rivia. What if she weren’t here interpreting? It pleases me that my family took such a quick liking to her, and she to them. We eat the good food while chatting about years gone by.

  I find out that Mamãe spent another fourteen years living on the street after Patrick and I were adopted. It makes me sad to hear that life was so hard on her for so long. My aunts and my mother are all speaking over one another as they tell the story now. I ask a simple question that requires a yes or no, and I receive a long account of everything conceivable. My friends often tell me that I do this same thing. Rivia says that’s the Brazilian way. In all their stories, I try to fish out and understand the things I’ve wondered about, the details I want to know. My mother left Patrick and me at the children’s home, thinking at first, she explains, that it was a school. When Patrick and I were adopted to Sweden, she didn’t know where we were, and no one would tell her anything. My aunts hadn’t known that Patrick and I were at the children’s home, and when they found out and went there to pick us up, they discovered it was an orphanage and that we had been adopted. The orphanage staff told my aunts we weren’t there anymore, but no one told them where we’d gone. For the last twenty-four years, no one in my family has known where we were or even if we were still alive. I listen as they talk, and I feel sad. Imagine not knowing where your children are, not knowing whether they’re alive.

  Vitoria says that Mamãe usually talks to me every night when she goes to bed and that sometimes Vitoria jokes around with her, sticking her head in the door and pretending to be me. She says that she and Mamãe laugh then, and that warms my heart just as much as it pains me to know that she talks to me in the evenings. I want to tell Mamãe that over the years I’ve talked to her, too, and to tell her about all the times when I’ve done something or been scared and heard her voice in my head. But I remain quiet. There’s too much to take in and navigate, and I hope that we’ll have more opportunities in the future to talk to each other properly.

  Mamãe says that she used to roam around, searching for Patrick and me. In her attempts to find us, she walked around São Paulo, wandered back to Diamantina, and tried the places where we used to sleep. I ask how long she did that, and the answer hurts me. Vitoria says that my mother has never stopped. They have often found her barefoot, wandering the streets with bloody feet, and when they’ve picked her up and brought her back, she’s disappeared again, back out there searching for us. Vitoria says that from the day my mother moved in with her, one of my cousins would sometimes take my mother out in the car and just drive around for hours so she could search for her children. Mamãe nods and says that she knew I would come back one day. I smile and say of course I would.

  What I still don’t understand is why no one was told what happened to us. I think the most humane thing the orphanage and the Brazilian courts could have done would have been to let my mother and her family know that we’d been adopted and that we were in Sweden. That would have spared my mother from so much suffering. I picture her wandering the streets with her feet bleeding and feel pain and sorrow.

  Vitoria says that she’s been my mother’s guardian for ten years now. Then I ask her about my mother’s illness. Vitoria says that Mamãe is a diabetic and that she needs injections every day. They have to keep a close eye on her diet, and that’s not easy because Mamãe has a sweet tooth and is fond of fatty foods. Mamãe interjects that she doesn’t like lettuce. I laugh and say that I love lettuce, it’s soooo good. Mamãe gives me a playful look as if to say I’m a traitor to the cause, and then shoos me away with her hand. I laugh. It feels so natural to be around her. But now that I’ve seen her and spent a little time with her, I understand that diabetes isn’t the only thing she’s suffering from. Vitoria says that Mamãe takes medicine for schizophrenia. A thousand thoughts pop into my head. I try to concentrate. This is tough news to hear, and I do my best to suppress my disappointment. I ask what it’s like for Mamãe to live with the disease. Vitoria says that the medicine helps, but that Mamãe sometimes sees people the rest of us can’t see. I ask her when the disease began, and Vitoria says that they think it was sometime around when I was born or a few years after that. I quickly try to process what I’ve heard. I have time to realize that I’m almost the same age Mamãe was when she had me. If I have children, what are the odds that they could inherit this? What if I get sick, too? But most of all, I think about how much of a struggle my childhood was, how I defended my mother, how much I wanted to be with her, and what a shock it was to read confirmation in the paperwork I found as an adult that she was mentally ill. Now they’re confirming that this is true, and that she was probably already ill when I was little. I look over at Mamãe and wonder if all those times when I was left on my own had something to do with her illness. I picture us wandering through the wilderness. I’m tired and my feet hurt and they’re covered with sores and aching, but Mamãe just keeps walking and tells me to keep up. Even though there are so many good memories, there are a few that I guess I’ve never really been able to make sense of. Maybe her illness explains these? I wonder. I remember Mamãe screaming hysterically for me outside the orphanage, and I wonder if the disease had something to do with that, too. That she did not successfully grasp what she was supposed to do, that she wasn’t told anything, that she didn’t make it to the court hearing. It’s painful to think about this; it brings up feelings of abandonment in me. I know that she never hit us, but she may have left me alone more than she would have needed to if she’d been completely healthy. But most of all, I wonder if on some level I didn’t always suspect that the orphanage was right about whether my mother was sick. I can’t help but think that maybe I’ve denied this as an adult because of my strong feelings of loyalty to my mother. I understand that as a child, I didn’t know better. But the older I got, it was like I held on even tighter to my denial even though there was a little voice inside me that said otherwise. Even though there were some memories that I couldn’t make sense of. I didn’t want it to be true, and the only way of holding the doubt at bay was to never even give the slightest credence to that nagging voice that said, Maybe? It’s hard to admit that I fell victim to the power of denial. Naïve of me, I realize, but at the same time, I see how it also served its purpose. The denial helped me survive. But it hurts when that perfect glass bubble turns out to be cracked. As a child, I wanted to see everything as black or white, and I didn’t know any better. Thanks to my pigheadedness, I refused to listen to the little whisper in my head that wondered about Mamãe’s mental health as I got older.

  Mamãe says God came to her and told her to leave us at the children’s home. She says that if she’d known we would be taken away from her, she wouldn’t have listened to him. I give her a smile. I have no idea what else to do. I can’t just say to her that I’m grateful that “God” told her to do that, because the truth is, I am. I feel cleft in two. In a way, I’m disappointed because I still don’t know how much we’ll be able to communicate and what her disease really means for us. At the same time, I’m incredibly impressed that despite her illness, she was able to give me love and warmth and an upbringing and a strong sense of loyalty. I know that these feelings have saved me many times in my life. But most of all, I’m impressed at Little Christiana, who in the middle of all this—in the caves, on the streets, and in the slums—actually survived. For the first time in my life, I realize just what I’ve survived and how proud I am of that little girl who fought so hard.

  Suddenly, Mamãe asks about Patrick again. She’s done that several times now. It makes me happy. There’s no mistaking her love, which I’ve always felt.

  A lot of things come to light during our conversation. I fin
d out that my biological father’s name was Beto and that he was murdered when I was little. I can tell from the way Mamãe talks about him that she really loved him. I try to map out my new-and-old-at-the-same-time family. My mother’s mother gave birth to twenty children. “Or, wait now,” Vitoria says, and starts debating with her older sister, Elsa, whether there were twenty or twenty-one children. Rivia and I exchange an astonished glance. I ask Rivia to ask my aunts how many cousins I have, and they look at each other in surprise, wave their arms around, and say that they’ve stopped counting. There goes my idea of trying to look up all my cousins.

  Everyone is talking over everyone else, but obviously Mamãe’s parents lived in Diamantina. They were pretty comfortable. My maternal grandfather was a generous man. When people needed help, he would loan them money, but he rarely got it back. So little by little, he had loaned out so much that his own family wound up in dire straits. One day when my mother, the youngest of that whole flock of children, was four years old, he took his own life. He shot himself in the head. My grandmother was left on her own with all those children, and she died two years later when my mother was six. Then my mother had to go to Rio de Janeiro, where she lived with her brother. No one really seems to want to tell the whole story. I can tell they don’t feel comfortable, but they say that Mamãe’s brother had a drinking problem and that he didn’t treat my mother well. One day when she was fourteen, she literally jumped out the window to escape. Later, she had her first two children, my older brothers. I ask about them and learn that one is dead, and they don’t really know where the other one is. They also say that Mamãe had a son after Patrick and that a wealthy couple who couldn’t have children of their own offered her money for him. They offered her money and medical care during her pregnancy and then took the baby. When Mamãe changed her mind and wanted to return the money and get her son back, it was too late. I ask where he is today, but they don’t know anything about him. I still remember the scar from the caesarian section that Mamãe showed me during one of her visits to the orphanage when I asked after my new little brother, whom I called Erique. I remember that I wanted to see him, at least once, so I would know what he looked like and know who he was.