Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe

Author:Rudy Wiebe [Wiebe, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36713-6
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 1999-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

Dwa and I were killing each other slowly and we knew it. Something was building up, it was inevitable, and in fall 1988 he went north to Yellowknife on a job and just stayed there that winter till spring break-up. Moved in with a girlfriend he found. In Wetaskiwin I had the kids—he talked to them sometimes on the phone—and the house, did odd jobs, went on welfare, and it was dreadful. We couldn’t live together, but we couldn’t live without each other either.

Other than Dwa, the largest part of my gathering disaster was Leon. I knew what I had to fear from him when he came to visit, but I also felt that with him my children were in particular danger, though I did not quite know how. I remembered that when he was small and started to steal in Butte he began to wet his bed at night, and now he always slept with a light on: how was that dangerous? I could not fathom my fears, but I tried to turn them inside out, as it were expose them by doing the opposite to what I feared. Once, when Chantal was about five—the summer after Susan was born, 1987—she came running into the kitchen, waving her arms, “Mommy, Mommy,” she wanted so badly to tell me something.

But she had gone out to play before she finished cleaning her room, which she knew she must do every day, and I yelled at her.

She stopped, abruptly silent. I wanted to teach her something, I did not want to see her pain because discipline was in order; when I grew up a child had to be hit hard, immediately and quick to make it remember. I never treated my children that way, but as I yelled I watched her too and I saw the shine vanish from her face, her shoulders fall, her eyes so large with excitement grow small. She stood half-turned and silent, and my heart broke.

She was me, the little girl who never spoke. Head down, not daring to look up. What was happening inside her? I understood more about her than she needed to explain. I squatted down to her.

“Chantal, what’s the matter?”

She looked at me and I could see tears gather in her eyes.

“You hurt my feelings.”

I opened my arms and she came to me. I sat on the kitchen floor and rocked her in my lap and sang Christmas carols to her because I didn’t know any lullabies, and we cried. After a while I pulled a chair close and lifted her up onto it and we had a long talk. I told her I often felt the same way when I was little, but no one would take me in their arms; this mom stuff was all new to me; but she had me, maybe she could teach me something. She should tell me every time I hurt her feelings and we would cuddle and talk about it. I never, ever wanted her to feel alone.

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