Bergen Rose

Yesterday I cried all day. Some chemical concoction in my brain/body resulted in a lot of WAH. Just ask Andy. I was so fuckin sad that the boys were not near me. Later that evening, over paella with friends whose two kids were at sleepovers (the couple was happily alone at home), Andy said to me, “You look tired.” “Yeah,” I replied, “crying all day is hard work.” “Crying?” my friend, Andrea, looked at me. “About what?” “Just that I don’t see my babies three days a week.” “I’d cry too,” said Andrea, looking into my eyes. And she wasn’t just trying to make me feel better. No matter how much we complain, it just feels better, more right, when we’re with our kids.

Lots of people joke that my situation is ideal. We can all use a break from our kids. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” my friend Cate asked me today (she’s known me for 27 years). “More time to yourself?” “Yeah,” I replied. “But not three days a week!”

Anyway, I think there’s gotta be some hormones involved that get out of whack when I’m not with the kids.

Because, even though I often enjoy myself, on a deep, subtle, cellular level, the separation torments me. Sometimes I don’t feel it so bad. But, yesterday, lying face down on my yoga mat, weeping, the pain was intense. And, hey, sisters, we all know what them out-of-whack chemicals can do to one’s mascara.

So, what do I do when I’m not with the boys?

Here’s a list I made a few weeks ago:
Cry
Work, feel good
Play, feel guilty
Feel guilty, cry
Cry, make love, laugh, feel good
Feel good, feel guilty
Cry
Resolve to move forward
Move forward, feel good
Feel good, feel guilty
Feel guilty, cry
Repeat, ad nauseum
Write
Write, become stronger
Feel good
Become productive
Become happy
Become confident
Love them with I’m with them
And also when I’m not.

It’s grief I experience, pure and simple, something you can’t control or predict. At best, I’m starting to manage it. Gotta make the best of it, don’t I? I mean -- I had an ancestor who wrote poetry in the Gulag.

Bernhard Bergen was my grandmother Katharina’s brother. A robust and likeable fellow by all accounts, he survived being impaled by a pitchfork during a friendly lunch hour wrestling match on the farm. He trained as a Mennonite minister in Germany in the 1920’s, which gave him many strikes in Stalin’s eyes: he was German speaking, he was religious, and he came from a landowner class.

The Mennonites’ bucolic way of life came to an end during the Russian Revolution. Many Mennonites, like my grandmother Katharina and her husband Johannes, were lucky to get out before Stalin clamped down. They came to Canada in 1925 and raised ten children here, first in southern Manitoba during the Depression, and then in southern Ontario. That’s where my mom, Susanna, met Peter, my father. My dad, also a Mennonite, came to Canada from the Ukraine after World War Two. My dad was eight when he and his family walked from the Ukraine to Germany, following the retreating German army (some of the millions of Displaced People after that war, or DP’s as they were derogatively called when they got to Canada).

When they arrived in Germany, my great-grandmother Margarethe heard that they had landed in the Soviet-occupied sector and insisted that her clan move to the American sector. They did and my dad was able to come to Canada, which he lovingly called the Promised Land, whereas his cousin, who’d made the same trek but didn’t leave the Soviet-occupied sector at that crucial time, was exiled to a remote, inhospitable part of Russia.

Both men fathered six children. In the mid-80s, my dad and his cousin met in Canada, and shared their life stories. My dad cried when he told me of his cousin’s struggles for survival. My dad was so thankful he’d made it all the way to Kanada. Me too. Thanks to the hardy matriarch who insisted they couldn’t stop until they were safe, though they were sick, starving, exhausted, and entirely vulnerable.

In 1937, Bernhard Bergen, my mother’s uncle was exiled to Orenburg, an early outpost of the Gulag system of prison camps, located southeast of Moscow near what is now Kazakhstan. He was one of 1,245,000 people sentenced in the early 30’s during what has been called The Great Terror. 55,000 German Russians, like Bernhard, died. 20,000 were sent to prison camps in Siberia called Gulags.

There were three kinds of work camps: one was prison, another was hard labour, the third was “mere exile.” Bernhard was likely exiled, sent to a remote, inhospitable place and forced to exist while being engaged in infrastructure construction for the Soviet government. These exiles had to find food, and survived by planting and harvesting and preserving what they could. On June 20, 1937, Bernhard wrote that he got 4.5 kg of flour. “Had the 356th place in line,” he wrote. “Yesterday there were 1300 of us waiting.” The next day, he reported, spirits were high in the camp.

In February of that same year, Bernhard wrote about his children. “Today everything is particularly difficult and trying,” he wrote. “When will the day come that I get a letter from my children? Who can explain such silence?” He suffered separation from his children in a much different context than I do. He didn’t know where they were or what became of them.

I know where the boys are at all times, and that their father is taking good care of them. Last week Secundo had infections in both his ears. Steph and I communicated about the little guy every day. Primo’s favourite Floppy (a bunny on a leash) moves from house to house, we track them together. And, hey, I’m writing chick lit when I’m not crying, or making love.

Bernhard Bergen wrote this poem in the summer of 1937, in a Gulag in Orenburgsche Kreis, 1,478 km southeast of Moscow, very close to the border of modern-day Kazakhstan.

Rose,
You, rose, that I spy,
you remind me of good times
when I swam in the goodness of life
without all this heavy suffering.

Now that time is past.My rose blooms no more.
My days have become dreary.
I feel that heated thorn severely.

In truth, the time of blooming passes quickly –
you don’t worry,
you bloom full of goodness.
The time of thorns passes quickly too.

The rose guards its thorns wisely.
A person walking by has only to see the rose and pluck it.
Understandably, the thorn, of course,
pricks him right there on the path.

So, I’ve come upon
this path of real, naked truth.
Enthusiasm gone,
as all my hopes for this life.

Still, a quiet, true faith in roses
-- which do bloom in summer --
(though someone who hopes for
flowers in winter might lose faith)
keeps me alive.

So bloom, rose, and bloom again.
Through the change and chaos of this time.
You provide the inspiration for my songs,
you speak to me in struggle and suffering.

And bloom also for my children.
Guard your thorns, too.
Bloom, bloom, be beautiful
until everything, finally, calms down.

Bergen Rose is the name I planned to give Primo, if he was a girl.