Naked truth chapter 7 - arriving on planet Earth
No welcoming committee in sight
Martha never wanted children. In truth, the thought had never even brushed her mind. Parenthood, like marriage, was a foreign concept, distant and irrelevant. Odd, perhaps, but looking back, it made perfect sense. She had been too consumed by survival, navigating the hostile terrain of her life, too scarred by trauma to entertain the idea of escape. Every drop of her energy was spent playing the saviour—caught between two warring souls, forever trapped in the chaos of her parents' endless and traumatic battles.
She had been constantly preoccupied with being “good”—first the good girl, then the good daughter—constantly striving to meet impossible expectations. And yet, no matter how hard she tried, she failed in Ferret’s eyes. And the more she failed, the harder she tried. It was an endless cycle, like a butterfly tangled in a spider’s web, or Mowgli caught in the hypnotic coils of Kaa. There was no escape.
"I’ve struggled so much with you," Martha recalled Ferret saying, one of her most cherished lines. It was a phrase she repeated like a mantra, a verbal weapon that froze Martha in her tracks every time she heard it, as if it held the power to silence her, to diminish her, a secret expression like in the “Manchurian candidate”. Sometimes it felt as if the Ferret was a mind control specialist punishing her and her father in equal measure.
The truth is that the Ferret had expected someone else at the maternity ward—a rosy-cheeked, golden-haired cherub. Instead, she had been faced with a "dark, long and skinny, long-haired, ugly beyond words, looking like a monkey" baby, screaming with all her might. The story had been retold to Martha countless times, always the same. It seemed her appearance had shocked Ferret so deeply that she refused to touch her, feed her, hold her for two days straight. Even the matron had commented, saying she had never witnessed such a reaction from a mother in her entire career.
When Martha dared, on rare occasions, to ask why—why this revulsion, why this rejection?—Ferret never hesitated. “But it’s the truth,” she would say, without a trace of remorse. “You were so ugly and dark-skinned, I feared you’d look like your grandmother, your father’s mother, Dumitra. She was short, ugly, dark like a Gypsy.
Those words, crafted as an explanation, only cut deeper, each syllable a sharp dagger embedding itself in Martha’s heart.
Ferret would often continue, “When I took you for a walk in your pram—those long, horizontal ones that made you look like a sleeping doll—I could see people approaching, their heads bending in for a closer look. I knew their murmured praises of ‘so cute’ were nothing more than empty lies, uttered out of societal habit. They all could see the truth. . They all could see how ugly you were but what could they say? They pitted me.”
According to Ferret, when Martha was just a few months old, her skin had begun to peel like a sunburned patch of skin, the dark exterior flaking away to reveal a paler hue beneath, a transformation that seemed to shock the mother even more.
From time to time, for good measure, Ferret felt the need to remind her, “Your father never wanted children” but I did. And when he finally accepted this reality, he would have preferred a boy. But Martha knew her father well; he never made her feel unwanted or like she was the wrong choice. Never.
“I had nobody to leave you with,” she would add, her voice a mix of complaint and accusation. “From the time you were three months old, you started staying with nannies—so many that I lost count.” None of them were professional caregivers; they were whatever help she could find—a young girl from the countryside seeking a better life, a distant relative who tried to assist but for only a short time, an elderly lady who apparently stayed for a year, whom apparently I used to call Grandma. Interestingly, Ferret would ask Martha on two occasions, “How come you don’t remember that elderly nanny? You were three and loved her very much!” Three? I have almost no memories of my childhood—nothing until I was seven and even then, nothing but scattered fragments without much head or tail. Nothing.
Grandmother Dumitra lived far away, about an eight-hour journey by train—a daunting task for an elderly woman who rarely left her village. With a yard brimming with animals—hens, pigs, and geese—and a vegetable garden demanding her attention, she had her hands full just to provide for herself. Yet, summoned to Bucharest by Ferret’s insistence, Dumitra was dragged into a web of obligation, caught in Ferret’s manipulative grasp. She only stayed for two weeks and left in tears. Knowing what she knew Martha was not surprised.
Other times, she would recount with fervour how she had thrown one of the girls down the staircase along with her suitcase late at night because the girl had allowed Martha to grab a lightbulb, burning her skin in the process. These were fragments of memory, all tinged with sadness and drama—nothing joyful at any time.
Martha had nobody to share her pain or make sense of the words spoken by the Ferret with such heaviness and conviction. A little girl burdened by those words as dark as the night, she ended up not being allowed to be a child but was forced into the role of a young adult, constantly striving to behave impeccably, always proper.
She often felt like a shadow of herself, molded by others' expectations and the oppressive weight of unspoken traumas. The relentless pressure to perform and please left little room for her to explore her own identity or process the deep emotions swirling inside her.
Oh wait—she suddenly remembered a rare positive remark from the Ferret: “Until you were five, you were an ideal child. You did what you were told, ate nicely, and wiped your mouth constantly.” But after five, you changed; you went mad. Those words echoed in her mind, a chilling reminder of the fragile line between acceptance and rejection.
The Ferret’s insistence on perfection mirrored the society around them during a tumultuous period in Romania’s history. The late 1960s were marked by ambitious industrial development plans set forth by the Communist Party, which needed a growing population to fuel its goals. Starting in 1966 and continuing until 1989, abortions were banned by a special decree, creating an open filed of desperation and unbelievable pressure for many women.
The prohibition had a devastating effect, burdening families with unwanted children and straining already cramped living conditions. Families were divided, pressure mounted on schools and hospitals, and the societal fabric frayed under the weight of unfulfilled dreams and hidden pain. For whatever reason, Martha’s generation became known as the second generation of the "decree children," a label that carried the weight of countless struggles.
During this horrendous time, nearly 10,000 women died due to botched illegal abortions, while compassionate doctors, nurses found themselves imprisoned for assisting desperate women who lacked access to contraception and faced unwanted pregnancies. The atmosphere was thick with fear and hopelessness, as women fought for autonomy over their own bodies in a system that saw them merely as vessels for population growth.
Amid this chaos, families with multiple children were glorified by the government, hailed as "hero mothers," especially those with ten children or more. They were used as examples of loyalty to the state, while their sacrifices and struggles remained largely unrecognized. This celebration of overpopulation stood in stark contrast to the quiet suffering of women like Martha’s mother, who faced the burden of a society that valued numbers over well-being.
Martha’s own existence was a testament to this harsh reality. She often wondered how different her life might have been had her mother been given the choice—a choice to embrace motherhood on her own terms rather than out of obligation. Instead, Martha became the vessel for the Ferret’s unprocessed pain, a living reminder of the decisions she never got to make.
With every reprimand, Martha felt the weight of unfulfilled expectations, a haunting reflection of a mother’s silent struggles. She sensed the Ferret's regrets swirling like a storm cloud, threatening to engulf her. Those turbulent emotions manifested in her upbringing; instead of nurturing warmth, there was a coldness that wrapped around her like a snake’s skin.
As Martha grew older, the tension in her home morphed into a suffocating silence. The impact of the Ferret's unresolved grief seeped into every corner of their lives, shaping Martha’s childhood into a labyrinth of broken souls. It was as if she had been handed a script with no clear direction, forced to act in a play she never auditioned for, in a life she did not recognise.
Children like Martha often carry the burdens of their mothers’ unexpressed emotions, becoming custodians of pain and loss. They navigate the world with heightened sensitivity, trying to fill voids that were never meant to be theirs to fill. The struggle for identity becomes a poignant battle, as they attempt to distinguish their own desires from the shadows cast by their parents' unfulfilled lives.
In her solitude, Martha realised that the scars of those choices ran deep, shaping her perception of love, acceptance, and self-worth.
Until next time, be well!
End of chapter 7
One of my dreams is to write a novel, inspired by real events but with a touch of fiction in it. Will it happen? I don’t know! Writing as and when I find the energy and time while navigating the choppy waters of life.
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