This week I explore how much occurred below the surface of my awareness as a child. I explore the link between the emergence of a brood of cicadas in my childhood with the collapse of my family. There is a creepy-kismet to how my life story is so intertwined with the saga of these strange, ancient and sacred bugs. They emerged again this year, just as I completed processing and writing the aftermath of that family collapse and came back to New York to read parts of my manuscript with my Polish family.
I am watching a six year old version of me come in and out of focus, the horizontal blips of a VHS tape buzzing in and out like black lasers from one side of the screen to the other. In a jilted high-pitched Polish, wrung down with a heavy American accent, I am explaining to the table of grown ups assembled on our back porch what I had learned about the creature that was climbing up my forearm, its’ alien eyes frightening my mom and making my dad shudder in his seat. The men ignore me, begin to talk about something else, the ice cubes in their glasses rattling against the glass tumblers, an invitation for my mom to top up their jack and cokes. On the bottom left corner, the data is seared into the image, September 1 1991.
In the undertow of my dad’s alcoholism, we were dragged out of that house and my family was left in shambles. Much of the damage was below the surface; my dad was arrested but escaped and the police were looking for him. Below the surface, he wanted that family life, and he blamed my mom for taking it away from him. Tata thought he was being swept out to sea, when in fact, he was the wave.
The cicada that was walking on my hand was from a brood that had been buried underground for seventeen years, when my parents were just teenagers in Warsaw. It was a straggler from the springtime, when the trees were heavy with their molted shells and carcasses. I was showing off the cicada and what I had learned about it, and my parents were showing off a house they were about to lose. We would be gone by spring, our big house empty and the backyard full of molted cicada shells, the next brood of eggs hidden underground again for another seventeen years.
Below the surface my mom wondered if she should have tried harder to save the marriage. She could have learned how to manage the finances and helped him with his business. Below the surface, she resented that my dad got to keep partying, keep sleeping around doing drugs when she had to stop. Maybe she should have sent her parents away sooner, Janusz hated having them there always prying and watching. She gave him an ultimatum; if you think you can handle the mortgage payments on your own then fine, I’ll quit my job and be a homemaker. I’ll cook you dinner every night and make you breakfast and do all the cleaning and take care of Patka. They tried to make it work, and she remembers it as the best year of her life. He tried to stop doing coke, tried to become a family man, but it was too late. Again and again he failed her.
The crash of the surf was when we moved to a new town. I didn’t see my dad for years. My mother was inconsolable,and as I looked out for him in the audience at every school play, knowing he would never be there; I blamed myself. It’s amazing how much was under the surface. But understanding the ocean doesn’t make the impact of the wave softer. I’m still on that shore as a seven-year-old girl, taking wave after wave after wave knowing that the ocean does not bring back what it has taken.
The cicada walking on my hand in the video from 1991 marked the end of my family together. Across the ocean the Soviet Union fell apart that year too. The nymphs that hatched and burrowed into the ground of my childhood home emerged again in 2008. By then my family had transformed again. That generation of cicadas birthed the ones that emerged this year, 2025.
It is the year that this story which became a book is finally emerging. If the story has a shape and form it would be wrapped around the burrowed nymphs from 2008 who are emerging now as I write this in 2025. Ninety-nine percent of the story was in the quiet painful changes between people. In the times we left and the ones we stayed. This messy explosion of words is what it was all building towards. Sometimes we call them cycles, sometimes we call them generations. Because some things take a long time for a reason.