On his walk. Which isn't really a walk, since he's not technically walking yet.
Since I haven’t yet figured out how to tackle the interview I recently gave (not the Forbes one, let’s just say that this was for an ostensibly feminist publication for now), or what to make of it, really.
Daddy bought Lev a wheel that lights up and makes music. When I’m not with the two of them, I’m busy writing about death. I’m staying in character, I guess.
Nowadays, a modern person has to be careful about implying that there is anything “unique” about motherhood. After all, you don’t want to imply that someone who is not a mother, or else not a mother in the traditional sense, has somehow been deprived of a unique experience.
The physiological aspects of traditional motherhood – gestating a person, giving birth to them, and then likely going on to nourish them with your body for some time – are pretty damn unique experiences. And there is a reason why people who have had these experiences tend to bond over them the way soldiers do.
But mommyhood, whether biological or otherwise, also affects different people differently. It has a tendency to change people – but in different ways. Some people become mothers – and, as a result, grow intellectually and spiritually and what have you. But motherhood can also expose your fundamental weaknesses and character flaws, and leave you face-to-face with your own shortcomings. Because it is physically and emotionally taxing, because it limits your lifestyle in some very basic ways, it can slough away at your illusions and whatever comfortable mythology you have built up around yourself in your years on earth. When you’re taking care of someone very small and vulnerable, and yet very demanding, you learn a lot about yourself, and not all of that knowledge will be comforting.
You’ll find that you have a lot of work to do on yourself – and not a whole lot of time and energy to do it.
Of course, every once in a while, you also go to the pool:
At the pool, you hand the baby to the husband (who, being a stereotypical husband, loves playtime), and reflect (haw haw) by the water for a bit.
How has motherhood changed me? Well, it has changed my body. It has rewired my brain – and honed my reflexes. It has rewritten something fundamental inside of me, some great big block of code that comprises that entity known as the soul. It has made me more attuned to suffering and injustice – behind every murder victim or every person illegally convicted in a corrupt court, I see someone’s small child, some little smiling face. It has made me more aware of the terror of nature, and the terror of fate, and yet less helpless somehow, because I have a dependent, I cannot crap out. It has made me more aggressive – something I would normally welcome, except that keeping my aggression in check is important when I go home in the evenings, and close the front door, and am alone with my family. The power I now possess must be used wisely, or else it can destroy my relationships.
I take more responsibility and yet live more dangerously. Or that’s how I feel, anyway.
A childless (not to be confused with childfree – that’s not how she identifies herself) friend recently admitted that she was “scared” of me or “scared to end up like [me]” – she wasn’t sure which. I think those feelings are normal. At 25, when I first started longing for a child, I would have been scared of my future self too. She’s got bigger boobs that don’t fit into any of her old clothes, a leaner wallet and a meaner attitude. She can sing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” with a straight face.
Especially in a town like Moscow.
The grass is green again. Little boys wear hoods with ears.
I’ve written a brilliant pop song, called “Such a cutie.” Unfortunately, I can only sing it to Lev to the tune of “Where’s your head at.”
He doesn’t seem to mind.
P.S. When I’m not cuddling him in my free time, I’m writing stuff like this. People keep telling me that it’s hard for them to reconcile my status as a young mother with the kind of columns I write. But I don’t think it ought to be. Young mothers need to keep their eyes on the ghosts. And the darkness.
I was in the U.S. Embassy applying for a new passport for Lyovka the other day.
If you’ve been in Moscow long enough, you’re struck by how efficient and friendly the staff at the U.S. Embassy tend to be (on a sidenote: when my Russian husband and I were getting our paperwork approved at the Foreign Ministry in order to get married on Russian soil, everyone was also really efficient and friendly as well – and that’s when it strikes you, the huge difference between the Foreign Ministry and the Federal Migration Service. The former is alright. The latter is Mordor). Nobody’s angry at you for showing up. If you couldn’t print the PDF form, they just provide you with one. There are comfy chairs in the waiting room. There’s a playroom too – where I nursed Lyovka last August.
At the security post. U.S. Marines watch you with their feet propped up. You wonder how they get on in the city. You want to go home. You remember that you no longer have one. “We’re women, our choices are never easy.”
I always knew that I would leave North Carolina one day, but not before it rewrote my DNA, made the arrow in my inner compass point ever westward. North Carolina is a chronic illness. The outbreaks are always inconvenient.
And there is so much death on the news. You want it to be meaningful – it is not. You want to mythologize death – it will not be mythologized. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors kill infants through neglect – and grandly tell the mother frozen in the hospital corridor that “but you gave birth to a very sick child, we have all of the necessary paperwork – that we just made up to cover our asses.” People spend their days killing other people and go home to their families in the evening – talk shows scream from the windows of their apartments. The old are always burying the young.
You need permits to do anything, permits to live, permits to breathe – and yet no one needs a permit to stomp a bloody trail through someone else’s life. It just happens. These things happen. “We wanted what was best – it turned out like always.” Shrug.
When he sleeps in his mustard-colored pajamas, Lyovka looks a bit like a squash. After we put him to bed, we drink wine. If my husband is off working on a movie, I’ll write. Self-righteous middle-aged American women who may or may not drive SUV’s but tend to have “accepted Christ as their personal savior” send me nasty messages on Facebook – because I became a mother without asking Sallie Mae for permission. “I would have never had children if I were still in debt!” “Enjoy your rootless existence, watching your child grow up without a home!”
Lyovka’s concept of home is currently defined by me and his father. When he made his first trip to the Embassy, he spent most of it sleeping in his sling, tied tightly to my body like a baby kangaroo. “Can I see him?” The consular staff member asked. I came closer to the glass. This was official procedure. His birth was being recorded – we were notifying the government of his existence.
“Wow. What a peaceful sleeper.”
Two countries mingled within him, borders rearranged, and he slept on.
Despite being broke and living in the jungles of Novogireyevo.
Lev and I listen to the Marriage of Figaro on Saturday mornings.
At night, I can leave Lev with daddy and go trudging through the snow. The soldiers outside the barracks near the ponds still offer me their cigarettes. Nikolay Khomeriki still tells me all the same things when he’s drunk (and he still doesn’t know who I am).
Most of the time I’m just bloated with bags under my eyes, and with high blood pressure, and with distant plans to “get myself together” one of these days – but I also don’t hate myself. I wouldn’t have the energy to do so even if I tried.
I walk by the frozen ponds in the dark, and listen to the sound of the highway mingling with the sound of the winter woods. The birches and oaks are asleep and, at the same time, they are watching. I come hope and peel off layers of clothing, and Lev is asleep in his crib, and we drink discounted wine and make no plans for the future. We’re learning to live in the here and now.
…And Holy God, it is amazing how much Lev looks like his father here. Like, we broke out some of Alexey’s old baby pictures and had a look recently – and it is ridiculous, how physically similar father and son are (though the forehead and the hair are clearly mine, all mine ).
Incidentally, Sasha is oddly modest about the photographs she takes. Modesty is great and all, but in her case, it just ain’t right. This woman has somehow managed to immortalize some of the biggest moments of my life and done that in a way that actually makes me want to go back and look “at that photo taken of me right after The Worst Break-Up Ever” or “that photo we took when I felt as though I was about to DIE.” I don’t have that kind of talent with the camera and am flattered to be her occasional model.
I have to spend 13 hours on a packed train with a baby very shortly. The baby is in a screamy mood.
I need time and space to finish my book and I do not have these things.
You know what, I wish my jaw would stop hurting. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK, JAW?
I’m tired of fretting as to what kind of a future our son is going to have. I mean, he won’t have a trust fund! What kind of parents are we?!
I’m tired of fighting.
I missed a deadline with a play because I am too tired and because I have writer’s block. My head feels as though it’s made of cotton wads.
I hadn’t noticed Caitlin Flanagan’s sexist, presumptuous article about Karen Owen and Duke last year – I was busy becoming a parent and such – but it has since been pointed out to me. The odd thing about Flanagan is that she would be a really good writer, if she were a little more brave and a little less of a snob. If she didn’t extrapolate her own anxieties unto others, but focused on why she has them in the first place. Still, I’m tired of the fact that people like her launch writing careers after “holding forth” at dinner parties and so on, while the rest of us have to bust our asses. The only reason why I bring this up, of course, is Flanagan’s own sneering contempt for women who must bust their asses.
I’m extremely tired of being told that I am a bad parent by the people who are closest to me. I’m tired of hearing that “the baby is not developing properly” when he’s developing nicely according to every single damn source I have read. So how about you keep your “helpful advice” to yourselves, bastards? Before you take an arrow to the knee, and such.
I miss sleep. I mean real sleep here. Not the fake bullshit that passes for sleep around here.
I’m tired of not having a proper home, one that at least feels like home. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I am not a very fancy person, no matter what rumours you may have heard. I would like a balcony onto some quiet dvor. And think that the real estate bubble in Moscow was and is a crime against humanity.
I’m tired of visas and work-permits and constantly feeling as though I am on the edge of some bureaucratic disaster.
Incidentally, I want to take a sledgehammer to Russian bureaucracy.
I’m tired of uncertainty and really wish my hair would style itself.
Hysterical gif is hysterical:
One:
And two:
Happy New Year, guys! Let’s hope it’s a good one, etc.
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