Things that I can’t write about right now

I didn’t notice how I started crying. I had been cutting down a story about deaths in a Russian orphanage specifically designed for the children of female inmates – children born in captivity, like tiger cubs in a zoo (though tiger cubs generally get better treatment). Space on the page was limited, 300 words or so needed to go. I was busy making my usual choices – cut down on some of the details? Trim some of the longer quotes? – when I was surprised to find tears cascading down my face.

“Well, damn,” a voice said inside my head.

Someone passed along a link to the infamous video of Judge William Adams beating his screaming, terrified daughter. I was roughly a minute and a half through before I had to turn it off and look at pictures of cats on the internet.

The voice inside my head became less charitable. “How do you expect to cover the news anymore?” It snapped. “Oh em gee, I’m a mommy now! Somebody get me to cover the more appropriate stories! Like the Moore-Kutcher divorce!”

I pretended as though I didn’t hear and scoured the internet for cheap offers on televisions (“Skyrim” is out and I NEED a new TV).

That voice and I – we’ll need to have a chat eventually, though. We will have to reach some sort of impasse. Our constant bickering is bound to get people to start looking at us kinda funny.

In my last play, I made fun of the “hormonal mommy syndrome,” or, rather, society’s reactions to it – but I am also one of those people who makes fun of the things she believes in (see my previous post on religion, for example). I also refuse to believe that hormones are 100% to blame for increased sensitivity following the birth of a child – after all, you end up getting a completely different perspective on life, and it can take a long while to get used to it.

As I dress my child for bed, I hold and kiss his flailing little arms and legs, the little arms and legs that formed inside me for all of those months, and I marvel at the fact that anyone could ever want to harm this pudgy, energetic little body – whether through deliberate neglect, or worse. I am amazed that violence should even exist outside of movies and video games, somehow tricking my own brain into blotting out the entire concept behind how the human race has come to dominate planet Earth. I go full Godwin on myself – wasn’t Hitler once a helpless, toothless, adorable being who grinned at his mother as she picked him up from his crib? Nature has made me invest heavily into life, and so I find it harder to contemplate violent death.

Young filmmaker Madina Mustafyina, part of the same project that allowed my husband to shoot “Katya, Vitya, Dima,” shot a documentary about a family of bums living outside a village in Kazakhstan. These two odious alcoholics have somehow managed to give birth to a pretty little girl, Milana. Seven-year-old Milana and her parents live in the woods. The mother experiences random, completely unpredictable bouts of primitive aggression. She hits the daughter right on camera. The daughter screams and begs and promises to be good. Later, Milana takes sadistic pleasure in trying to feed a captured bird to a dog. “I will kill you!” She rages at the bird. The bird – small, helpless, dirty – is Milana herself.

When Milana’s mother gets extremely drunk (as opposed to her usual state of being, which oscillates between somewhat drunk and very drunk) and stalks off into the woods to hang herself, Milana screams and begs the other adults to stop her, which they eventually do.

Would Milana have been better off in an orphanage? You know, the sort of place where she would be neglected by the underpaid staff and possibly allowed to choke on her own vomit? What does it say about our world when a small child like Milana essentially has two choices: batshit parents or a batshit state care system? The questions hang in the air. Not even “Skyrim” quite drowns them out at the moment.

These are the things that I can’t write about right now. I’m writing about them anyway.

“Oh, you’re RELIGIOUS”

Mom and Lyovka and I. Lyovka's Christening. Kiev. Summer 2011.

I think religion can be pretty ridiculous. That’s why I’m part of one, truth be told. I believe the existence of the universe points to the existence of a God – and said God has a sense of humour. Just look at babies. And dark matter. And the craziness associated with both.

At the christening this past summer, I remember worrying that Lev would poop himself during the proceedings. I remember the disapproval of the lady at the church service desk – Alexey and I being too uppity and “counter-culture” for her taste. I realized that the reason we took our son to be christened was, in part, the reason as to why we love life: life’s batshit nuts and full of contradictions. All you can do sometimes is stand with a lit candle in front of an icon and pray for the best,

Also, lol.

Baby lion is growing up

My parents are in town, so we ended up watching a bunch of our hospital videos that Alexey shot, and I was struck by this little creature, maybe half an hour old, at most, being encouraged by Anna the midwife to feed. “Come on, we need to get those reflexes going!” Anna keeps saying. “Come on, it’s about survival at this point!” But Lyovka is tired after being born and his face is saying, “Bugger off.” He knows he’ll get to feed later. He trusts mom and fate.

Babies change quickly. I remember what it was like with my brother, so it didn’t take me completely by surprise – but still, it leaves you pretty breathless. Lyovka’s new thing is cooing to me whenever I rock him to sleep. It’s like he’s got a bunch of things to get off his chest before he settles down for his nap.

One of the Best Things Ever is waking up with him in the morning – when he starts looking for me and then finds me, and grins widely, like I’m the most awesome person that he’s ever seen. Both Alexey and I try not to let it go to our heads. Before long, Lyovka will have his own hobbies and political opinions, and mom and dad will just be these two annoying people who exist solely to embarrass him. Until then, we’re busy learning to play with various rattles and discovering the joys of Ray William Johnson (it’s never too early for dick jokes and cat videos, is what I think).

So I read Janet Reitman’s “Inside Scientology” recently

And have been slow to put up anything up about it – mostly because I’m, you know, a mother to an infant, a full-time working journalist, and kind of a proper playwright nowadays as well.

The book has stayed with me, though, and I feel compelled to say at least something, if not write a proper review.

I think we all ought to be grateful to Reitman for attempting to write a dispassionate book on the Church of Scientology. I understand that a lot of the teachings of Scientology are supposed to be this Terribly Important Secret, but as both a member and a fan of the Russian Orthodox Church in all of its wacky glory, it seems to me that Scientology is really no more insane than the rest of humanity’s major cults. I still think L. Ron Hubbard was mostly a con artist (based on the compelling evidence put together by the writers at one of my favourite websites), but certainly some of the stuff he wrote ended up helping a lot of people and whatever, more power to them. And for all of the people who are bitching and moaning about how Scientology made Tom Cruise into a weirdo – no. Just no. Dude was always a weirdo. You can see it in his smile from way back when. Scientology just helped him get in touch with the inner freak inside.

Still, Reitman is right to point out that the way Scientology is currently run makes it ripe for criticism – both from random outsiders who are staring at it in that whole “check out this fascinating slo-mo trainwreck” type of way, and from ex-members. So I’m betting that there will be proper Protestant Scientologists and Puritan Scientologists and, you know, Calvinist Scientologists soon enough, i.e. the church is splitting.

People looking for Shocking! Horrifying! Facts! are probably going to be disappointed with Reitman. She doesn’t trade a whole lot on rumour and her tone is dry. Perhaps the biggest revelation here is that for a non-believer, Scientology is really not that fascinating – in a sense that non-believers who are looking to be fascinated are going to gravitate towards reading about fringe cults who sacrifice their elderly to Jeff, the God of Biscuits, instead.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about Scientology is how, by virtue of a whole lot of secrecy, church leadership has managed to cover up the fact that it’s fairly bland. Even if you account for all of that Xenu and exploding volcanoes stuff. In a world that already has Kali and Hades and stoning evil apostates – is Scientology really that impressive? I guess the price-tags for some of the spiritual packages it offers surely are. In this economy, anyway.