You Say Grandpa, I Say Deda

I was born with two grandmothers but only one grandfather. In nature’s rules of familial supply and demand, my Deda (Russian for grandpa) is a priceless asset; a family value very much treasured.

While my relationship with Deda has spanned the course of three decades, our one-on-one interaction has always been slightly superficial. It seems that in retrospect most of our bonding has been when he had been sick in the hospital and I had come to visit. I’ve always suspected that our bond may be different if I was a boy, but nature dealt him three granddaughters and my sister, a tomboy through childhood, quickly became his favorite.

Grandparents stories are lessons, anecdotes, a light cast on the doubt of the past. I want to learn the details of the stories that, pieced together, define their multi-hued life. These tales, when retold, should show the future generation the vivacity and the strength of the thread that held this family together.

As my grandmother recently crossed the line from cancer victim to cancer survivor, I began to scrutinize the life she lived; the life she created and shared with my Deda. I try to imagine my grandparents’ lives as an expanding quilt of vividly colorful squares, each of life’s hurdles, a new vibrant patch.

I thought hard about my Deda’s life; the family patriarch. What did I really know about him? I know some of the idiosyncrasies of his personality; things that define Deda to me – descriptive phrases that pop up, word association-style when prompted with his name.

• Deda believes in tradition. He’s loyal and he believes in right and wrong, in commitment, in maintaining strong work ethic.
• Deda drinks only coffee and red wine. The former with breakfast, the latter with dinner.
• He loves his wife and he loves his family. As the cornerstones of his life, I think those are his truths and his strengths.
• True to his Russian roots, Deda likes to boast of his tolerance for pain. After an open-heart surgery, he continually bragged how he never pushed the self-controlled pain medications. Not once, he insisted. The IV drip stood next to his bed, an unused crutch.
• Deda loves to drive. My grandmother has never learned to drive and he prides himself on being her chauffeur. It is important for Deda to have purpose, to be useful. Retirement brought him to a darker place, a light most certainly dimmed in his eyes after he no longer had a job to go to.
• In Russia, they owned both a VW bug and a motorboat.
• Deda never held babies in the traditional baby-holding way. This includes his son, daughter, three granddaughters, and great-grandson. The only way he carried children, once they were old enough, was perched on top of his shoulders, as if in a game of Chicken.
• He has had 11 surgeries, including two for throat cancer. The second throat surgery left him forever without a voice box and with a permanent stoma – a hole in his neck, through which he breathes, coughs and sneezes. When he showers, if he gets water down his hole, he’ll choke – drowning himself. Deda now speaks robotically, yet emphatically, and with limited volume control, by applying an artificial speaking device to his neck.
• During his life in Russia, my grandfather served seven years in the air force unit of the Russian military. A month of his time there was spent in an army hospital with clinical laryngitis.
• Deda had one sister who died during the Second World War. This is one of our family’s most famous retold stories.

My grandfather’s sister, Biba, was madly in love and engaged to be married when her fiancé joined the Russian army during World War II. Devoted, he sent her letters every day for a year. Until one day he didn’t. Instead of a love letter, the mail brought a death certificate.

Biba was broken hearted – a love wasted, a future shattered. Loyal to a cause that was never truly his, she enlisted as a nurse at the war front. Two months later, the entire army hospital was bombed. Another death certificate arrived in the mail.

Several years after the war, when the world was a different place – everyone was displaced, lives were beginning and ending at the same time. The knock on my grandparents’ door was unexpected. My mother, then a young child answered the door to an unfamiliar man in a wheelchair. He was asking for Biba.

It was the fiancé. He wasn’t dead but she was. A family tragedy; our very own Romeo and Juliet.

At 82, Deda seems frustrated, sometimes even defeated. A new country forced upon him, a new language permeated his world, a new job starting from the very bottom. His voice stripped, his heart weakened, his family hurting when he couldn’t always solve their problems.

His life has been a series of events that has both strengthened him and left him feeling a bit conquered. I am sure that he does not view his life as a series of conquests over incredulous challenges. I am certain that he looks back at a path of struggle that in the end, left him weaker, and often silent.

Deep down I think Deda has a freak flag – or least a trunk full of secret memories that were only his. A life he lived before us – before he started planting the roots of our family tree.

For Andrew

Dear Andrew,

I saw this and thought of you. Turn the volume up and watch her crash into the pole.

xo,
G.

My son, the Digital Sand Artist

He liked. He created.
Mount Everest by Jacob Dylan, age 6.

My Russian American Dichotomy

I was a Russian girl and an American teenager. I had no choice about the first but I tried very hard to be the second. Now as a grown woman, I mostly deem myself a New Yorker. While I never truly considered myself an American, being a New Yorker encompasses more. New York has a special tolerance for Russians.

My immigrant story begins when I was five years old. I don’t recall a sense of fleeing from our home country or the idea that our life was difficult. As a child growing up in Kiev, I recall very little. I remember snapshots here and there, mostly stories retold that have tattooed themselves onto the childhood story log.

I remember getting my ears pierced when I was three years old. With gold studs in my ears, I descended sub ground to a quintessential ice cream parlor. I remember the dark wood paneling and the taste of the vanilla. The memory of that vanilla has solidified itself as the definition of vanilla perfection to me.

My grandmother, who came to America three years before us, used to send me clothes. My mother would then go on to dress me up in the fashionable American garb and pose me in front of the navy plaid wool blanket on our couch. To this day I have a portfolio of me as a mini Russian fashionista in bell-bottom jeans, short skirts, and sweaters of the itchiest caliber.

Yet sometimes there were style malfunctions. A roll of film serves as proof of our afternoon strolling through an urban Russian park. Me, a three-year-old with long hair on the swings, wearing as a complete outfit, American Popeye Underoos. My father developed all of my childhood photographs in our bathtub and my mother would send them to my grandmother as proof of wear.

My grandmother arranged the visa that got our family out of Russia. I remember very little of the immigration process. My mother packed the only life she had known into a couple of suitcases and moved to a foreign country that made no promises beyond hope. She was 25 years old. I am now 34 years old with my own 6 year old and cannot imagine confronting a task half as challenging.

We came to America by way of Vienna first and then Rome. We were thrust together with other immigrants into a holding pattern of unglamorous proportions. I can’t recall one iota of our entire time in Europe. The family stories that circulate regarding the European purgatory are few and random. I got motion sick habitually so my mother carried a plastic bag with her everywhere she went. My mother was amazed that so many Italian men knew her name; she didn’t realize that her name, Bella, was synonymous with beautiful in Italian.

I remember my grandmother coming to visit us in Italy; she couldn’t wait the two more months for us to get to America. When we picked her up at the airport, I remember seeing a strange woman who I knew had to be someone important shoving a doll against the glass wall. I didn’t understand if I was supposed to be more excited about the doll or the woman. I don’t remember being thrilled by either.

Early life in America seems distant, a shadow of a childhood where I didn’t really fit in but wasn’t completely ostracized. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment across the street from my grandmother’s identical apartment in Queens. I would look out my first floor window and up to my grandmother’s eighth floor window; with binoculars I could see her waving.

The whole neighborhood holds few memorable moments for me. I remember learning to ride my brown Huffy bike there. I remember playing on the monkey bars and a grown man came to hang upside down. He was wearing loose running shorts and no underwear.

Elementary school in retrospect seems fruitless. My parents were always disappointed with American education. In Russia they told me they were learning my sixth grade math in second grade. My parents would quiz me on my multiplication tables, insisting that I should know them so well that I could recite them if they woke me up in the middle of the night.

I remember the first day of kindergarten. My grandmother took me and was my translator for the first and only time in my life. The class sat around in a circle and I must have done something that caused the boy next to me made a hand motion that I interpreted to be peeling a carrot. Later I learned it was “shame, shame.” I still don’t remember what I did, but I remember the shame shame.

That was the first of many American colloquialisms and childhood antics that I never learned. We didn’t eat macaroni and cheese or Chef Boyardee. For breakfast I used to have tea with toast and cream cheese. When I was really little I slurped the tea from a saucer so it wasn’t too hot. Instead of six packs in the refrigerator, my family had vodka in the freezer.

I don’t even have a real birth certificate. As authentication of my birth, I am the proud owner of a bronze coin with Lenin on it. My official Russian name and date of birth calligraphied on it with what looks like white gel pen.

After five years in America we got our citizenship. I remember thinking there would be some sort of a test but I didn’t have to take one even though I was in fifth grade.

Sixth grade was the year of the Challenger crash. Back in the days when public school let you go home for lunch, I went to my grandmother’s house and watched the Special Report on TV. A few months later, just shy of my elementary school graduation, my parents moved us to Staten Island. I went from Russian to American over night.

Sixth grade was junior high school, not elementary school in Staten Island. I had to learn to put on red lipstick and black eyeliner in the cafeteria. Girls had boyfriends, kids smoked in the schoolyard, and the mall was center of it all. Kids categorized one another as Guido, Preppy, or Jappy; I didn’t fit into any of them.

It was also at this point that I really hated being Russian. Russian was the anti-cool. The 80s Cold War had pitted Russia as the supreme enemy. In every James Bond movie, in every Tom Clancy book, we were the foe. My name brands me with my nationality so it was hard to hide. When I hung out on the block, the annoying boy would call me Commie.

Living in Staten Island shielded me from Russians. They mostly settled in Brooklyn, particularly Brighton Beach. I didn’t have any Russian friends and didn’t want any. I didn’t want to associate with anything or anyone Russian because Russians gave other Russians a bad name.

Russians came to this country expecting freedom and carried with them a sense of entitlement. They knew how to milk the system like professionals. They collected welfare, SSI, unemployment, Medicaid, food stamps. They learned to get fake divorces to collect two checks. Old ladies signed up for jobs as home health aides and then would “take care of” their non-sick friends, splitting the paychecks. No one paid taxes, but the government had plenty of payouts. The women of Brighton Beach would wear their Cartier watches and Gucci purses over their fur coats. They bought their food at the fancy Russian gourmet stores and used food stamps to buy caviar. There were plans to trick the system prepared for them before they even got here.

Why does this country owe these immigrants anything?

My family, in contrast, worked diligently from the time they arrived in America. My parents worked two jobs and took ESL classes. We never received a dime of public assistance. We had pride and work ethic. I resented these criminals that gave me a bad name – tarred the road I was struggling so hard to pave. They didn’t earn that right.

Life got easier after Perestroika. All of a sudden, Russia got cool. Gorbachev was a hero, Russian letters were fashionable. We went from enemies to friends.

In college I embraced my inner Russian. While I originally taught myself the Russian alphabet from the Russian newspaper at my grandmother’s dining room table, I thought college was time to finally learn to write in script. So I placed myself in Russian 5 and and sailed through because I knew the answers based on what sounded right.

I don’t remember at what point I gained the appreciation and gratitude toward my parents for bringing me to this country. I don’t remember a defining moment when I it sank in that they did it all for me; all so I can have a better life. A life of freedom and opportunity.

It’s a constant internal conflict, like a child of divorced parents, you’re not sure to which country to pledge allegiance. Watching the Olympics, we always rooted for both the Americans and the Russians. Why were we still rooting for a country we fled? Whenever anything tragic or abominable happened, it was “Americans!” or “Only in America!” I didn’t get it. I thought we were those Americans.

America promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America celebrates birth with a paper certificate as opposed to a dictator-branded bronze coin. For that, I am thankful.

When you immigrate as a child, you don’t question it. It just happens to you and you go along with it. But somehow plucking a leaf off a tree and replanting it in a new country doesn’t come without consequences.

I feel like I have a perpetual wanderlust, nothing holding me down anywhere. New York is as good as it gets; a multicultural Mecca with no judgment. But New York bears no roots, no collective history, no cemeteries bearing headstones with names of generations of my family.

I haven’t been back to Kiev, but I’d very much like to go. I hope that walking the streets, smelling the trees, hearing the language around me will somehow give me that inner resolve – some sort of conflict resolution of future meeting the past.

I speak Russian – fluently and rarely. It was my first language but will forever remain my second. But I still listen to Russian pop icon Alla Pugacheva, love caviar and bring bread and salt into every new apartment I occupy.

But in English I read, I write, I dream.

Digital Sand Art

This is hours of fun. Remember sand art from kindergarten? This is way cooler. Check it out: www.thisissand.com. Note: don't get alarmed by the blank screen. There is a small box on the upper left hand corner; click that for instructions. Then, play!

Perhaps this is for the unemployed with too much time on their hands. Here's my creation:

It's National Grouch Day

A Grouch's mission in life is to be as miserable and grouchy as possible, and pass that feeling on to everyone else. Only then will a Grouch feel in touch with his or her world and be happy. Yet, even though a Grouch may show happiness at anyone's misfortune (including his or her own), a Grouch would never admit to being happy. Such is the stability of a Grouch's life: so balanced, and yet so unbalanced. Oscar is especially aware of this.



Anything a Grouch likes is best described (to you and me) as rotten, smelly, yucky, awful, dirty and trashy to name a few. A Grouch will only buy appliances that don't work, keep pets no person would keep in a house (such as elephants and worms), eat foods that are undesirable for any reason (they have a particular affinity for sardines in anything), sing out-of-tune, play the radio at high volume, and bathe in mud.

Happy National Grouch Day!

Ellen never fails to make me laugh

This aired a while ago but she refers to it over and over. It's hilarious every time. Classic.

Hearts by Reena

Thank you Reena - for finding the hearts.

Mothering

I had many expectations and fears before I had a child. I was afraid of health issues. I was afraid that he wouldn’t be cute. I was afraid I wouldn’t love him enough.

None of those fears came to fruition.

Instead my body and mind became overwrought with how to feed and put this baby to sleep. Babies are about feeding and sleeping and somehow I didn’t think about these things. My good friend gave me two books; one was The Art of Expecting and the other was The Incredible Truth About Motherhood.

The former was a small hardcover book that featured beautiful Sepia photos of pregnant bellies and blonde toddlers frolicking on the beach. The Motherhood book featured a polar bear and cub on the cover. The book, full of black and white photos of animals and their babies, was written by a man who is holding a rabbit in his author’s headshot on the inside flap.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting is like the New Testament to Dr. Spock’s Old Testament. I read it cover to cover and tried to follow its laws. When after what seemed like 24 hours of continuous breastfeeding, my 5-day-old baby was still wailing after I took him off the boob, I decided to put the book down.

A rebel, I decided to go on instinct. Instinct, that is, with a pediatrician’s blessing.

One of the biggest shocks came to me when I realized that our children physically fit us. My newborn son seemed to fit wholly within my small arms; they formed a perfect shield of protection around him. As he quickly grew into toddler-hood, his limbs dangled around my torso and he used to put his warm head onto my shoulder and fall asleep on me; his weight heavier with each breath and his heat transferring directly inside me. He fit completely.

Now he’s 6 and he goes to sleep easily on his own. For the 3 1/2 minutes that we play his goodnight song, John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy, I get to lay down next to him. He used to ask for it; now I ask him for it. He lets me hold him, more akin to spooning than anything else. He tries to fit with me on his twin bed – me and his 13 stuffed animals, 3 pillows and 2 blankets. I am the one that doesn’t fit in. I am the one that needs the cuddling – and he, at 6, is now the man that already gives it to me.

***

The place where I landed is not where I would have predicted. I am nothing like the mother I imagined I would be and little like my mother was to me. Our generation of mothers is different – with an innate sense of guilt.

We no longer feel like we have the power to say “because I’m the mother, that’s why” to our children. We have to explain and justify everything because we have learned that mothering comes with consequences. I don’t have a fear of screwing my kid up – I just wonder which of the things I do or will do that will be the one that he throws back at me.

The other day when I was picking my son up at school, a mommy was pleading with her blonde, curly-haired beauty. “Please Chloe, just one store. We just have to go for 10 minutes.” And then comes the bribe. “If we go to the store, then I’ll buy you a Webkinz.”

We start bribing our children when they're babies and then we're surprised when they start making the demands. We bribe them with Cheerios to stay in the stroller. We entice them with trips to the toy store if we want to run an errand. We breed these children to expect something for everything.

We have taught our children to become reliant and dependent on things rather than people. They cry and we appease them pacifiers instead of the breast. We put them in bouncy seats instead of holding them. We play Cd's for them instead of singing to them. We play books on tape instead of reading to them. The computer and the Internet’s social networking sites replace friends. Virtual reality games substitute exercise.

I don’t consider my 6-year-old spoiled by any means, albeit others who may judge his toy content may disagree. Yes, he has many luxuries – but he is aware that he is a fortunate boy. He knows that these are lucky bonuses to what life entitles you.

But after I got tired of schlepping books, Lego’s and snacks for every cross-town bus trip, I showed up with a small purse one day. Upon landing the coolest spot on the bus, he says, “What do you have for me?”

And I knew what he meant. He didn’t mean something new – he meant something with which to occupy himself. We have raised a generation of children who have grown dependent on external stimulus for entertainment rather than encouraging our children to use their imagination, their brains for stimulation.

It is our responsibility as parents to expand our children's brains; teach them to think. Their brains need to be exercised by seeing life, nature, people, creations, dream.

Children need to roll in the grass, explore crowds of ants. Let them dissect a flower, discovering a box of Crayola represented in one petal. Let them chase a squirrel up a tree and find acorns. Let them wrestle down a hill.

Mothering is a lesson I both teach and learn everyday. Mothering is my lifelong responsibility and my lifelong blessing. Mothering is loving unconditionally, unintentionally, and with abandon. Mothering is your heart as it exists in the outside world.

Master Your Fear

Anthony Robbins speaks about staying positive in tough times this morning on the Today Show. I think this is a really good way of looking at life right now.

Sending positive energy out into the world.

The Candidates as Trains

Originally posted on http://www.dailykos.com/

My sister tastes a raw acorn in Central Park

Starring Reena in a self-induced flavor exploration experiment. If it's good enough for the squirrels, it's good enough for the Russians. Supporting characters include my father, my son and my half brother.

Pregnancy Scare

Today is Friday and your period was due on Monday. Here you are again – a pregnancy scare, guaranteed to be a sobering moment for any couple in love. Dating sure is hard in the grown up world.

Too early to confirm or deny the suspicion, you wait a few more days before you fork over the ten bucks and pee on the stick. You still hope it’s stress that’s taken your period hostage. “Stop thinking about it and it will come,” you keep repeating the mantra.

Every bathroom break, a hopeful wipe results in colorless toilet paper; a deep sigh accompanies every flush. You move one step closer to a decision you are not ready to make; to a discussion you are too scared to have. You see an intersection on the horizon but you don’t want to reach the crossroads.

You could be pregnant. Everyone has been in this predicament at one point. Maybe you’ve been with your partner for a few months; maybe it’s been a few years. But if you still call it dating, an unplanned pregnancy translates into pregnancy SCARE.

Its only four days late, you think. But already your body is flooding with premature emotions, multiplying exponentially with every bathroom break, any movement down below.

Your dormant imagination goes wild; hypothetical scenarios spill out of you like prolific prose. You create mental flow charts for every option. All in response to the big WHAT IF?

You start to question everything – life, your relationship, your values. Conflicting emotions fill up the pros and cons columns, but resolutions like this are often not made by comparing points on paper.

You send yourself on an emotional roller coaster, the for it versus the against it, playing bumper cars in your mind. You do all this before you even take the pregnancy test and you’re not sure.

In this black and white situation, you see many gray options and often they reveal themselves in the most unexpected places. Your brain is not always the judge in this court; sometimes choices like this are guttural, instinctual, a tugging you cannot logically articulate.

Another day goes by but it’s only Saturday and you’ve vowed to give it until Monday before you take the test. You try not to think about it; you distract yourself.

You realize that this is just one of a series milestones in a relationship time line; the meeting of the parents, the first vacation, the major sickness, a death of a loved one, perhaps. Now comes the pregnancy scare.

You turn crisis into opportunity and use this as a pseudo relationship “check.” Like a secret shopper, you judge your partner’s behavior as you spew out one theoretical after another. You study his performance and file it away for future reference. You judge him but don’t tell him. He may surprise you or he may disappoint you. He may do both.

You make a decision. You change your mind. You go back to the original decision. You doubt everything. You go to the bathroom and see a welcome friend.

So now what?

Happy Virus Appreciation Day!

Only in America.

October 3rd is Virus Appreciation Day.

Read about it here.

Happy Birthday Charlie Brown and Snoopy too!

HAPPY 58!!!





Learn all about these greats at www.snoopy.com.