Russian Life

When I take the girls out to play, I can’t help but notice Russian life bustling all around me: An old babushka carries her groceries home every day. She walks on filthy streets for blocks on end, cold or warm weather, to buy them and then lugs them all the way home herself in the plastic bags she has brought from home. Some days she gets up early and rides a bus way out of town to her dacha and brings back what she can carry and then sits on an upside-down crate in front of a cell phone store and sells a few sprigs of parsley and a couple of cucumbers that day. Dave and I like buying berries this way. We’ve tried getting into wild mushrooms, but we simply don’t know how to fix them, so we refrain from buying those.

A mother in stiletto shoes carries her baby blocks upon blocks on these same filthy streets in order to get on a fumy bus and ride 45 minutes across town and then walks a few more dusty blocks to drop him off at grandma’s house. She then gets back on a bus, this time standing-room only, and goes to her job which pays her very little. Another mom and her teenage daughter carry home a bag of vegetables, each of them holding one handle of the bag, and then, to balance the weight, they each hold a bucket full of tomatoes with their outside hands. They stop just outside our apartment building to rest their buckets on the ground and then start up again.

At the playground, a mother holds her child’s hand as she scours the ground because it is covered with millions of shards of glass. You can’t just search out a better playground - every playground is like this. This is life in Russia.

Most children in Russia are raised by grandparents because both parents have to work to make ends meet. As a result, kids are disconnected from a home life and left to fend for themselves. The population in Russia is diminishing because people continue to choose not to have children, or to have just one child, because it’s simply too hard to live here with more (low birth rate is a problem Putin addressed a few years ago by giving people a substantial monetary incentive if they have a baby, which, by the way, has helped for the most part.) Everything is shoddy, muddy, gloomy, and bureaucratically depressing. Of the few Russians I’ve met so far, most of them have out-and-out stated that their life is difficult, that Russia is like a prison, or that they don’t like their city and dream of living elsewhere. And then… Hazel comes up to me and says:

         “Mom, aren’t we so blessed to have a home and food and all these Russian playgrounds around us?” And I look at her and almost cry because I know she's right. I’ve got to remember her words.

Some days Hazel and Gretchen and I get up and walk out to our bus stop. It’s not too far for us luckily. We ride the number 109 down to Universam grocery store a few blocks away and get out, cross the street and then wait for the Mega bus to arrive and sweep us off to Ikea for free. This bus has very comfortable seats. When we get to Ikea, which is part of a larger shopping complex akin to a western style mall complete with indoor playground and coffee shops, we sit down and just breathe. This place is clean, light, and airy. You can let your guard down and just relax, have a cup of coffee, or even read. It’s a nice break.