(looking for) the good mother
We have been eating uncertainty for breakfast. If the sky was falling, that would be easier to deal with - you just try to somehow run away from the sky, and find shelter. This is different. I don’t know if we are running towards something or just dodging imaginary raindrops that are harmless. Living in Moscow for fifteen years was a lesson in stagnation. Nothing but the sheen of things changed, but the roots remained the same. No headlines came as a surprise, it was all expected, just a lesson in waiting for the other shoe to drop. I remember various people telling me in the early days that Moscow can be a good mother, if you let her, if you tuck your face into her embrace and surrender to how things work there. Something in my resisted, probably because my own mother is not a person to be trusted, more a random collection of acts that never made me feel known, or safe, or that someone was looking out for me. I cannot erase the moments when I would call out “Mom” and get that salty reply, “I’m not your mother.”
So I spent time in Moscow like a motherless child, grasping at straws, banging against walls in the dark looking for light switches. Sometimes I found them by sheer accident, sometimes they remained hidden. Navigating, muddling, wrestling, treading water, the years passed. On a good day I want to think I did the best I could, but on others I know I failed miserably, a stranger in a strange land always feeling like the floor was quicksand, dependable, foul-smelling, unending quicksand.
Here, the streets smell of lilacs. It rains suddenly, and the courtyard is flooded in the middle of the night, but in the morning just littered with branches and dead flowers. Things change here so quickly - the price of rent, the mood of the taxi driver, the empty lot begging to become a hotel. There is something so alive here, that makes it profoundly unpredictable.
When I was a boy on the farm, the only person to play with was my little brother. On the days we attempted baseball, with a heady collection of ghost players who could and could not steal bases, mitts we had gotten at garage sales that fit terribly, and a habit of knocking the ball into a field which took ages to recover it, lost between the tall grass and the wild blackberries. Most of the time, my brother walked away halfway through - losing interest in this game for city kids, a terrible fit for a stretch of the low grass behind the house and the tire swing. I would shuffle inside, pissed off.
“It isn’t fair.” I told my father, my lip stuck in the air.
“Who told you life is fair?” He asked offhand, tying a fly for the next day of fishing.