out with the old, in with the new

Growing up in the Soviet Union, New Year’s was a big deal, the way Christmas is in the United States. As the years pile up, D remembers less and less of his childhood in Moscow, but recollections of celebrating the New Year remain as fresh as ever. There were presents under the New Year’s tree, delivered by a Santa Claus-like character called Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) who was accompanied by his granddaughter Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden. And, unlike in the States, New Year’s was primarily a family holiday. Long after his family had been resettled in New York, the traditions lived on. D’s parents would wait until Christmas had passed to acquire a tree, and then D and his sister would help their mom decorate it with the same fancy ornaments they had back in Moscow. For many families in the Soviet Union, New Year’s ornaments were treasured family heirlooms; D’s grandma didn’t bring much when she left Moscow a couple of years after D’s parents had come to America, but she made sure to pack the New Year’s ornaments.

hardcore love

At the beginning there was utter confusion: plenty of raw emotion and few words to make sense of it all. Love is messy like that sometimes. In D’s case, that first true, messy love was music — a passion that still burns deeply and flares every time he goes to a good concert or hears an old favorite song whose lyrics were etched deep into the recesses of his mind decades ago. 

living in the past

Strive though we might to live in the moment, the task is almost always impossible. The weight of the past is too great, the pull of the future too powerful to resist. The present is all we ever truly have but it seems too ephemeral to hold on to for long; it may, like the current inflection point in European geopolitics, be too painful also. William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Those words rang with particularly sinister clarity last week as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and the Cold War ghosts of Europe’s not-so-distant past took on corporeal form.

re-examining personal identity

Where are you from? This simplest, most natural of questions when meeting someone new is one with which D has long struggled. How best to convey to a total stranger the trajectory D’s life has taken and the complicated self-interrogation of identity this innocent query triggers? Born in Moscow, raised in New York, serving as an American diplomat having spent considerably less than half of his life in the United States and without a permanent residence in the States that feels like home, pretty much any straightforward answer feels inadequate. Reconciling the multiple strands of D’s identity became exponentially harder this week.

chasing the dream

One of our greatest aspirations for our forthcoming assignment to San Jose is for our kids to become bilingual. It’s actually quite embarrassing given the number of languages we speak that our kids have remained monolingual. S is now on her third stretch of language training at the Foreign Service Institute, having learned French and Tagalog before her current stint brushing up on Spanish. D also speaks three foreign languages well and has dabbled in a couple of others. And yet we have failed, to date, to realize the Foreign Service dream of raising multilingual children.

from the mouth of babes

It wasn’t that long ago that we anxiously counted every new word that Junebug added to her lexicon. She didn’t really start speaking until she was two years old and we found her speech delay concerning enough that D stopped speaking Russian to her after her second birthday in the hopes that simplifying the verbal cues she processed would help her learn how to vocalize. A year and a half later, she appears so intent on catching up on lost time that it’s hard to keep up with all the funny things she says.

three years young

Sweet and sensitive, but also fierce and strongly opinionated, at times overly melodramatic despite being emotionally mature for her age, and always bubbly and precocious, Junebug, whose third birthday passed this week, is at a developmental crossroads. She has held on to her baby tendencies far longer than Munchkin had, but she also routinely surprises us with the depth of her emotional understanding and reasoning, which is far beyond what Munchkin could muster at this age.

the wonder years

Next week marks six months since S arrived in Manila with the kids. Junebug, whose second birthday we celebrated a couple of weeks early during our last weekend together in DC, is quickly approaching the midway point of her third year. Now that she is speaking up a storm, her personality has truly blossomed. It is a curious age, as she seems caught between holding onto her baby tendencies and striving to catch up to her older brother.

Bohemian rhapsody

The first thought that struck D on arrival in Prague was that the city was overrun by Russian-speakers. The Armenian taxi driver who picked D up from the airport and could barely string three English words together; the management company for the apartment D had hastily booked on hotels.com; the students and old ladies exchanging news on the street corners; even excluding the massive Russian tour groups, D heard about as much Russian during his first couple of hours in Prague as he had in Minsk.

second child syndrome

Despite our best attempts to ensure parity so that Junebug later does not feel slighted by being the second child, at times we have struggled to match outcomes to our intentions.