Getting Over It

For the last few weeks I’d been extremely annoyed by my host family, angry with them to the point of distraction. There I was learning a new language, reading new texts, writing new stories, while the three of them––each in their own way––was gliding through life incuriously, greeting day after day with the same mindless routine. They don’t read books or try new things or develop talents. What was wrong with these people?

My mother cooks, cleans, visits grandma, collects her pension, and does little Sergei’s homework while he talks to friends online. She watches the news uncritically; thinking and feeling exactly how she’s told to feel. (Why is it so hard for a woman who spent her first forty years receiving Soviet lies and distortions, to recognize the ones on television?)

My father has been driving a marshrutka taxi in circles thirty years, which I took as the ultimate symbol of his life––an interminable series of left turns, cigarettes, and bad TV shows. I can always hear him approaching by the sound of his wheezing, difficult breaths; the result of years of chain-smoking. Even though he gets up at six in the morning to go to work, he’ll stay up past midnight watching a Steven Siegal movie, or the its intellectual equivalent. Verdict: he must be brain-dead. (On a side note, Steven Siegal was just in eastern Russia meeting local Buddhist leaders. Saw it on the news).

My host brother is almost fifteen, but looks and behaves like an American twelve-year-old. He likes cars and hip hop––could you be more unoriginal––and talks on the phone more than a Fortune 500 CEO or a mafia boss. Why!? Couldn’t he do something for somebody besides himself? Couldn’t he be productive, or at the very least do his own homework?

I’ve been waiting two weeks to get over my anger. I hated feeling this way. Why couldn’t I just let them be who they are. I realized I was being a snob, but I still felt angry. I realized my host brother was behaving just like I used to, but that didn’t matter either. Finally, on Friday, the feeling broke. I was sitting in the kitchen at 2am, talking with my host mom (not unusual weekend hours). She’d found out earlier that day that I wasn’t going to be living with them next semester––I hadn’t gotten around to telling her myself. She’d been surprisingly understanding, and now as I listened to her talk about all the students who’d come and gone I realized how evolved her outlook was. She allowed her students to be themselves; she saw the good in them––even the ones who never learned much Russian, or the ones I would call difficult. Now, my host mother has probably never been to a therapist; she’s probably never practiced meditation or any of the stress-reducing-zen-oneness methods or programs that are so popular in the US. She didn’t go to the type of school that hung up ‘tolerance matters’ banners, or had diversity days. And here she was being the mature one, and I was acting like a schmuck.