The unconventional me

              I’m not big on laws and regulations.  I smirk at the common folk with their social games, the rigid role play of the hierarchical food chain. When it comes to choosing between the route of the herd and the untraveled path of the lonely egomaniac I would always pick the latter. So what if I lagged behind getting lost in the woods, I was on the path of my discovery, doing my thing, beating my own drum and marching to it.

         So, the life choices that I’ve made confused and worried people around me with their unconventional way of repeating ageless mistakes. I conventionally finished college and just as any good little daughter of any caring and overbearing father I picked Finance over creative writing. But then I made a bizarre move back to Ukraine at the urgent pleading of my mother who still lives back there. I spent a year looking for a job in a market for which I wasn’t trained, foregoing the well-trodden path of the mass enrollment job fairs you can find at any campus.

            Despairing to find a job I found myself a husband, a religious zealot from an impoverished family, their only hope of prosperity at that time. That was the extreme of unconventionality since any immigrant girl with an ounce of brain matter took advantage of any chances to grab herself an American husband and raise her kids in conditions as far removed from her lineage as possible. I was proud to announce to strangers and to myself that I was different and original. I did not fear poverty. The spirituality and kindness that was brought out in my husband by the church enveloped me like a small child in a cocoon of matrimonial bliss. I hibernated in my own little love nest, cut off from the rest of the world by the sparkling of the moonlit snow and the howling of the wind.

            Well, that romantic crap didn’t outlast the nine months it took to turn me into a very conventional mother. We quickly realized that our family will soon outgrow our little love nest and relocated back to US. So back to square one, I had to make my way through the maze of rules and regulations that I so gleefully discarded seven years ago hoping never to look back. But this time the pressure was tenfold. Because never in my darkest nightmares did I ever imagine that the last person I would want my child to emulate is myself.

            I used to scoff at the way Russian kids turned out in the US. Everyone knows that the educational system is in the dumps, that America breeds imbeciles and that the immigrant brain power is the only thing still keeping it afloat. Well, having read a mountain of child rearing books and having compared the way I want to raise my child here and the way I was raised back home, I realized that I am that computer system in the “garbage in, garbage out” joke, filled with garbage, giving it back out, only it’s my daughter on the receiving end.

            So when it comes to raising the glowing masterpiece of a human being that she has the potential to become, I realize that the issue is not in improving upon her qualities or fixing her faults but in trying not to infest her with my own emotional baggage. I am not a good parent because my mother never was, because her mother was even worse and because her mother… Well, you get the drift.

            Easier said than done, and here is where I have to get very unconventional. I have to erase all the conditioning that was hammered into me by the hysterical women and the impotent men in my life. I have to watch my every move, put my poker face on and brave another day with the gem of my life, the ray of pure sunshine that brightens my bleak existence, all the time trying my damnest not to extinguish it.