This flag had been flying next to our federal MP’s office since February 2022. I may disagree with him on thousand different things, but I am deeply grateful that he keeps the flag up for over two years now. I am also grateful that he doesn’t change it for a new flag. I hope it stays up until the war is over, until the victory.

I’ve been reading numbers on the news: numbers of drones, numbers of missiles, numbers of destroyed homes, numbers of people killed in a concert hall by, I believe, their own government. I have seen other people writing the same thing. The two number that stuck with me: the number of electoral fraud in this year’s russian election is believed to be between 22 and 40 million votes; there have been over 39 000 air raid alerts in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. I am trying to understand this number. I am dividing 39 000 by 800 days, the results comes up to almost 50, then I am dividing it by 24 hours and get over two an hour. I know this math does not reflect how things happen in reality, but still – try to imagine that for over two years twice an hour your life, your sleep, your daily activities, your laughter, conversations with friends, reading bed time stories to your kids, making love, walking your dog in the park, is punctuated by wailing, howling siren announcing that someone is trying to kill you. Imagine living in this reality, raising kids, making babies, writing poetry, volunteering, pouring lattes, doing yoga, shopping. Imagine being scared. Imagine not being scared. Imagine getting used to being scared, so that even fear becomes familiar and routine and only hope and rage remain searing. One never get used to hope.

I know that if I wrote this on social media, someone would reply, or think “but what about…” Compassion has become a zero-sum game. So, I no longer say anything on social media. I am scared and I am losing hope.

Tonight, my youngest was too tired to settle down. He refused to go to bed or accept any help. Instead, he sat in his bed and cried with a force of desperation of an overwrought five-year old. I sat in his bed next to him. When he finally finished crying, he settled down on his pillow and I stroke his cheek until he fell asleep. I wish someone was sitting on a bed next to me, because I feel very tired and scared and guilty. I am sorry that I can’t protect you. I am sorry you have to spend the nights, sometimes entire nights in the bathroom or in the corridor, hoping that this time the building will not collapse on you. I am sorry you have to walk your elderly parents down to the bomb shelter, finding way with the flashlight of your phone, because there is no electricity and the elevators don’t work. I am sorry you have to build shelters in the schools. Does my old school have a shelter? I am sorry I don’t know all that. Not in the way you know. I am sorry, so so sorry.

I saw this raven on the parking lot of the secondary school today. It’s big, very black, beautiful and nonchalant. I wish I knew how to approach him.

The news today are overwhelming. Ukraine is under the biggest attack since 2022 for the second day in the row. There’s been a mass shooting in Moscow – I have a hard time sympathising, but neither do I gloat. I’m just wondering if it will spiral into a new level of violence. And those are not even top news. The top news are that Kate, the future queen of England, has cancer. No one’s talking about Ukraine, just one person said something about Moscow, a few mentioned Kate. The story of one sick woman, a mother, seems to be easier to relate to these days. I can understand that. There are too many people dying, too many things falling apart. I don’t believe people are heartless. They are just small, confused and scared that they too will fall apart.

The north wind was blowing all day today – the only kind of weather I truly hate. But it was a good day, the one that felt full and restful at the same time. It was full of small luxuries: good coffee, time to write and reflect, time to talk to friends without hurry, more coffee, more time. In the evening I texted with Vika about the volunteer translation project she got me involved in. She texted back, saying that there is an air raid and they are in the shelter. This is the kind of truth I have to hold at any given time: it was a good day here in Montreal, back home my best school friend was hiding in a shelter during an air raid.

The first day of spring. The snow fell in the night and covered the ground to make it look like winter. It was honestly by noon.

Early in the morning, before my alarm clock, before the first light, I heard the first word: mama? Mmh, I replied. Je t’aime, he said. I spent the day believing this simple truth, that I am deeply loved.

It’s Spring Equinox, a moment of fragile balance. There was half of the moon in the sky today. An icy wind was blowing all days long. As the night fell, it brought new snow. This feels important.

It’s Tuesday, so I had to wake up early and drag myself out of bed before the first light. Still, I took a minute to ask my ancestors to give me guidance. It feels easier to believe these things in the moments between sleep and wakefulness. It felt like they listened.

Monday, I feel wiped out and ready to sleep by 6pm.

I used to look forward to mondays. I used to anticipate the thrill of returning to my work, of doing my work and doing it well. I remember it like from a different live, a different me.

I still love my work, but only those parts of it where I can be myself, where I feel safe to show my messy, creative, uncompromising humanity. I no longer feel safe most of the time.

I have to remind myself not to display any negative emotions. Any strong emotions, for that matter. Don’t show doubt, don’t show reluctance, don’t show disagreement, don’t show disappointment, don’t show that you’re exhausted and lonely. Don’t ever say again that you don’t feel like you belong. It’s better to hide something than say it and be misunderstood.

Because I don’t know how to hide my emotions selectively, I hide all of them. Joy, enthusiasm, burst of wild creativity, wonder, joy. Of all these, I miss joy so much. I have to remind myself to nod in agreement and smile. I don’t know if I am fooling anyone. Certainly, not myself.

The good thing about this, the really really really good thing is that I no longer see Monday as a return to reality. I am faking it for seven hours five days a week (I still produce a very good work, I just don’t love what I produce anymore). Beyond those seven hours, there is reality. There are my children, my dormant garden, my forest alive with mushrooms and mosses, my books, my friends, the voice of Margaret Renkl in my headphones.

I wish I could merge the two worlds. I wish I could brighten the grey canvas of my office with the ideas of Adrienne marée brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Blair Stonechild. I wish I could bring the intellectual awe, wonder and courage into my corporate seven hours, but I tried and I failed and I don’t believe anymore that I will succeed one day or that it’s worth trying.

So, I have a choice: I can either let the corporate seven hours extinguish my joy and my wildness, or I can protect it behind a wall, an armour or a mask. This is a hard choice, believe it or not. In my whole life, the only thing I’ve never been good at (besides singing and some sports) is being fake. But I will learn. I am a very good learner.

Tomorrow someone will inevitably ask me how my weekend was. It was ok, I will say, we stayed home.

At which point they will lose interest and leave alone, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that nothing interesting ever happens at home.

At home

Sunday starts with a rain so grey that we turn on the light. We make Sunday crêpes, as we do every Sunday, I call my parents, we play, we make lasagna. I usually hate to have people in the kitchen when I cook, but today I make an exception. I bask in their warm presence, in their delightful anticipation of our future meal. I even let them sprinkle cheese on top.

Then the sun comes out and children run off to see their friends up the street and I decide to go for a walk.

In the forest

The geese are performing some kind of ballet or a musical: there are dozens of them up in the air, they circle, crisscross, change ranks, pair up. They accompany their aerial dance with long cries.

Not a single flower is out yet, but the mosses are luminous green, the fungi are sprouting from every tree stump and fallen log and the stones are painted green and silver with lichens. It’s amazing how once you know that everything alive, you start noticing that everything is alive, more than noticing – you start feeling it. And once you start feeling the life in everything, you start opening up to it, letting it pour into you. And you no longer look for a moment of breathtaking beauty, a catharsis, because you feel every moment. As Richard Wagamese said, The center of the universe is everywhere.

On my way home I notice some old trees, I assume maples, with wet patches on their bark. I touch one wet patch and lick my hand. It tastes sweet.

No petty sorrows of this week can compare with a sheer awe of feeling your child tear away from your supportive hand and seeing him pedal away. Of knowing that this is the first time, the first of many many many many many times. Ride on, baby! Mama is so proud.

Coming out of this long, painful, exhausting, humiliating and alienating week, I have realized something.

None of my ancestors have had a privilege of living in a world favourable to their thriving. Every single one of my female ancestors have at some point made the vow to survive.

My great-grandmother on my mother’s side must have made this vow when she was deported with her family, with her young children from her land all the way to the Far East of russia. She must have made this vow when her youngest daughter was born in that cold, foreign and unwelcoming land, where they lived in trenches and huts. She made this vow when they made their way back – two years of travel by foot, by train, by horse-pulled carriage back to the place of their ancestors.

My grandmother on my father’s side must have made this vow when she, the only child who survived the genocidal famine, moved from the village to the capital. She must have made this vow when she traded her dreams of being a singer for a low-skilled job that allowed her to feed her family.

My grandmother on my mother’s side must have made this vow when she was forcibly transported to the nazi germany to work on the rope factory, then on the farm as a de-facto slave. She must have made this vow when she raised her daughter (daughters?), while trying to shield him from their abusive alcoholic father.

My mother must have made this vow when she lost her mother at the age of 16 to cancer. She must have made this vow when she traded her dreams to go to university for a job that allowed her to feed herself. She must have made this vow when my father had his accident at the age of 37 and she had to scramble between low-paying, precarious and degrading jobs to keep me fed, clothed and at school.

None of my ancestors have had a privilege to realize their dreams. Their survival was their triumph.

I am the first of my family to have made it to university, to three universities, as if I had to do one for each of them. I am the first to be able to choose the career I want. I am the first to be able to move freely in the world, to go and to live in a different country without boundaries, limitations and humiliation. I am the first to have privilege to speak freely and without fear, even the first to speak the language I want. I AM my ancestors’ dream, the one they never even imagined possible. All their love, all their courage, all this survival in just one woman’s body.

I, too, may not have the luxury to live and grow in the systems that were made for my thriving. I may not always feel that I can breathe freely, that I can say what I want to say, to be understood, to be accepted unconditionally. But just like them, I make a vow to survive. I will survive for my ancestors, I will survive for my daughter, I will survive for my kin connected to me by choice if not by blood. I am living in the world that is reaping at all the seams, I am raising my children through the snowless winters and summers hot and pungent with wildfires, I am nurturing my friendship in the systems that punish authenticity. I am surviving. This is what women do, everywhere, all the time.

I will build the walls that I need to build to protect myself. I will only speak my truth to those who I can truly trust. I will divert my attention to the spaces and relationships that make me bloom. I will not offer more that I can give, will no longer rob myself of time, rest, joy and fulfilment to change the systems I cannot change. These systems are probably doomed, one way or another, and it is sad to think that we are probably doomed with them.

But for now, I will give my love and attention to the ones who need and deserve it: children, parents, gardens, ancestors, books, friends, birds, forest, strangers who are kin. I will detach myself things that hurt me: office politics, social media, being right, going an extra mile, bringing authenticity where it isn’t wanted. From now on I will put my survival first. Because my survival is not just mine, it is not selfish, it is tending to my ancestors dreams, it is giving my children the childhood they need, it is protecting my wild overgrown garden. My ancestors have survived and so will I.

This was a bad, hard, exhausting week, just like those weeks of past December. I thought the bad days were over, I thought I was over them – they returned with vengeance.

Nobody warned me that this spiritual awakening or whatever this is would be so painful. Except for, of course they did. Jonah and the whale, all those saints and Leonard Cohen. Anne Lamott: when everything is ugly it’s because something beautiful is being born. The birth is not beautiful in a politically correct sense – you did it twice, how come you don’t remember?

Remember, your son was born with his face turned up – a stargazer, they said. Apparently, it wasn’t “normal”. They were worried. They were about dozen in the room, while you were screaming with pain and effort, bloody, naked, vulnerable and fierce. They were worried, but weren’t showing it. They were professional, you – everything but. Then your son appeared, stubbornly staring up. He started screaming even before he was fully out and they disappeared. You didn’t see them leaving.

Birth is never beautiful, except it always is. You didn’t trust yourself then, you don’t now, you can trust the life force within you. Something is always being born.