I was just watching another short documentary about the residential schools. There was a vivid description of a catechism class, where the nuns were describing purgatory to frighten children. This reminded me of a time, when someone in my protestant pentecostal church gave me a tape with a weird testimony of a person who supposedly went to hell (either in a dream or a vision or some kind near-death experience, I don’t remember). I remember that I really believed the authenticity of that tape (I must have been around 14) and the story about that person actually seeing what hell was like. I remember being terrified. When I think about it, I remember being terrified for most of my teens. Of course, there was my family situation, my dad being in a hospital and my mom, thin with worry, working 12-14 hours a day and chain-smoking in the kitchen the rest of the time. But the main source of my terror was the belief that the people I love will go to hell, unless I save them and convince them to join the church. I haven’t thought about it for a very long time, but tonight it dawned on me, what a terrible, traumatic burden was placed on me back then. I was a child, a teenager, I was lacking confidence and role models, I was lacking care, not because my parents were uncaring, but because they tried to survive in their own ways. And here I was tasked with saving everyone I knew, lest they burn in hell. Not scared for myself, scared for them. Here I was, frantically praying every night, unsure if God hears, always trying harder. Here I was, overcompensating for everything I believed was wrong with the world. I am still overcompensating. I can’t heal myself without healing that terrified 14-year old, who just listened to that terrible tape. I need to find words to reach her. I still want to save the world, save everyone I love, I just don’t think I want to carry the responsibility for it any longer.

It seems that we still have winters, if only for a little while. Monday, bathed in the glow of the winter sun and still retaining the flavour of the weekend, feels good and solid. All focus, zero adrenaline. Liberating myself from social media truly feels like liberation.

During my mid-day walk, I realized that I haven’t written down all the small moments of the weekend that I remember so lovingly:

Having a chance to cook and to clean on Saturday

Painting with kids with my favourite acrylic paints

Kids making guacamole together and eating it with chips

Watching a whole movie on Saturday night

Sunday morning crêpes

Kids’ friends coming over to play with them

First time sledging this winter

Finishing Emily Monnet’s Okinum

Sushi in the evening

Reading the poem written by a dear friend for my late cat Echo

Falling asleep on the couch, tired, but not exhausted

Weekend is the most uncomplicated form of happinness. Just having a time on my hands that is not parcelled, not planned and not accounted for in Outlook. Cleaning, cooking, painting with children, watching an actual movie, not 15 minutes of an old sitcom, doing nothing, doing everything, not rushing towards something, rather, moving in circles. Ironically, I started the day tired and finish it rested. I have a feeling of having lived.

The snow is back. I was really happy to see it this morning, even though the wind was blowing it in my face. Tonight, when I was walking home, impatient to see my kids, the little snowbanks marking the border between the street and the front yards felt almost cozy. I don’t even like snow that much, I just like the comfort of having seasons and regular climate events.

I finished Kelly Barthhurst’s Crane Husband. It’s beautiful and very sad. Ever since I have children, I am disturbed by the stories revolving around siblings, especially when it’s sister and brother. I was holding my breath for most of the book, hoping nothing bad would happen to these fictional kids. This week, I’ve been listening to the podcast with Merlin Sheldrake and someone else, an artist, talking about fungi and challenging our ideas of individuality. We see ourselves as separate from the “outside world,” our skin serving as a barrier. What if instead we saw ourselves as a process, a constant exchange between the inside and the outside, our skin not as a barrier, but a porous membrane. I definitely feel my skin getting thinner, at least metaphorically. Everything gets to me. Almost everything.

The good thing about having thin skin is that kindness gets through even faster than all the bad stuff. The thing that made my day was that my husband decided to pick up kids early, because yesterday our daughter said that she had a bad day at school. This was pure kindness and it moved me in an unexpectedly deep way.

Everyone else will remember this day as the day that Alexey Navalny died. I honestly don’t know anymore how I feel about Navalny. I certainly don’t feel grief so many people seem to express. Nowadays, grief is reserved for the innocent. For me personally, Navalny is a product of the same colonial russian system that putin. He may be a better, lighter part of the system, but still a part of it. It is not putin that needs to disappear, but the whole system with its tyrants, oligarchs, it liberals and freethinkers, because as long as it exists, no one will be truly free. I don’t know if that will ever happen. Could colonialism be eternal? Anyway, let Navalny rest in peace.

Now, when I think about it, we were always at war in some way.

The year I was born, Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. I was too young to care, but the news of that endless, pointless war with no winners were a constant background of my childhood. Later, when the violence erupted in Artzah (that we knew as Nagorno Karabakh), I was not scared – I was conditioned to think that there was always war, somewhere, far from me. Those, who didn’t grow up in the Soviet Union, cannot imagine how vast it was and how little we cared about what was happening there. This morning I read that one of the primary symptoms of PTSD is the loss of control, the feeling that whatever happens is done to you, rather than by you. By this measure, the Soviet Union was a giant PTSD camp.

The first war that truly scared me and shook me to the bones was the invasion of Chechnya. I remember reading Anna Politkovskaya’s Second Chechen War in Kyiv metro and literally shaking from pain and rage and helplessness. I couldn’t get a hold of the real book, so I printed out a file, two pages per sheet of paper, landscape orientation, held with a paper clip. Back then, I couldn’t see it for the foreshadowing it was, the war was still happening to someone else, but it was creeping closer.

I don’t remember my reaction to the news of the wars on the Balkans and the genocide in Rwanda, but I do remember the experience of reading books about them – the helpless grief about something that already happened, that no one stopped at the time and no one could help anymore. I don’t remember strong reactions in the society. I think it was partly due to the fact that we lived in Ukraine, a place that everyone, including ourselves, considered a periphery where nothing of interest happens.

Just pictures tonight in an attempt to keep the memory of this strange day.

The one day of the year I absolutely hate living on the American continent is the Monday after Superbowl. Sunday of the actual event is fine, because of our asynchronous living style, restraint social circle and lack of access to the television. In the worst case scenario, some Superbowl echoes will catch up with me on the social media, but in a distorted way. Whatever happens at Superbowl, all I’m gonna hear about is the racial and gender analysis. Last year it was Rihanna. This year it was the irony of our show must go on during the genocide.

It’s Monday that makes me suffer, because a) everyone but me spent their precious Sunday watching Superbowl, b) everyone seems to really care about which team with an offensive and culturally inapropriate name won in this game that only North Americans seem to understand, c) the Europeans who don’t understand the game and, I know for fact, don’t care about it, pretend to care to blend in, which qualifies them as traitors, d) nobody gives a damn of wants to talk about anything else. Sometimes, the Monday excitement spills over to Tuesday, so I am legitimately worried about surviving for straight seven hours in the office.

I remember reading a story, I don’t know if it was true or fictional, about a small German town adjacent to a nazi concentration camp. At the end of the war, when the camp was liberated, the residents of the town told the journalists, or maybe to the allied soldiers, that they had had no idea of what was happening in the camp. The journalists wondered, how it was possible, hadn’t they seen the thick smoke rising from the crematorium chimneys. To which, the residents replied that when the smoke was blowing their way, they turned their heads and looked the other way.

By some weird association, I am thinking about another story, about a ship named Saint-Louis, filled with the Jewish children and women, that was circling the Atlantic ocean, from one port to another, getting rejection after rejection, because no one wanted these Jewish refugees. In the end, the ship sailed back to Belgium and most of its passengers ended up in the concentration camps.

I am thinking about these phantom chimneys and phantom ships and how diligently we are looking the other way. I am not pointing fingers, as I recognize myself in the crowd. I wonder if we are caught in one of those cautionary tales, where people are condemned to relive some terrifying experience over and over, until they learn a lesson from it. In which case, we have failed again. In which case, I am sorry.

Every week, for the past three weeks, someone in my family has had a medical emergency and I have to admit that it has put me a little over the edge. Today, I was not ok and when I am not ok I easily slip into the old overactive, paranoid, demanding pattern. I need rest, but even more than rest I need to feel seen. I need people, well, not all people, but some to see that I am trying and that it’s hard to do without support network. I need someone ask me how I am doing without expecting a cookie-cutter answer. And oh, I stumbled upon this random meme that said something about reciprocating energy and it resonated – I need my energy to be reciprocated. That’s all.

It was +8 today. As we were driving to emergency clinic, we saw almost no snow on the side of the road, just dirty April-looking grass. And it felt like early April too – humid and windy with not a hint of winter in the air. I decided to walk my daughter home after school – we were walking through the mud and flakes and dirty melting snow so uncharacteristic for February. I am really scared to think about what this early spring signifies for this summer and on a longer scale for our future.

Today I didn’t go to the concert of a very dear friend, although I had tickets. I just couldn’t. Even good emotions can be too much. I know she’ll understand. Maybe, it’s a form of trust: knowing that people will still love you when you don’t show up, that they’ll hold you when you screw up.

Instead, I went for a long walk with my son, who turned five today. He was originally supposed to be born on the second of February. That week between his due date and his actual birth date I walked a lot in the company of my tireless mother in law. I remember that we went to the movies and that on February 5 we were walking along Ontario street in Hochelaga and the day was warm and sunny, but nowhere as warm as today. I remember feeling impatient and stressed, but also eerily happy, in this liminal space between “normal” life and sleepless euphoria of new motherhood. My kids have definitely given me the most profound experiences of time I ever knew.

Also, today we went to listen to the brook singing, twice.