Before I Was Born Anastasia Baranovskaya
“There was no sex in the Soviet Union,” my mom would constantly repeat when unveiling another story of herself and her numerous female classmates.
During my university years that I spent in Russia, my mom liked to give me a tea portion of the times of her youth, telling me about the time before I was born. We would sit in our tidy and tiny kitchen, a favorite hangout spot of any Russian family. She would tell me how they went to the only restaurant in the city where you could also dance, and my dad would get mad if mom danced with somebody else. One time he even threw a tantrum, and mom, being an independent girl, left home. My dad followed her all the way to her house, just to make sure she got there safe. Or how my parents liked to travel and go out partying almost every weekend which was uncommon for young soviet couples who tended to get married and have kids without dating for a year. There were three conditions upon which she would start a conversation: hot bergamot tea on the table, I was not partying till the crack of dawn, and if my dad was asleep or not home. I don’t think she was trying to hide anything from him; she tried to make those few hours as intimate as possible, and that is exactly why I enjoyed them and pretended they were our little
secret. I was attracted to my mom’s phenomenal ability to talk to me as if I was a friend, not her seventeen year old daughter. Every time, she would draw me into the grown up world with her meticulous descriptions. No wonder her favorite Russian saying was, “Say yes shew, but put into his mouth!”
Since I left Russia four years ago and do not see my mom often, those bits of time, so small in comparison to what I spent with my girlfriends chitchatting about boys, are now the ones that I cherish and often reminisce on snowless winter nights in Baltimore.
“I thought I was pregnant when your dad and I decided to get married. I did not go to the doctor, we did not have pregnancy tests available either,” she started one time. You have to know up front there is no fuss about marriage proposals in Russia nowadays, back then it was even more casual. Girls did not go to Tiffany’s to look at the rings they would like to receive, grooms were not stressed out trying to pick the right diamond shape. “If you want to get married, you get married,” my mom took the first sip of her hot steamy tea. It was one of those early December nights when the fresh fallen snow is still untouched by man’s feet, just like my mom’s memories remained clear and untouched in her head. It was so quiet outside that from time to time I thought I could hear the crunchy sound of somebody making a path home in the dark. My dad was long gone to bed and we could hear his
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