Part 2 – Reflection
© Copyrighted by Doug Salem, 2004
From the outset, Olga and I were under pressure from her parents to produce a grandchild. Ukrainian Mom and Pop were now empty nesters and I was to blame. Andrei and Angela, though married for ten years, had managed defy their own culture and tradition by remaining childless. Olga and I had become the great hope. Beginning just after our wedding and surfacing regularly in every correspondence, meeting, or long-distance telephone conversation thereafter, my Russian in-laws inevitably demanded “Where is our grandchild? What is the matter with you? Our life is empty now. You owe it to us! What is a marriage without a child? Can Doug not get it up? (Implied, not quoted.) Olga (in her early 20s) is getting old! Has she become so Americanized as to not want children?”
The sad truth of it was that I wanted a child - had waited longer for a child - than any of us. My attempts to start a family up until now had resulted in a series of tragic near misses. There was the excruciating pain of a senseless divorce from my first, American wife. I was 30 and she 25. She had “choices,” she said, and she “chose” not to be married to me anymore. She also “chose” not to bear our child twice during the seven year marriage – a scarring experience for an idealistic and aspiring young family man.
Then there was the beautiful young medical intern, eleven years my junior. American and smart as a whip, the world was her oyster. And I was her lobster. She had decided I was marriage material and that I would sire a minimum of three children. The prospect scared me to death. I pictured a young Don Johnson in “A Boy and his Dog,” strapped to an operating table, being milked for his sperm by a machine. When I asked how she, a busy career woman, would find time to give the necessary love and affection to three carpet crawlers, she balked and muttered something about plenty of money and nannies. After seven years of dodging, weaving and negotiating for all I was worth, she finally dumped me and I had failed again. Thankfully, it never actually culminated in a marriage, ending in more of a painful whimper than the devastating bang of my divorce nine years prior.
Aged 41 and still without a cozy family. Olga from Ukraine, marriage agency I.D. # KR986, was my dream-come-true. She was attractive, educated, never married, no children, and willing to settle for – even preferring - an older man. She was young and just beginning; her biggest priority being family and a cozy home. It was this allure of Russian women that had taken me all the way to FSU in search of a wife. But after having completed the arduous task of locating Olga, vetting her, getting her into the U.S. and marrying her, I vowed, no matter how perfect a wife she seemed, not to knock her up as soon as she got off the plane. Barefoot and pregnant, young and Ukrainian, just off the boat without a clue? I would not have that on my conscience. No sir, not me.
I was determined that Olga would receive the full benefit of a new life in a truly free and democratic society. Even if it killed the both of us, which it nearly did. She would have the opportunity to adequately learn the language and receive an education that would allow her to be independent and support herself if she wanted to. Like my ex, she too would have choices. I would give her the very rope to hang me with. If she chose not to, then I will have made a good choice for once in my life. In my mind, it would be then, and only then that we could honestly make a baby for all the right reasons.
Olga was perhaps more confused about this than anybody. She had come to America prepared to deliver on command. In FSU, girls her age married and became pregnant, not necessarily in that order, without thinking twice and regardless of current situation or goals achieved. After all, cozy homes were the goal. Several of her peers had married Middle-Easterners and their only obligations in exchange for a life of luxury were to look pretty and produce children for their husbands. Other Russian girls she knew had married older, wealthy Americans who already had too many children. These girls were also required only to look pretty, but also to only go through the motions of reproducing without ever getting the satisfaction of having a child of their own.
But Olga had found an American man who had no children, and who, although not wealthy, did O.K. for himself. Further, he was a man whom she was attracted to that she could actually love. She had done the best any Russian woman could ask for. Why did her new husband want to complicate things with all of this nonsense about freedom and independence? What was freedom and independence anyway, and what does it have to do with creating a cozy home? After all, was it not the terrible, free and independent American women that were driving American men to Russian women in droves?
I insisted; Olga resisted, albeit not consciously. A product of Communism and a more chauvinistic society, she innately and passively rejected freedom and independence just as you or I would consciously and aggressively reject slavery and dependence. It took much longer than I reckoned. (I never really did reckon – I remember deciding I would just bonsai the adaptation part, as we all end up doing anyway.) And in the end it was compromise.
After four long, difficult years of “adaptation,” Olga had reluctantly learned to drive an automobile and run her own errands. She had scrabbled her way up to Freshman-level English., earned an AA degree, learned computers and programs, was running her own small business and earning money, had her own health insurance policy and IRA, her name on the title to a house, established credit, understood taxes, and in my mind, would do just fine if I were to get hit by the proverbial truck.
At first Olga humored my forced labor, but later she came to recognize and appreciate what I was trying to do. She saw other young Russian women who had signed up to what had appeared to be more favorable lives of luxury and looking pretty driven to madness by the emptiness of their compromised lives. And when these women finally made breaks for it – to try and salvage their dreams of cozy homes in the West, she saw them discover that although they all had great legs they really hadn’t any to stand on here. Most went from the cat bird’s seat to the frying pan to the fire. And not because of any particular ill-intentions or desire to have the upper hand by either party, but by their mutual inabilities or unwillingness to understand and accept each other’s cultures.
To be continued ….
Doug Salem
(of Olga Salem’s GoEastNow
www.goeastnow.com)
