Last night I had our two girls , the brave and fiesty orphan from my last post, and her graduate program-mate, over for the evening. When they were living under our care, they concurrently experienced their first major crisis in their independent lives. They had bravely set off on the long bus ride to their former residential college to collect their bank passbooks, returned jubilant from their successful adventure, only to have their excitement squashed by discovering that they no longer had possession of these precious books. I wrote to a friend at the time:
"... one went into hedgehog "curl up in a ball and cry mode" and the other went into housefly "flit about" mode - and neither had or have any clue as to how to cope with the crisis and figure out any actions to take. I coaxed the hedgehog out of her ball for a few minutes, and got the housefly to sit still for a few minutes and we had a little chat for a while... The hedgehog at one point said that maybe "god gave and god took away", so I said, "Well, maybe. If that's the case, then maybe you could ask him to give it back". So they said they'd like to try that, and the housefly, after asking a few questions about how she could talk to God, came out with a very touching and conversational prayer. After that, the hedgehog became more action oriented and was ready to do something about finding her book, while the housefly became paralyzed with I'm-no-good, life-is-no-good, what's-the-point-of-anything-pity. After a couple of days of agony for the both of them, the bank books were found back at the college, in the spot where they had absent-mindedly put them down while being given a couple of items of clothing from a house-mother."
Their characters remain as distinct as they ever were, but over the past year they have matured immensely. The brave and fiesty house-fly is as impulsive and intense as ever, but her intense emotions are now focused on the fate of the "Detdomskii". Recently she bumped into a former class-mate of hers who passed on news of others. "So-and-so is selling herself, as is this other one."
I know both "so-and-so" and "this other one", and this news was painful enough to me, but to my girls the pain goes deeper. Not only did they grow up with these other girls, but in the back of their minds is the thought: "That could have been me".
"It's not right!" the fiesty one, now christened by me The Revolutionary, fiercely vented. "The detdomskii haven't been brought up well. The "bringer-uppers" (literal translation of the Russian for house-mother) aren't doing their jobs. They say "Be quiet, sit still, clean this, do that", but they don't tell us about important things, and how to live. The teachers, they teach us abcd, but nothing about how to get a job and keep it. The detdomskii leave and aren't ready to live in the world. I've been thinking about the detdomskii a lot lately. We need to help them."
The hedgehog, now christened by me The Philosopher, inserted her own thoughts on the matter. "But you can't help people that don't want help. They have to want it first. And they have to want to help themselves."
A bit later, as it usually does, the topic of their mothers came up. The Revolutionary gave voice to her usual discourse that she wouldn't live with her mother if she found her and discovered she was rich. "But if she was poor, or sick, I would help her. BUT..." and this is where the monologue took a new turn from her usual recitation. "I will NEVER forgive her." The Philosopher was immediately anxious to say something, but was unable to get a word in edge-wise for several minutes. Finally she found a break in the one-way conversation: "You can't go through life with unforgiveness like that. We have to forgive. As for me, I'm just glad I'm alive, and I thank my mother, at least for that."
The whole evening was punctuated with moments that I wish I had captured on video, if for nothing else than to show our future graduates snippets of the wisdom they had to share about practical everyday living. "Did you know it tells you on the box of (long-life) milk that you have to keep it in the fridge after opening?" marveled The Revolutionary. "Detdomskii need to know these things!"
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