Wild type women. Good medical outcomes. Inundated with children.

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Women in the West have changed since I was a child. They are not the same as those who made us laugh with I Love Lucy in the 1950s.

Lucille Ball’s secret of success was that she dramatized all of the foibles of real woman. She exasperated her husband Desi Arnaz, but somehow her feminine view of the world, however nonsensical it was to him, seemed to work out for the best.

I identify with Desi.  I am married to a wild-type woman.  I call her  that because she never altered her natural hormonal makeup.  She has never taken birth control pills. She has had three natural pregnancies with breast feeding. Those bring well documented, predictable emotional swings and she experienced them all.

She, like me, received the standard childhood vaccinations of her day such as  MMR and DPT, tuberculosis, polio and smallpox without evident signs of injury.  So far as we know, we both inhabit bodies that have not been radically modified by environmental factors.

The Soviets significantly rearranged people’s lives. Though woman were expected to work, they did not view work as a career. They worked because they had to. The government gave them a place to live and told them where to work and what to do.

Oksana’s mother spent her early career as a draftsman’s apprentice, earning enough to live. Grandmother had also worked in factories, including a few years as slave labor in Germany during the war. Great-grandmother had been born on a fairly prosperous farm that was totally upended during the holodomor when her parents disappeared, father never to be seen again, mother to reappear in some years after prison.

Although the 20th century dramatically change these women’s lives, their notions of family and marriage remained traditional. There was no Betty Friedan or Erica Jong telling them it should be otherwise. Oksana’s childhood friends looked for the same thing she did. In America they used to say woman mainly wanted men who were straight, solvent and sober. Since the first was really not a question here in Ukraine, these women were satisfied to find a stable partner and a good provider.

That’s another characteristic of the wild-type woman. Her expectations in life have not been rearranged, causing her to abandon that for which millions of years of evolution prepared her. Oksana’s mother, whatever her many foibles, is dedicated to her grandchildren.

This is just the beginning of a riff on the wild type woman. In point of fact, I’m rather of an anachronism among modern men. Quite a few don’t want to deal with the complications that come with sharing their lives with women and children. I can only laugh at the compromises and limitations that family life imposes. This is the way we evolved to be, and the only way forward for our species. I have to accept it.

Grandpa Sasha came home from the hospital today. He is having trouble mastering crutches. Oksana tells me, and I observe that he is not the kind of guy to take initiative. He was just as happy lying on his back in the hospital letting everybody wait on him. I am being a hard ass. If he wants to go to the bathroom, he had better figure out how to use the crutches. We will help him, but we have to make it clear that he needs to help himself.

Zoriana went to a nursery school today, one of the first to open up after the war moved away from Kyiv. Oksana was disappointed that she spent some time watching videos. I am just glad she is with other kids.

Speaking of which, yesterday we had six of them running around the house. It was wonderful. They entertained each other while Oksana and the moms talked. I got out on my bicycle to buy ingredients for salmon fettuccine, which I made tonight. First time through I hewed fairly closely to the recipe, substituting however a watery béchamel sauce for the heavy cream that goes with than Alfredo-based recipe.

The Italian ingredients made the dish expensive. I loved the sun-dried tomatoes in oil, but everybody else that they’d rather have just fresh tomatoes. It cuts out one expense. Though I bought Italian Parmesan, by the time the cheese was melted into the sauce a taste for what you pay $10 a pound was not discernible. Next time I’ll use the Ukrainian knockoff. The fettuccine noodles themselves were expensive, and all you pay for is the shape. We agreed next time we will use Ukrainian spaghetti.

The other dish that I’m slowly perfecting is homemade corned beef. Put it together with grandma Nadia’s homemade rye bread in my homemade sauerkraut and homemade mayonnaise and you’ve got a pretty good imitation of a Reuben sandwich. It will have to be on hold for a while though. The Russians have seized the saltworks down by the Black Sea and none of the stores have salt for sale. I have a couple of pounds salted away, so to speak, from our preparations for Covid. I hope the supply chain rearranges itself by the time we run out.

The doctor that did the cataract surgery were absolutely right. The fuzziness went away. I can now read the bottom line on the eye chart – first time in 10 years my vision has been this clear. In other good news on the medical front, five months after I stopped drinking and having pretty much given up junky sweets, my stomach is close to normal. As a bonus my weight is down to what it was in high school.

My observations about the difference between boys and girls continue to collect. The nice thing about a blog like this is that I can record my notes on a daily basis, coming back later to collect and organize them if I want to write something more serious.

Marianna’s vocabulary is growing. She knows everybody’s name now in a name a few things. Every car is a be be. A few years back I made a T-shirt with a picture of our local marshrutka bus on it to recognize the closeness between the drivers and the community they serve.  Unfortunately that franchisee went bankrupt, and so far the new guys are no more to us than just bus drivers. But every time I wear the T-shirt, Marianna goes be be.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men are feeling pretty good, the good looking, wild-type woman fully engages my attention, and the children don’t know how to survive five minutes without it. As Oksana so frequently reminds me, this is exactly what I wanted.

Graham