Wild-type women. Sympathy for the Donald? Moving West.

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The women in the family confuse Oksana. Both her mother and Zoriana will argue at length over things that make no difference. Marianna, though she has only a few words, argues fairly eloquently by crying and pouting.

I offer my opinion that this is simply the nature of the female of the species. It is Zoriana’s way when we bicycle to school. Toward the end of our route we can turn left up the second line to the main road or turn right and go to the end down by the river, go over one block, and then turn left to go up the first line. It makes no difference – both ways work – but she will be insistent as to which one she wants.

When we get to where the second line joins the main road there is a gate to be opened. Zoriana wants me to hold her bicycle while she pushes the button and goes through. Some days she insists on closing the gate herself. Some days she insists that I do it. Yesterday she insisted that I leave it open. Though it probably would not have made much difference, good citizen that I am I wanted to close it. It took a few minutes to convince her it was the right thing to do.

The fact that I am a man helps. She is continually testing, to see if she can get her own way, but when I put my foot down she will assent.  This applies to bedtime, no ice cream before she finishes her dinner, wearing warm clothes on a cool day and endless other small confrontations. I think that she takes some comfort in the fact that there will always be a decision, whether or not it goes her direction.

Her confrontations with grandmother take a different turn. Grandmother raises her voice all the time, but rather ineffectually. She will count “one, two, three” as if there were some consequence to be had at four. There never is. Grandmother almost always gives in.

Grandma berates everybody the same way. She, however, must see it differently – picturing herself merely offering sage advice. If I wash the cutting board and put it in front of the window to dry, she will tell me it should be behind the stove. Or vice versa. If I give Zoriana milk in the morning there is invariably a problem. It should be mixed with water, or heated, or given to her after the water, or one thing or another. Marianna should not get meat (which she loves) and instead eat borscht. The borscht is delicious – I suspect that Marianna refuses it just to spite her grandmother. Oksana has never gotten comfortable with her mother’s constant criticism. I am lucky to get away with playing the linguistically challenged, culturally ignorant and somewhat deaf foreigner and simply ignore most of what she says.

The women in the family think I am too soft. I don’t so often argue with the children and more frequently give them what they want. On the other hand, when I say no it usually means no. Usually – I am sufficiently inconsistent that Zoriana at least will continue trying if she thinks she has half a chance.

Oksana herself is inconsistent. Two nights ago her mother got on me for not having diapered Marianna just before bedtime. So I did. Five minutes later Oksana came in and asked why she was wearing diapers when I had not insisted that she use the potty. I was too slow-witted to say I was only trying to appease her mother. Oksana ripped the diaper off. So I put Marianna on the potty – no result – and put another diaper on in five minutes and put her to bed.

One of the many things I love about Oksana is that she understands herself. She sees her mother in herself, and she understands that she can be inconsistent.

“Evolutionary mismatch” is a term that I just picked up from reviewing Ed Dutton’s book “Spiteful Mutants.”  Per Dutton’s theory mankind evolved in a tribal, later agricultural/pastoral environment in which sex roles were fairly well defined and children grew to adulthood knowing what would be expected of them. Per this theory, we were evolutionarily adapted to a life in which a woman’s primary roles in life were bearing and raising children and tending the home.

Patriarchy worked in this setting. Women were valued, protected and supported in their vital role of raising children. Their opinions would usually be accepted in their proper realm. The French call the matron of the household the “general of the interior.” However, the man of the household was expected to make the final decisions in external affairs.  He was the head of the defense and economic efforts.

Industrial society has changed all that. There is no more tribe. Childbearing is a private matter, of less interest to society at large. Women compete equally with men in the workplace. Government has displaced men in the role of protecting, and to some degree even victualing the family. Oksana’s stories of her ancestors highlight the evolutionary mismatch.

Her great-grandfather was the last traditional man, a prosperous kulak liquidated by the Communists in the 30s.  Great-grandmother was banished to Siberia or somewhere, leaving grandmother Mila essentially an orphan at about five. She somehow survived, worked as forced labor in Germany during the war, married and had children. By all accounts she could be a difficult woman, without a particularly affectionate marriage. Oksana says she made life miserable for her son’s wives, breaking up Uncle Sasha’s marriages. She was constantly critical of Oksana’s mother Nadia. She refused to move from her modest wooden bungalow the last years of her life, letting Nadia trek over to bring her food, bathe her and keep house, all the while berating her for not doing the job as well as it should be done.

In evolutionary terms, modernity – the Communists – had destroyed the community that should have surrounded and protected her and had diminished the role of a husband to simply being a cohabiting proletarian with a paycheck. Mila had to manage her own life. Unhappy as it was, it lasted 95 years.

Oksana’s mother comes by her habit of constant criticism honestly. It appears to be her major form of social interaction. She simply does not know how to engage in conversation. She is a smart enough woman, but she is uninformed. She does have her virtues. She is a faithful wife, a conscientious churchgoer, and a doting grandmother.

The Communists likewise stunted Oksana’s father by constricting his ability to run his own life. He was raised on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, to which Stalin had transplanted them in one of his many efforts to break up ethnic solidarity among Ukrainians. As they did for everybody, they provided him a job. Enough money to survive, but little reward for initiative. It would have been difficult to grow into the kind of decisive figure to whom a wife would look up. Nadia constantly criticize him for not being the man it would have been difficult to become, the husband evolution had prepared her to expect. Like a great many Ukrainians and especially Russians to this day, he accepted what life offered him and took consolation and refuge from his wife in drink.

I call Oksana a wild type woman. She has never subjected her body to synthetic hormones in the form of birth control pills. She was never much influenced by feminism, discordant and depressing music, drugs or materialism. Her world was her circle of friends, many of whom attended Conservatory with her. She is as much of a throwback as the ‘70s could have produced.

Oksana’s life is like I Love Lucy. She can be mad at me one minute for being five minutes early putting a diaper on Marianna, and two minutes later hug and kiss me and tell me I’m the best husband in the world. I’ll certainly forgive the former, because life has taught me how hard it is to find the latter. One of her great virtues is that she knows herself. She recognizes that she is mercurial like this, and knows enough to allow me the traditional role of the patriarch. Her emotions, untempered by synthetic hormones, make her a loving mother and wife.

For my part I have to accept that she will be guided by wisdom received from her mother and the society around her. She knows my opinion about overdressing kids in winter, being overly fearful of microbes, the fact that sunlight is good for kids and they don’t need hats to protect them from our less-than-tropical sunshine.  She won’t change her opinion, but she is wise enough to know she won’t change mine either. In finding an old-fashioned guy like me she sidestepped the question of evolutionary mismatch.  She is free, and happy to be, a traditional woman.  The question for us is how to make this happen for our children.

I haven’t commented much on the persecution of Donald Trump – Russiagate, January 6, and the FBI raid. Trump was elected to turn the tide. He certainly didn’t do that. I am not convinced he understood what was expected of him. He certainly did not surround himself with the people who could advise him, protect him, and carry out a program to fulfill the wishes of the Trump voters. Here is a voice from the alt-right that pretty much expresses my lack of extreme sympathy for the guy’s current travails. Ed Dutton, review upcoming, would largely agree with me. Trump was elected to put the brakes on evolutionary trends that are beyond anybody’s power to check.

The Oksenyuk family joined us for a barbecue last night. Before the war broke out they had broken ground on a home in the direction of Bucha and Irpin.  Since Victor can work from home, it made sense for them to abandon that project and simply move to Western Ukraine and wait it out. Their plan now is to spend a couple of years in Uzhgorod, right on the Slovakian border.

Safety is not their only concern. Though they had a nice apartment here, kids do better if they have space to move around. Life is cheaper in that part of the country, and if one can work anywhere, why pay Kyiv prices? Eddie will miss his friend Yarema.  As we sat at tables on the lawn and watched the six kids playing happily with each other, all agreed that this is the way life ought to be.

The question hangs in my mind with regard to the extent to which a person can build a successful career without ongoing in person interaction with other members of the company and with clients. On the other hand, how do you measure success? If Victor and Sasha are able to spend time with their kids and raise them to be successful adults, what else really counts?

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is working on a review of Dutton’s important book, the good-looking woman once again teaching music, Eddie off on his bike to a music lesson, Zoriana in kindergarten, and Marianna and Grandma working out what it means to be women.

Graham