In the previous generations, when women were completely helpless, who did stuff for them when their husbands died?

My mother is such a woman of olden times, and I can’t figure out who’s supposed to be managing her life now that she’s a widow. It can’t be me because it’s a full-time job. She doesn’t know how to listen to messages on her answering machine, send or receive an email or a text message, or pay bills. She has no idea where any of her paperwork is, she doesn’t know how to pay taxes, fill up the tank of her car, schedule a doctor appointment.

Honestly, it’s easier to list what she can that what she can’t do.

My father would have been just as helpless without her but in a different way. He couldn’t make a cup of tea, feed himself, or find his own underwear in the house, let alone wash it, or anything adventurous like that.

We aren’t talking about a helpless, senile woman who needs constant (or any) medical care. This is a woman who simply hasn’t been self-sufficient since 1974. I really don’t know what to do.

These complimentary marriage models are terrible unless the participants die at the exact same time.

Peter Pomerantsev uses the words “postmodern, fluid, shape-shifting, changeable, and in flux” to describe Russia. He spent years there, and he really figured it out. Russia is not an unwieldy, outdated, Soviet-style empire. It’s the highly fluid, very postmodern society of the future. Hopefully, not our future because it’s a bad place to be.

Everything there is completely fluid and nothing really means anything. Here’s an example. The occupied territories of Ukraine have been officially accepted into the Russian Federation. The Constitution of Russia was changed to reflect that.

But then everybody kind of forgot about it all and moved on. The Russian government never took charge or responsibility for these terrories. Putin keeps referring to them as Ukraine, which goes against the constitutional process he himself oversaw and signed off on.

That’s not how less fluid and postmodern countries behave. Do you want to know how a real nation-state acts? A nation-state takes the constitution and the citizenship seriously. For instance, who do you think has been paying social security to the people in the territories Russia occupied back in 2014? Ukraine, obviously. The logic is: they are our citizens, so we are responsible for them. You can see how this approach makes everything a lot more complicated. Responsibility and being grounded in reality are hard. It’s so much easier not to bother with these complexities. Pick up some citizens today, dump them tomorrow, and move on. Nothing is real, anyway. It’s all a game.

No, this is not like anything that happens in America. But it will be if we aren’t doing anything to prevent things from ending up in that exact place.

Everybody nods their heads to this. Yes, of course, it’s the school closures. I’m opposed to school closures but I don’t get how this is an obvious result. The kids who are 13 today, were 10 in 2020. During lockdowns, they weren’t at home alone. That person they were with at home could have taught them to read. There wasn’t much else to do anyway.

We keep hearing that schools exclude parents from decisions about their children and that the government treats parents as irrelevant.

Hmm, I wonder what’s causing all this. It’s not like parents are aggressively making themselves irrelevant by handing over all responsibility for their children to the schools and the government.

I taught my 7-year-old about tradeoffs. Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you want the good things, you’ll have to accept the bad things that come with them.

This is a tradeoff, too. If you don’t want to teach your own child to read, if you hand over control over that process to somebody else, that somebody else will control what the child reads. We can pout over it or recognize how it works.

And why not, if the international reaction to the blowing up of the Kahovka dam by Russia was limited to a few tweets expressing the usual grave concern.

I talked to the Ukrainian instructor who is coming to us from Bakhmut. She’s a native speaker of Ukrainian, for all that people keep chirping stupidly that the Donbass is Russian-speaking. She speaks so fast, I had to do this thing where I go into a zone when somebody speaks a language to be able to follow.

A wonderful young woman who has never been on an airplane and has never even been to Kyiv, let alone overseas. What’s even better, she wants to be a literary critic.

I’m very psyched.

In his book about Russia, Peter Pomerantsev writes about one of the enormous number of schools that teach women how to whore themselves out more successfully:

“Today we will learn the algorithm for receiving presents,” the instructor tells her students. “When you desire a present from a man, place yourself at his left, irrational, emotional side. His right is his rational side: you stand to his right if you’re discussing business projects. But if you desire a present, position yourself by his left. If he is sitting in a chair crouch down, so he feels taller, like you’re a child. Squeeze your vaginal muscles. Yes, your vaginal muscles. This will make your pupils dilate, making you more attractive. When he says something, nod; this nodding will induce him to agree with you. And finally, when you ask for your car, your dress, whatever it is you want, stroke his hand. Gently. Now repeat: Look! Nod! Stroke!” The girls chant back in unison: “Look. Nod. Stroke. . . . Look, Nod, Stroke.”

Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

There is also a story in the book about a Muslim family where one daughter was a prostitute and another got in with Wahhabists, and everybody was worried she’d become a suicide bomber. But then she also became a prostitute, and everybody is now content.

My parents – now just my mother, of course – have these friends, a couple their age with a daughter called Katia. Now, Katia is a very attractive woman, as Katias tend to be. Very attractive.

Katia’s mom was always gushing, “my daughter and I are so close! We are best friends! She never had a rebellious phase as a teenager. Always so sweet and loving to her mom!” The mom’s friends were very jealous.

Of course, now Katia is in her forties, and mom is still her best friend. Her only friend. Katia never married, never had children. Forget children, she’s never been on a date. And it’s not that she’s lacking in the looks department. It’s simply that she never grew up. Katia’s mom is devastated. She’s in her seventies, and she understands that Katia will be completely alone once mom dies.

The reason why I’m telling this story is because I saw comments regarding the invariably negative images of parents in literature for teenagers. As I said before, every stage of human development has its own developmental goals. The teenage years are the time of the second major separation from the parents. These aren’t parents as human beings. It’s parents as objects of a child’s psychological life. A child needs to reject the parents to become her own person.

And here’s the most important thing: the better the parent, the earlier and the harder is the rebellion. When a teenager says (or seeks out in a book), “mom and dad are bad”, it doesn’t mean they are actually bad. To the contrary, they are fantastic to have been able to bring the kid to this important stage of development. What the kid is actually saying with this “mom and dad are bad” is “it’s bad for me to be mom and dad. I need to be my own person.”

It’s only in the third and final stage of separation, which is young adulthood, when a child fully separates, comes into her own, and can finally return to the parents as an equal, as a fully formed grownup.

If a parent is this larger-than-life person, a fascinating individual, and a fantastic parent, it’s all the more difficult for a child to separate. Mom’s or Dad’s persona is so attractive that you don’t know how to create your own and not keep swimming in the comforting warm soup of their light. I anticipate that for my own kid I’ll be an absolute monster once she gets to be 15. And once she separates and figures out who she is, she’ll come back to me and see me finally as a normal, fallible adult that I am. Unless I freak out and prevent her, which I’ll try hard not to do.

Not everybody who failed to separate successfully is as tragic a case as Katia. But we all know people who are 27 and still stuck in the parents’ basement or freak out and cry for an hour when a neighbor says, “did you gain some weight?”

I have a friend who keeps saying, “I don’t know what’s happening, my daughter was always so loving, we were so close but now she turned 16, and she can’t stand me, always rude, always avoiding me, I must be a terrible mom.” And I keep telling her, no, you are a great mom. This is the proof that you did everything right. She thinks I say it to be kind (which shows how much she gets me) but it’s the literal truth.

So that’s why teenager lit aims to help teenagers explore this “my parents don’t get me” feeling. It’s not about the parents but about the “me” that is suddenly making an appearance. It’s very annoying to the parents, it’s a shitty stage for everybody involved, but the alternative is the Katia scenario. Would you rather suffer a sullen, eye-rolling, misunderstood brat for a few years or have a sweet, compliant Katia with a failed life at 40?

I think people are starting to believe that I constantly dump on China and the “Global South” out of a sense of a dislike for them. But that’s completely untrue.

China has enormous potential. I’d love to see it live up to it and not be a source of only COVID, cheap plastic crap, social credit scores, and Putin butt-lickers. I’d love it even more if Africa finally got itself together.

But beyond all for obvious reasons, I’d love it if Latin America did something about itself because somebody else is always to blame, and it’s embarrassing to watch.

It would be a much better world if most of it didn’t just sit there and pout, waiting to be given everything and always feeling disappointed.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is revealing many things. One is the answer to the question of “why the West rules.”

With all my sincere respect for my South African readers, it’s undeniable that African politicians showed themselves to be groveling, pathetic incompetents. It’s clear that Africa will remain a stale backwater of humanity because it has no interest in anything else.

We keep hearing that it’s the fault of colonialism that “the Global South” is in a bad state. But long after anybody has had any interest in colonizing these places, the Ramaphosas, the Lulas and the Petros are still crawling on all fours, looking for a colonial master whose boots they can lick.

Klara thinks that Father’s Day means her father should be playing with her every second of the day.

“It’s OK, Daddy,” she says encouragingly, “I have many more games prepared for you.”

N is giving me triumphant looks, like he just won the parent competition.