I even remember the moment I heard. My husband came to me and our baby, we were playing on the bed, it was a Thursday. He asked if I had heard yet. I asked what, and he told me that Russia attacked Ukraine. It felt so surreal. It felt like being held at gunpoint to r*pe your sibling.

We don’t live in Russia or Ukraine, but we have close friends and relatives in both countries. For about a week I couldn’t concentrate on our daughter. My head was somewhere else which felt awful, but was also the first time I had allowed myself to think about something else and not give her 100% of my attention. We went to demonstrations (well who cares) and kept doom scrolling, which felt more urgent, more necessary to stay in touch with what is happening. We realized how we didn’t see the obvious for years. Which was very painful, since my husband was always interested in politics, also back when he lived in Russia, and got me into being more political myself. We were way too naive about it.

We kept asking our friends and family how they were, what they planned to do. Some fled immediately. Some a bit later. Most stayed. With time, the imminent feeling of threat and impending doom numbs down to low key anxiety. So many years down the drain. So many futures waisted. They stole their futures.

I remember I kept telling my daughter “one day we will tell you about a war between our countries that lasted for 1 day when you were a baby”. 2 days. 10 days. 30 days. I stopped counting at 100.

Now I just hope we will have time to go there. Will my grandparents be able to see their great granddaughter? Will she meet her grandpa in Russia? Will she ever be able to play with her cousins in rural Ukraine? I had planned to spend summers there, to get to know this side of my spouse’s family, and hoped she would get to learn some snippets of Ukrainian there. That’s how he knows the language. And now I just hope that his cousins will not die. The fat one lost about 2/3 of his body weight so far. I’m not surprised being in the military does this to you.

Damn I even remember the pigeons. That stupid pigeons. We had pigeon problems on the balcony and in March 2022 they built a nest and it had eggs in it. But the day prior they bombed an orphanage. Or a children’s hospital? Or a maternity ward? God these assholes bomb everything, don’t they. And I cried and we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t bring ourselves to remove the eggs. We had freaking pigeon babies with incredibly proud pigeon parents who were, btw, super progressive, crazy emancipated pigeons, both were looking for the eggs and babies equally. We gave them names when they hatched and watched them grow older. And then fuck nature, about two weeks before they would have left the nest, a fucking crow ate Hittin first, and poor Putler was so, so scared, and we tried to shelter him and even lifted the rule of no feeding no water, but then the next day, he was dead as well. The parents were devastated. We were devastated. We were powerless. We still are. We couldn’t protect them. We couldn’t make a change even when we tried. We were powerless.

The universe stood still, and then it started going with a different pace and in another direction than before.

Not sure where I am going with this, I think I’m just grateful someone else found this moment… Majorly significant.

Back in 2014 I thought we are witnessing the beginning of WW3 and even went so far as to head down to the shops and buy enough food for ~ 2 weeks.

Call me cynical, but in 2022 I felt more like “You guys are surprised about this? Really?”