Parents & Sons
'The last time we smoked weed together, my mother passed me a joint and, said, 'Son, smoking is bad for you.''
Hear the words “90s in Russia,” and instantly, images flood in—crime, theft, bloody violence on the streets. And with that, the sense of opportunity, business, and status—a chance to change your life.
I imagine it felt the same for those first American settlers heading west.
You’re in a bar, sipping bourbon, when some ragged-looking man motions you closer.
“Psst,” he whispers. “They say there’s gold in California.”
“Gold?!” you say, leaning in. “Tell me more.”
That night, you go home, bang your fist on the wooden table, and proclaim to your wife and eleven children: “Family! That’s it! We’re moving west!”
By morning, your worldly possessions are packed into a caravan covered in stretched animal skin—and you’re off.
On the way, nine of your eleven children die of hunger or dysentery. Somewhere around the Rockies, coyotes eat your wife, leaving only a mud-stained dress. You don’t care—where you’re going, there will be plenty.
After a year—hollow-eyed, half-mad, dragging your last two children behind you as makeshift wagon wheels—you finally arrive at the last frontier of the great American expansion. You drop your belongings on the dusty rock and stare into the Pacific, inhaling the air. Somehow, it smells different. Sweeter.
Ah, you think.
The land of opportunity…
“…What, you think it was all rosy and fun during the 90s? We starved!” my mother says to me. “Not that you would understand, city boy…”
As if being born and raised in the city is somehow my fault.
“You’re Moscow-born as well,” I reply, pointing a finger at her, though she is already walking away, her back turned to me.
Various legends exist about the “accursed 90s” in Russia.
Some older people say it was a time of opportunity when you could make money out of thin air. A time they, somehow, missed. These bitter people point to a TV screen where the news shows yet another oligarch and say, “Those dumb crooks took all our money!” As if that’s the root of all their problems and not the fact they've been drinking vodka on a Tuesday afternoon for the past two decades. You can’t help but wonder: If you’re so smart, why didn’t you just, you know, join them?
Others say the 90s in Russia was a time of poverty, crime, and lawlessness. In discussions with my mother, she would provide vivid details—the empty shelves in grocery stores, the crumbling ruble, the crime gangs suddenly filling the streets and controlling businesses, and people fighting over a loaf of bread on Tverskaya.
“I was afraid to walk outside alone, do you understand?” she tells me.
But of course, I don’t understand.
We, people born in the late 1990s or early 2000s, came into existence sandwiched between two generations. On one side are the Millennials, the first proper post-Soviet generation. These are the bungee-jumping, startups-and-money-obsessed biohackers downshifting in Bali, always needing to make a statement, like teenagers who never grew up. On the other side is the proverbial Gen Z, whom the entire world hates because nobody understands them. Those alien weirdos are perpetually glued to their phones, dancing on TikTok, wearing suspicious haircuts. They were born when social media was already popular. Surely, that leaves a mark on the psyche.
The only information my generation has ever had about the 1990s in Russia came either from our parents or from an endless stream of TV shows and movies that romanticized crime and coming to power through illegal means.
Guess which one we believed.
“I had friends die from sniffing glue in the underpasses of Moscow! We had nothing, you hear me!” my mother would say, gradually transitioning into a yell, as if my silence was somehow a disagreement. “NOTHING!!!”
As a teenager, I brushed her off, saying something like, “Okay, Mom, I hear you,” to avoid further escalation. Though, of course, secretly, I was thinking, I’m sorry you were dumb enough not to notice opportunities when they came to you, Mom.
Only when I grew up did I realize that my parents couldn’t notice or grab any of the opportunities in 1990s Russia because they themselves were kids. Both of them were born in the late 70s, which meant that by the time they could reap the rewards of the Wild West that Russia had become, they were teenagers at best.
When they were old enough to move out of their family homes, my father risked being drafted into the army, so a coin was flipped, and nine months later, they had me.
Three years later, when that draft postponement ran out (valid only for three years), they flipped a coin again and had my sister, Kate.
When my mother learned not to play coin toss with my dad, they finished procreating and—boom!—it was already the 2000s. My father got over the conscription age, Putin came to power, and the “accursed 90s” became what it is now: a label for a strange and uncertain time, buried deep in the collective past, shrouded in mystery and legend, a goldmine for screen and joke writers.
Yes, my parents are young; it’s weird, and the older I get, the weirder it becomes.
When I was seven, and my mom was 27, it felt like a gulf the size of the Pacific Ocean was between us.
I remember thinking about what it must be like to be 27, imagining it as old—ancient, even. One more step, and you’d be nothing but dust.
When my sister Kate was five, she used to ask my mom, “Do you remember the dinosaurs?”
To which my mom, an unsuccessful stand-up comedian, would reply, “Of course. I had one as a pet. The year after, we had to give it up because we started hunting mammoths and drawing stick figures in caves.”
Now I’m 27, and sometimes I look in the mirror and think, God, I’m just a kid. And then I think back to my mother at that age and think, God, they were just kids! And they already had kids!
Each year, the gap between my parents and me shortens, and we become less like parents and children and more like something I can’t quite name. They seem increasingly less parental and more like older friends or, at the very least, distant relatives. In my MA program, I have classmates older than my parents. I have friends and colleagues who are the same age as them. How do you deal with that?
How do you build a relationship with parents who are not young enough to be your buddy but also not so old that you switch on their favourite TV show and patronizingly tap them on the knee, spoon-feeding them raspberry Jell-O?
Do you show them respect the way your friends show their older parents—telling them it’ll be alright, pretending you won’t put them in a nursing home when the time (and money) comes?
Or do you go out drinking together late into the night, cracking dick jokes, then wake up in the afternoon, order pizza, and watch reruns of Seinfeld while smoking pot?
I’ve tried it enough times to say that’s not an option either.
The last time we smoked weed together, my mother passed me a joint and, coughing, said, “Son, smoking is bad for you.”
I raised a glass of wine and said, “Cheers to that.”
At 27, my parents were kids who, for some reason, also had kids. Now, they are just 40-year-old adults who, for some reason, have almost 30-year-old children. I’m not sure that’s covered in the manual on how to be a human.
So I do what I can—switching back and forth between the two modes, existing on odd days as their friend and on even ones as their child.
It doesn’t matter how old I am, how many girls I’ve slept with, how many marriages or divorces I’ve been through, how many careers I’ve started and destroyed—every time I meet my parents, I turn into a ten-year-old with a squeaky voice.
Forces unknown make me allow them to bully me and scold me. Every time I meet my dad, I turn into a needy, weeping crybaby, obsessively craving his approval and love. I silently hate my parents for having such control over me (but mostly, I just hate myself). In any other circumstances, nobody can make me do things or tell me what I’m doing wrong. But with these people—just 20 years older than me—whatever they do, I am their bitch.
My parents and I would be having fun, and I’d tell a profane joke that everyone would laugh at in any other situation. But my mother would suddenly go, “Oh, Serezha. Stop it.”
And I’d feel guilty, thinking, What am I doing? Telling this joke to my mother?
My father would just look at me and say, “Are you an idiot or something?”
Seriously, am I?
Suddenly, all I can do is sit there like the scolded child that I am, nodding sadly in agreement that yes, I am literally the worst idiot this planet has seen, and yes, I am sorry that my dad had to escape conscription so that I was born.
Then, the weekends would come, and I’d get drunk with my dad and belt out karaoke songs at ZIMA in London. We’d get pissed on nastoyka, my dad feeling less like my father and more like some old friend someone had invited to the party. He’d tell his profane jokes and laugh at mine. We’re back to being buddies.
Then Monday would roll around, and it’s back to basics—as if we’d suddenly remembered our true roles. We’d sit down and have The Talk (The One That Every Parent Has With Their Child On a Monthly Basis) about where my life is going.
“I just want you to be a sensible human being,” my father told me recently as we sat in a Russian restaurant in central London. “Not another one of those online bloggers. They are all idiots, you know.”
“I know,” I replied.
He exhaled, shaking his head in disbelief, then said, “Alright, pour us some more vodka, son. It’s not getting any colder just sitting there.”
But I imagine it must be strange for them, too. At a certain point, when you have kids, you stop measuring your age by the numbers on your passport. Instead, you see it reflected in your offspring. Their milestones become your markers—one day, you’re thirty; the next, your grandchild is.
Whenever someone asks my father his age, he shrugs and says, “My oldest is almost thirty.” Then he pauses, watching the face of whoever he’s talking to shift with surprise. “Yup,” he adds. “My children are old.”
Still, with two new kids—siblings of mine who are closer in age to me than I am to my parents—to my dad, I must feel like a son he “once had.” The way men with second families sometimes speak of their children from their first marriage: distant, past tense, like a car they used to drive but then sold because they moved to London and it was just sitting there, depreciating, at risk of being stolen.
For my mother, who hasn’t had kids in over twenty-five years, it’s another story. Just as I feel younger around them, I imagine she feels older when she tells her friends she has a nearly thirty-year-old son. At 47, with colleagues roughly my age, that must make her feel ancient. After all, when her mother—my babushka—was her age, she already had two grandkids.
“You know what,” she tells me occasionally. “I think I am ready for grandkids.”
“Good for you,” I reply. “Go on Amazon and buy one.”
I’ve recently hit the age when everyone around me has started getting married and having kids. If talking about these topics was strange before, now it feels like everyone expects you to do it. Every relationship you start has one big question looming in the background (WHEN?), and every family gathering inevitably comes down to answering that question in the open.
“So, when are the kids due?” my grandmother asked recently when I brought Masha to her birthday a few weeks ago.
We were sitting in a posh Greek restaurant in a posh Surrey town called Guildford, drinking posh organic wine that left bits of rotten grape at the bottom of the glass because my father’s family is, well, posh—and I like saying the word posh.
“Ah, they aren’t even thinking about that yet! In their generation, they live for themselves until they’re 30, then take a mortgage, and only then think about kids—at age 35,” my forty-year-old stepmother, who’s had three divorces before marrying my father, said knowingly.
And she isn’t far from wrong.
Still, the older I get, the more I think about it. Not just think privately about it—it’s more like the entire world is conspiring to make me think about it.
First, your friends get married and have kids. Then, the people you thought would never get married and have kids get married and have kids. And before you know it, you’re the only unmarried douchebag in town.
But what’s worse is that you start wanting these things.
Just this morning, before I sat down to write this, Masha and I downloaded this new AI app that lets you see what your future child would look like. It asks you to upload four images of yourself and your partner, then makes you wait 24 minutes while it “generates.”
Now, I am very far from being ready for kids—both financially and mentally—but when I saw the ten generated avatars of AI children that looked like me and Masha, something inside me shifted. I kept looking at one image in particular—a girl in a little beige dress and a tiny hat, her nose and cheekbones like mine, her eyes and hair like Masha’s—and I felt weird.
As in, I know this is crazy, and I know this is just an AI-generated image, but I love and miss her. Also, why is she not here?!
I sent the images to a group chat with my mother and sister. My mother replied instantly:
“Ah, someone is ready to have a baby!”
“Don’t even start,” I texted back, knowing better than to fuel the fire that is my mother’s desire for grandkids.
“What? I’m just saying what I see.”
The worst part? My mother is a psychologist. So she might actually, you know, see something.
When my father had his new kids a few years back—when I was roughly the same age he was when he had me—I joked, “You helped me dodge that bullet.”
Now I look at these tiny people, my sisters, and feel such abundant joy and love for them; it makes me wonder if having kids isn’t as bad as I thought.
I’ve always wanted a big family and thought I’d be a great dad. But I also wanted—unlike my parents, who used their kids as Army Dodge Passes—to be practical about it. I wanted to feel ready, to know that I could provide for myself before committing to raising another human being.
Whenever people find out I was married and divorced—all by the age of 26—they give me a weird look, as if trying to see something in me they didn’t catch the first time.
“Wait,” they say, “When did you find the time to do all that?”
After spending my entire life not wanting to get married and ending up like my parents (or their parents)—that is, divorced—I married someone on a whim after knowing them for all four months.
I wasn’t ready. Three years later, I got divorced.
Still, maybe this whole “ready” thing is overrated.
I think back to my parents, growing up in the “accursed 1990s” in Russia, living in shared accommodation, crashing at my mother’s family home, and getting financial support from two sets of parents until they were nearly 30.
I think about the lightness with which they decided to have kids—“Ah, I just need to dodge the army, let’s have another one!”—and the heaviness my generation today sees having kids. A burden—financial, emotional, intellectual.
I think about my friends who are younger than me and have kids. And my friends who are older than me and don’t have kids.
And I wonder which approach is the right one.
Whether there’s a right one at all.
Perhaps it’s like writing. You never know what you’ll write until you sit down and start typing. You write to figure out what you think.
And in most things in life—starting a new career, launching a business, or raising a family—you can’t know whether you’re truly ready until you put yourself against the wall. Sometimes, all you can do is make the jump, let it be what it will be and not be afraid to make the Big Mistakes. Because maybe, with time, those Big Mistakes will turn into something beautiful.
I mean, my dad needed to get out of the army, and here I am, 27 years later, writing this for you.
Surely, that’s something.
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