Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

I was lost after school without my babysitter Svetlana. This was the most traumatic experience of the seven years of my life. I was stranded in a big market all alone, all I remember is spilled milk on the sidewalk that was running everywhere and closing in on me. I didn’t realize I was crying until I was made fun of by a group of teenagers, who always mistook me to be older than I was. All of a sudden a place so familiar to me was no longer the place where I walked through everyday; I was panicking.

I lost my recollection of my walk home, all I remember are tears burning my eyes and preventing me from keeping them open. The fear of being one of those homeless children that I saw on the subway in Kiev was occupying my mind. I walked though construction, over a bridge, and somehow ended up in front of our building. As always the elevator was not working and I ended up walking sixteen flights of stairs filled with used needles and occasional druggies whom those needles belonged to. No one opened the door to my house, but the elevator was finally working, so I returned outside in hope of finding Svetlana; she stood in the sunset crying.

This was the first genuine hug I have given her in the past six month. In that period of time I had been waiting for my mom to pick me up from school and take me away in her little red car. As I would come down those stairs into the lobby filled with parents, my eyes would be searching for my mother. She always stood out of the crowd; at the age of seven I never realized how beautiful she is. My mother could be spotted a mile away. I looked for her long and bright red hair and her red lipstick, but always ended up spotting Svetlana.

As a child, I had never been this disappointed and upset. I would cry and tell Svetlana to leave me so my mother could come and get me. I would cry and start hyperventilating and wouldn’t be able to stop after the half hour subway ride. I despised Svetlana. I always assumed that she wanted to come and get me instead of my mother. I realized at about eight the Svetlana was paid to come and pick me up and stay with me and my sister until eight or nine when my parents returned home.

After my parents would get home, we would eat dinner and I would always be in trouble for something that I did to Svetlana. This cycle continued for about one year. I had never wanted to see my parents like I did when I was seven. Work was their life. Our evenings as a family always ended up in fights, our parents too stressed and tired would simply send my sister and me to sleep for fighting all the time.

Eventually, at the age of eight, I accepted the fact that my parents’ priority was work and finally gave into Svetlana’s genuine nature. After all the fights and tears, I grown to love her like my mother. I no longer could wait to see her after school and finish all my homework and engage in a fun activity that night. Most of our fun was interrupted at night by my parents, now I wouldn’t want Svetlana to leave. My parents became the people that made me burnt breakfast in the morning and the ones that would yell at me for loosing the remote.

The year after I went to fifth grade, my last year of school in Ukraine, my sister and I were informed of Svetlana’s termination of our babysitting. I could not imagine my day without her. My sister and I cried and cried and then I realized that Svetlana was no longer there to tell me to do my homework. She was not there to tell me not to use any of my school notebooks for school as a sketch pad, and she no longer came to get me after school. Instead of searching for my mother, like I used to, I searched for Svetlana and would never see her. I forced myself to hold back my tears as I left school all alone.

Svetlana’s leave was the first time that forced me to manage my own time. I had to learn to spend my time beneficially and not to waste any resources. I consider this my first step into adulthood; this period was the most crucial in my life. I had the taste of freedom of making my own choices. This was yet another time of change for me; I vowed to never cry in public again. This was the ability that most adults had, and since I was on my way of becoming an adult I made sure I acted like one.

That year my dad moved to US alone first, in order to later have us join him in the summer. My mother was working at home and was finally spending time with us. I still loved her, but I was confused about her role in my life. Secretly I would dream of Svetlana as my mother; she always loved my sister and I like her own two daughters. I still remember the first time I came home and found my mom’s shoulder to cry on. I will never forget her warm lap and how she hugged me, she actually hugged me for the first time when I really needed her.

After moving to the US my first meaning of family formed. We no longer had our grandparents and the four of us were the only family to each other and we did get along the first year in the US. The next year, however, was filled with my father’s idea of going back to Ukraine and his pressure on my sister and me to study Ukrainian subjects while in US. I struggled to rebel against my father’s rule and found myself in a constant fight with him.

In eighth grade my mother took a job in Washington DC while my sister and I were in Amherst with my father. My mom never explained why she agreed to take a job that far a way, but me and my sister suspected our parents having issues in their marriage. While with my father in Amherst, for the first time in four years I felt like he was interested in having a relationship with me. We actually hugged for the first time in six years (birthdays and holidays not included) and were enjoying each others company.

We bought a digital camera together and had a photo shoot – one of the moments I will never forget. This was one of the times I thought I thought that a relationship between me and my father could be fixed. After the four years of him not treating me like the little girl I have always been, I was sure he was just making up for his emotional absence as a father. My parents resolved their issues; my mother came back to Amherst next year and everything was back to the way it has always been – chaos.

I never understood why my parents were so much better with their children while separated. I had never been that happy with the relationship I had with each one. Perhaps my parents were unhappy with their life and when combined together they took it out on my sister and me. A marriage is one relationship that has to have the two people involved bring out the best out of each other. My parents were not that couple at that time, all their negativity would transfer on their children. I will make sure to have better parenting skills that my parents had and to never have my kids experience the better side if their parents separated.

I made a promise to myself to never forgive my parents for emotionally neglecting me once they were back together. For the next three years I did everything bad I possibly could without any feeling of guilt. My mother hoped that she could make up for all the days she didn’t come to get me after school. We moved to another apartment complex and she started working from home. My sister and I were to still too fat for my father; he made sure he expressed his ‘concern’ every time we ate. Everything returned to normal.

I cared about what my father said until I was about fifteen; then I realized if I don’t let him break me down he will only make me stronger and he did. Although his negative comments were all I heard, I knew he suffered the same growing up with his difficult mother. Now she has never been this proud of anyone like she is of my father, her older son, doing the impossible in her Soviet-made eyes. I realized this is the only way he knows how to care for us and that he has never been exposed to any other way. He is exercising what he is taught, my grandmother was taught by the Soviet Union, fear and negativity was the only inspiration and stimulation known to people. My father is a product of his time and there is no way he can control that.

I realize that I do have a cultural barrier between me and my parents. They were taught absolutely one way and I had been exposed to so many different possibilities. I have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and make sure that I never make them. Now being older I can analyze their behavior by looking at the history of the time they were brought up in. Slowly I start to forgive them and let go of old grudges.

Still, I can not remember the last time that my father has said “I love you,” I guess I even stopped caring. I hate my father for not finding those words in his vocabulary. Just like he hasn’t found those words for me, I still wait until I have enough in me to just say them and hug him. So far he is the only person that I have trouble expressing my feelings of love to. I struggled to let people know how I felt because of my father, but I fought that fear of rejection and overcame it to realize that saying those three words is the most amazing thing one can say and hear.

My mother although always being caring has always been a mystery in my eyes. I always have the feeling that when she says one thing but she is implying the exact opposite. When I do point that characteristic out, she tells me that I am trying to put words in her mouth. All I ever wanted to understand with her is what is really trying to say and why she won’t just come out and say it. That is why I am always straight forward and want everyone to know exactly what I’m saying. I never want to have misunderstanding, like I do with my mother.

I do not expect my parents to change, but I expect them to look back and learn from the past. I hope for them to see who my sister and I turned out to be and accept us for what we are, not what they have wanted us to be. I hope one day my parents realize that my rebellion was a mission not just an act. I have many more missions to make and goals to reach, but I hope these missions do not have to do with them. I hope they can give into my nature and accept the person I have become. I am simply a product of time and their marriage.