The highest-interest bank account
When the Iron Curtain came down on the Soviet Union after World War II and all capitalist influences were kicked out, it was a travesty for the population. There were enormous lines for basic food supplies, medicines, and clothes. People even went so far as to smuggle in Western music on x-rays.
But there was one redeeming feature of state-run communism, and that was Soviet cartoons. I’ve gone on the record about this. I genuinely believe that Soviet cartoons between 1950 and 1990 are leagues better than the average American offering over that time period. They’re calmer, much slower-moving (easier for small kids to follow), don’t have crude jokes (based on the level of censorship that was acceptable) and are often adaptations of Russian or foreign fairy tales, or Russian literature, set to original music.
They’re so good (and the Russian cultural climate even 20+ years after the fall of the Soviet Union still in such recovery) that generations of kids continue to grow up on them. The masters behind all of these cartoons were Soyuzmultfilm, which employed over 700 artisans working on a wide variety of cartoons and art films.
Since my husband and I are raising our kids to speak Russian first, we’re no exception. The creme de la creme, in my opinion is Бременские музиканты, an adaptation of the Town Musicians of Bremen, made in 1969.
It’s only 20 minutes long and is really sweet. It’s about four animal characters and a guy, a troubadour, who go from town to town singing and being friends until he falls in love with a princess. There’s no spoken dialogue. The plot moves through songs.
This was a big part of our own childhood. And now it’s become a big part of my daughter’s childhood, as well.
If you were to look in my YouTube history, way back to the first time we showed our daughter a video (around 9 months, when she was teething, for 2 minutes, to distract her and then worried about the screen time impact for weeks afterwards), it would be this cartoon.
As she grew older and screen time became okay, we showed this to her, over and over again. For days on end. When she was teething. When we were on planes. When we were at restaurants and needed her to be quiet at the end of a meal. When we’d watch together with her and tell her what the animals were doing to develop her Russian vocabulary. Бременские музиканты are, for me, associated with diaper changes, with small tantrums, with her first steps, with days in and days out, with years of constantly, constantly raising her to become a human.
Over time, when I started to type in “бр”, and YouTube began immediately surfacing this clip. If you look at my YouTube history, this video, hands down, is the most-played thing. Over two generations of iPads, two generations of iPhones, and two genertations of Macbooks.
My daughter has grown up with the musicians. And I have now, for a second time.
Now my daughter is Big with a capital B. She’s long past the days of teething, of multiple naps. She eats her own food and ties her own shoes. She’s starting to read and write. And, saddest for me, she’s starting to speak English, because they’re starting to learn it in preschool. Her favorite movie these days, is, of course, Frozen.
And we haven’t watched the musicians in a good six months. Russian will soon, I think, become the language of her babyhood, and she’ll shed it just like she’s about to shed her baby teeth. English will become the language that she thinks in.
I was reminded of all of this when, last night, my husband and I took her to see Бременские музиканты live. As luck would have it, the show is traveling across America, as Russian-language concerts often do, to cities with Russian immigrant populations. It’s so rare that the content we consume is available for us to consume live, in popular culture, so we jumped at the chance to go.
I was so, so excited to take her. Because in a way, it was circling back, closing the loop on her babyhood. I was excited to see how she would react to seeing real actors act out the songs live after years of watching them on that red and white YouTube screen.
Watching my daughter react with pleasure to things that we’ve grown to love together is one of the biggest rewards of parenting for me. It now makes total sense to me why people film themselves watching Star Wars with their kids.
We got to the play. We sat down. I braced myself.
And then, my daughter noticed her friend from daycare in the audience.
“Mama, I’m going to go sit with her,” she said casually, and without a second glance backwards, walked away.
My husband and I sat there, feeling useless. And I sat, watching her rows in front of me, unable to see whether she was enjoying the show.
It’s funny, this parenting thing. They say that you’ll love it, and some people genuinely seem to enjoy being parents most of the time.
But the way I see parenting is, you’re running an extremely long-term, stressful bank account. The bank account is your child. What you deposit into your child are all of the good things you want them to have: discipline, love, respect, all of your favorite music and movies and songs, everything you think they need to become a human being. You can only make these deposits a day at a time, and it is a grueling, grueling process because it involves millions of diaper changes, of “I’m going to count to three,” thousands of times when you brush their teeth, try to get them to sit on the potty, putting on winter clothes, coloring, reading books, all over and over again.
Parenting is a long, grueling game, the very antithesis of our modern, internet-based insta-culture.
And, if you’re lucky, you get the interest returned to you years later. In them saying “I love you” for the first time, or of mindlessly singing a song you’ve been singing to them since they were born, or when they learn to read, or ride a bike, or do any one of a million things that you’ve been putting into them day in and day out with zero return for years and years and years.
Or, in this case, the rewarding feeling of putting my own childhood into her, and watching it shine right back out. That feeling, getting that interest back, was about to be taken away from me.
But, just when I was about to cry, I glanced, and from a certain angle in my own seat in the darkness, I could just make out my daughter sitting, her chin moving to form the widest smile and dimples as she was singing along to the music. That’s when the interest hit, compounded and multiplied.
What I’m reading lately
Life…finds a way:
Which command line commands should beginners know?
txt: grep, sed, sort, tail, tee, tr, uniq, wc, diff
FS: find, touch, tar, gzip, locate, updatedb, du, chmod
net: wget, curl