Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
Here’s a story you might not have expected: thirty years ago this week, my family picked up and moved to Ukraine.
Our move wasn’t quite like the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl for the fertile valleys of California, but it had that vibe. It was 1993. The height of the Farm Crisis had faded, and most rural Iowans had settled into a bitter sort of denouement. The ones who’d held onto their farms were slowly clawing their way back. The ones who hadn’t were working in factories or town jobs, still haunted by all they had lost.
My dad was in the latter group. He tried a variety of careers in the mid-1980s, but by the early ’90s, he was working in a factory that made grain drying equipment and lawnmowers. I don’t think he loved it, but he was 35 and had two kids, and it was better than the alternatives.
Then something unexpected happened. My dad’s factory sent him to an agricultural trade show in Moscow. The Soviet Union had dissolved in December 1991. By late 1992, the US and Europe were ready to exploit new markets, and new (ancient) nations like Ukraine were desperate for revenue from improved production. My dad wasn’t in sales, but no one else wanted to go to Russia, so he rush-ordered a passport and took off.
My dad’s trip in 1992 was wild, and he loved it. How could he not have loved it? He had the soul of a pioneer trapped in the reality of Reaganomics. The trade show must have felt like a combination of farming and spies and Cold War novels — in other words, all the best things.1 He went to Ukraine for six weeks in the spring of 1993 to set up some grain drying equipment. He then signed a year-long contract to teach Iowan farming technology in Ukraine. We would live in Bila Tserkva, a city of 250,000 an hour south of Kyiv, which had been completely closed to foreigners (and even other Soviets) before 1992 due to its military bases.
In mid-July of 1993, I was almost twelve. I realized as soon as we landed in Kyiv2 that I had overly romanticized this move. I was an awkward tween who was very happy to skip out on the bullies and misfits in seventh grade. I hoped I would come back transformed into a glamorous Eastern Bloc athlete, like Katarina Witt or the Romanian gymnasts (I had very bad taste and was into big poufy bangs, so Eastern Europe seemed like the dream to me). I daydreamed about entering eighth grade different, more sophisticated, transformed by a year abroad the way that book heroines “acquire polish” after being sent to Paris.
Spoiler alert: Kyiv in 1993 was not Paris. Or maybe it was Paris right after all the guillotining. At any rate, I didn’t acquire any polish in Ukraine.
I did, however, acquire intestinal worms, which weren’t glamorous and required deworming medicine from the States.
Just as I feel like I’m never quite able to pin down rural life for you, I also can’t pin down being an expat child in post-Soviet Ukraine.3 We had lived through the cataclysm of the Farm Crisis and were starting to come out the other side. And then we went to an alien-to-us community going through a different cataclysmic collapse and rebirth.4
Food was sometimes hard to get. My dad lost forty pounds and my mom lost twenty. The currency collapsed and the economy went through brutal hyperinflation — Ukraine’s currency traded at 600 to $1 when we arrived, and traded at 240,000 to $1 when we left a year later. Black markets flourished; bread lines continued in the old Soviet bakeries.
Food got a little easier after the first six weeks, when we left an absurd Soviet-style hotel and moved into a slightly-less-absurd Soviet-style apartment block. My mom cooked whatever my dad could find in the black markets. Once, he bought three large jars of grape jelly labeled “UN HUMANITARIAN RELIEF: NOT FOR SALE.” He bought meat that was cleaved on wooden chopping blocks in open air markets, selecting only from the ones where the head was attached so he could look at the health of their teeth. After I got a splinter in my tongue from one of those purchases, my dad stopped trying to pull the wood splinters out of the meat; he cut the outer inch off as soon as he brought it home.
At some point, we finally got the shipping containers we’d sent ourselves from the US. My parents had bought gallons of peanut butter, powdered milk, canned goods, cake mixes, and enough tampons and pads for two menstruating women for a year (let me tell you, my almost-twelve self was mortified by that shopping cart when we stocked up in the US).
My dad hauled water in buckets from a well two blocks away because the water pipes (even in a city of 250,000 people) were often full of sludge that couldn’t be boiled to safety. My mom baked all of our bread, after sifting rat droppings out of the flour. I read every English book our translator had, no matter the subject matter; Svetlana lent me my first romance novel, which featured sex on a horse (a historical romance classic — IYKYK). My brother and I homeschooled, somewhat lackadaisically and with no detriment to our standardized test scores. We mostly played canasta, listened to Voice of America on a little travel radio, and ignored the clock in the center of town that reported the latest radiation levels (the melted Chernobyl reactors were 135 miles away).
My mom, brother, and I were mostly stuck in the apartment while my dad worked. We sometimes left for bizarre official dinners or friend meals, including being gifted a pig that was thrown in the trunk of our car (alive) and later served to us (dead). My parents were forcibly plied with vodka at these dinners, which shocked me since they rarely drank at home. I discovered that my dad could handle his liquor, and learned a lot about his wild youth as a result.
Our biggest outings were our day trips to Kyiv. We bought outrageously expensive candy from the “hard currency store” (a Soviet remnant that took dollars instead of the collapsing Ukrainian currency). We ate in a hotel restaurant overlooking Khreshchatyk Street and the Dnipro River, near the monks of St. Sophia’s and the square that would later host the Maidan Revolution. We ordered pizza that was delivered to a specific payphone by mysterious individuals who were evading the mafia.
And then…it was over.
There was some talk of my dad taking another assignment in Ukraine, or possibly one of the ‘stans (Kazakhstan? Uzbekistan?). But my mom was no longer feeling the endless baking and nonconsensual vodka shots, and my brother and I were tired of playing canasta, so we came back to Iowa. That experience catapulted my dad into a job with more international travel and, eventually, his own business. The effects of our year abroad lingered, but the memories faded.
I returned to my same class of 65 kids I’d grown up with, still unpolished, still awkward, still nothing like Katarina Witt. The foreignness of our Ukrainian experience made it even harder to fit in with my classmates.
But it gave me my first practice in a skill I’ve now mastered — slipping between places and identities. Becoming whatever I need to become to thrive in my new environment.
It’s comparatively easy for me to switch between writer and tech exec, or Iowan and Californian. It’s much harder to integrate two different lives into the same one and feel like all the parts of me can be accepted, together, in the same place and time and milieu.
Usually I’m okay with that. Usually I get along just fine with switching between worlds, after the first moment of dislocation fades. It’s something I’ve experienced so often that now it’s the roles that require me to be the same everywhere that make me most uncomfortable.
This is at the fragile heart of why I’ve wrestled with the idea of motherhood for so long, until it’s almost too late to still be a question. Motherhood feels like one of the few identities that becomes permanent. No matter where I would choose to live after having a child, and no matter how many identities I would want to shift between, “mother” would be a constant. And there would be a little human who would need me to be that identity, always, without letting me disappear for weeks or months into a different kind of life.
There’s an appeal to that kind of constancy.
But there’s also an appeal to finding out what adventures await me around the next bend, whether it’s a gravel road or a San Francisco street corner or a birch-lined lane through the Ukrainian steppe. Or finding what adventures await me in writing stories, or running for office, or building a company, or starting an artists’ commune, or, or, or….
We went back to Ukraine for two weeks in 2007. The changes were profound. There were plenty of gas stations and supermarkets and McDonald’s. Our friends had built stable lives. The slice of time we’d lived in Ukraine was gone for them, too, replaced by tentative but optimistic growth (and now, years later, a horrific invasion; they’re all alive, but it’s been rough to hear about).
I can’t switch back to that life, even if I wanted to. The door is closed by time and war.
And maybe that’s the real constancy that I’m rebelling against. Maybe it’s not the constancy of this moment or identity that I’m afraid of embracing — but rather the constant knowledge that, eventually, people and places and times come to an end.
It’s easier for me to ghost out of an identity while it’s still good, before the inevitable death. Leave them wanting more, don’t overstay your welcome, etc.
Assigning a belief to the constancy of motherhood, and using that as a reason not to have a child, allows me to ignore what I also suspect: that my child might someday be mortified by me, as I was mortified standing in the aisle of a Target with 20 boxes of tampons and 5 gallons of peanut butter. They will wrestle with their own set of traumas and questions. I will do my best, and there will be an abundance of love.
But no matter my intentions and no matter my other identities… to my child I may eventually become the anecdote. The funny story. The bittersweet memory. The pain they seek to understand while trying to avoid. The one they leave wanting more.
If I do have a child, I probably won’t drag them to Ukraine. But there are always creative new ways to scar the next generation, waiting like nesting dolls to be revealed.
Cheers,
Sara
We found out at the end of our stay in Ukraine that an ex-KGB agent interviewed my dad’s Ukrainian friends almost weekly to spy on him, which I think was v. gratifying given that his job overall was not that exciting.
We called it Kiev at the time, mostly because Russian was still quite common. But I’ve switched to Kyiv for this post because I #standwithukraine.
I’ve been an expat as an adult, too; in India for six months and Ireland for three. I have very complicated feelings about expat culture and who gets called an ‘expat’ vs. who is an ‘immigrant,’ and why one group is allowed to form enclaves and try to evade local taxes and send all their money home while the other group is looked down on for ‘taking people’s jobs.’ But that’s a different post.
While I generally believe in the possible improvements that come with AI, I’ve now lived through the aftermath of cataclysmic economic collapse twice. I can’t help but get nervous visiting San Francisco now, and gaming out all the ways that a sudden disappearance of whole swaths of jobs can devastate a place. I don’t think it will necessarily happen — but the warning signs are flashing and my inner child says to start stockpiling.