Russia, kitchen tables, and gratitude

Usually when people ask what I studied in college, I say “Russian,” even though I double majored in Russian and Comparative Literature (or, as I delighted in calling it when I was 20, “Cliterature”).  If I admit to my literature degree, people ask if I’ve read Anna Karenina, or what I think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realism, and I’m forced to admit that I am poorly read and lack critical thinking skills.  But people generally don’t know anything about Russian, and I enjoy appearing impressive, so I stick with the short story.

Like a lot of college students, I studied abroad during my Junior year.  I flew to Russia in January, because if you’re going to live in Russia you might as well see some real winter.  After I landed in the country that had almost killed me 5 years before (see, Anaphylaxis: a severe allergic reaction), I walked out of customs to a swarm of sneering taxi drivers.  I was supposed to see a man named Andrei holding a sign with my name, but I didn’t.  I still remember his name was “Andrei” because I sat on my suitcase for a whole hour, fending off taxi drivers and chanting his name as if I could will him to appear.

Andrei finally showed up carrying a sign that said “Kristin Kachison,” which was a good attempt at my then last name, Hutchison.  A for effort, Andrei!  Or if you want Russian grades, 5 for effort.  Except Russians don’t grade their children on effort, only performance.  You fail!

Andrei drove me to the small city where I would live for the next 6 months, and delivered me to the apartment door of my host family.  I had my own bedroom, and there was a good sized living room.  But I was to spend most of my time in the smallest room: the kitchen.

My mom once wrote an essay, after my grandma died, about kitchen tables.  She said that women’s lives center around kitchen tables: big ones, like the one I grew up with in Portland; or small ones, as my mom remembered from her childhood in a Brooklyn apartment.  Being a knowledgeable and righteous 15-year-old, I told her that was ancient and unfeminist.

But then I logged, oh gosh, probably over 400 hours on that tiny, yellowed, plastic-covered table that was crammed against the only free wall in a cramped Russian kitchen.  I would drink tea while my restless host mom cooked and sighed and listened to me “practice my Russian.”  Which meant I sat and complained about the language.  But at least I complained in Russian.

Every once in a while she’d look over the top of her glasses at me and raise her eyebrows, and I thought I might be in trouble.  But I came to learn that look meant something like, “This is life, girl.  Choose your response.”  It was the look she gave me on her birthday, when I came home and asked where her husband was.  She raised her eyebrows slowly so her glasses slid down her nose, looked at me over the rims, and said, “He… celebrated… my birthday all day at work, and now he’s lying down ill.”

This is life, girl.  Choose your response. That look bore so much love and sadness.

One of the best days in my life was on my 3rd trip to Russia, last year.  I walked the old route to my school and thought about how many people had loved and sheltered that wide-eyed 20-year-old Christine.  My host mom.  The American missionary who invited me to live with her, even though I never cleaned anything.  The Russian teachers who couldn’t live off their salaries yet delighted in their students.  The other wide-eyed 20-year-old girl in the English class that I visited, who raised her hand and said carefully, “I would like… to meet you… to drink coffee and talk.”  She ended up coming to my wedding four years later.

I like to think that one of the best days of my life was characterized by gratitude.  As I left on the train later that night, I was overwhelmed with it.

Finding a church

Jack and I started looking for a regular church right after we got married.  We had a tentative list of qualities we wanted: thoughtful and scholarly sermons, a small Bible study group we could join, diversity in age and background, as well as other young married couples.

Conspicuously absent from my list was “women.”  I didn’t realize how I craved mentors.  Whenever I joined a new church, I would immediately sniff out an older, educated and often, well, unusual Christian woman and attach myself to her.

My first mentor was a missionary that I found in Russia.  She was over six feet tall, single, and fluent in Russian despite having begun studying at age 40.  I lived with her for a few months during my first year of being a Christian, and we spent many evenings at her kitchen table as she listened patiently to my stories and questions.

When I came back to the states, I began tagging along with a half Native American woman with long silver hair.  She had finished her PhD in her early 40’s, then she and her husband had two kids.  They had a sign outside their front door that said “Welcome to the home of Dr. and Mr. Bentley.”  She home-schooled her boys, teaching them Greek, Latin, and how electrical circuits work.  They practiced “attachment parenting,” which meant all four of them slept in one bed.  Even though I found that a little creepy, I loved her brazenness.  Some part of me thought, “all this, and you’re a Christian?  Then maybe I can break the mold too.”

When I got married two years later, I thought that I had lost my chance of breaking any mold.  I worried that I had married because I feared independence.  My life story was looking too similar to others: I had been a good Christian college student, then I had a good Christian wedding where we sang “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” and it would only be a matter of time before I learned to cook and had babies.  And even though I loved the song “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and wanted to learn how to cook, I was terrified of becoming invisible amidst all the other Christian wives who cooked and sang and went to church.

So, with all this insecurity about being newly married, Jack and I tagged along with two old Intervarsity friends to their church.  During the “meet and greet” time, I turned away from Jack to the person next to me, who smiled and introduced herself.  She was in her 40’s and wore hiking boots and no makeup.  She had been going to this church for nearly a decade.  I was stunned… a functional member of a church who didn’t have to fight to stand out?  In fact, it didn’t seem to occur to her that she wasn’t “typical.”  She was just herself, friendly and smiley and wearing hiking boots to church.  I asked what she did, and she told me she was a professor.  I nearly proposed.

Instead, I blurted out, “I really want to go back to school!  But I have to pick something to study first, and I don’t know how to do that.”  She empathized.  She used to be an engineer, after all, before getting her master’s in Communications.

After church we met the associate pastor, another single woman in her 40’s, who, I later learned, will listen and not judge even if you bitch and moan about her church for an hour.  Jack immediately liked Andrea too, but I was fascinated.  I could not comprehend how these women learned to be so comfortable in their own skin, without measuring themselves against others.

When Jack and I got home that day we talked about how much we liked the church.  The pastor referenced two outside sources in his sermon!  And did you see all the young married couples!  And we already have friends there!  I didn’t say, “I met women I actually admire!”, but I think that was why I went back, and back, and back.  As someone who is swayed by the tide of others’ expectations, I’m startled by women who live without apology.

I’m speaking at my church’s women’s retreat in a couple weeks.  My talk, ironically, is about being comfortable in your own skin and not living in the tide of others’ expectations.  I feel simultaneously very qualified and not at all qualified on this topic.  Let me know if you want to come.  You have to be a woman, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a typical one or not.