As a little girl I spend a lot of time waiting for trams. Some of my earliest memories are waiting in the dark, freezing Saint Petersburg mornings with my mommy for the tram to arrive. I remember that the best way to keep warm is to jump from foot to foot and to hit your feet against one another. It is best to never stop moving. Just to give you an idea of how cold it was, Saint Petersburg is one of few major cities in the world which is so far north the sun doesn’t go down for 3 weeks in the summer.

As you can imagine this makes for some dark winters.

My children have taken public transportation probably a dozen times in their lives. Usually because we wanted to give them the experience of going into Manhattan by train.

It boggles my mind some days when I think about it. How different my children’s childhood is from mine. I got my first Barbie at 13. I got my first pair of jeans at 9. I used to treat car rides as my children would now treat a trip to the zoo, a Broadway show, a dinner at Dave and Busters and a trip to Toys r Us combined.

Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of my family, I am proud of myself, and I am proud of my community. I am proud of how far we have all come. I am glad, eternally so, that my children will never know the “joy” of waiting 40 minutes in the freezing cold for a tram to come.  But each time my children reach out and grab one more luxury of American life, without even thinking twice, my heart twinges just a bit. How to make them aware? What to say, what to do, to show them how lucky we are?  That riding in cars, and having nice things is not a right but a privilege earned for us by the hard work of our parents and of us? How to make them understand the risk our parents took all those years ago to bring us here so that we  could enjoy the privilege of doing what we want when we want it. How to make them understand that a pair of jeans was, once upon a time my most valuable possession? They have always had jeans, as many as they need. Can they really understand? And if they can’t understand, will they appreciate? Will they feel the joy I feel each time I look at my life? The gratitude, that comes from knowing how far you’ve come, how blessed you are. Does gratitude only come from knowing the many alternatives?

I took my oldest son to Morocco for his 7th birthday. We stayed in the finest hotels in the country, we ate in the finest restaurants. Just outside one of our hotels, an updated 19th century palace now turned into a Sofitel we saw a bunch of boys playing soccer. My older son, a soccer fanatic asked to join them in the game. He doesn’t speak a word of Arabic or French and they didn’t speak a word of English.  But the boys recognized his skills and gladly accepted him into the game.  He played with them for hours, until it grew too dark to see.  They even managed to strategize, all in that magic tongue of young boys who don’t need to speak each others language in order to understand. As we walked back into the privilege and safety of our hotel I asked him “Did you see how none of those boys were wearing sneakers? Most were playing soccer in flip flops and some were barefoot. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know” he looked up at me “Why?”

I looked at him. It’s true, he just couldn’t fathom the reason. And this in itself was a good thing and a bad.

“It’s because they don’t have sneakers.” I said to him. “All they have is flip flops. That’s all their parents can afford.”  He stared at me for a while.

I think he got it.

Viktoria Altman
Mother of 2 boys
President of Brainy Academy