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\u2019t go down for 3 weeks in the summer.<\/p>\n
\n
As you can imagine this makes for some dark winters.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It boggles my mind some days when I think about it. How different my children\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t 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 \u201cjoy\u201d of waiting 40 minutes in the freezing cold for a tram to come. \u00a0But 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? \u00a0That 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 \u00a0could 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve come, how blessed you are. Does gratitude only come from knowing the many alternatives?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t speak a word of Arabic or French and they didn\u2019t speak a word of English. \u00a0But the boys recognized his skills and gladly accepted him into the game. \u00a0He played with them for hours, until it grew too dark to see. \u00a0They even managed to strategize, all in that magic tongue of young boys who don\u2019t 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 \u201cDid 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d he looked up at me \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at him. It\u2019s true, he just couldn\u2019t fathom the reason. And this in itself was a good thing and a bad.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s because they don\u2019t have sneakers.\u201d I said to him. \u201cAll they have is flip flops. That\u2019s all their parents can afford.\u201d \u00a0He stared at me for a while.<\/p>\n
I think he got it.<\/p>\n
Viktoria Altman
\nMother of 2 boys
\nPresident of Brainy Academy<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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