There are three types of women in Ukraine: maids, mothers and babucias. The maids may not have their maidenheads, but they are maids: young and looking to get hitched, dressed to the gills and showing plenty of flesh despite the cold weather. American trashy is Ukrainian classy, so it’s not uncommon to see knee high boots over stockings that run into mid-thigh skirts. This is professional dress, as I’ve seen teachers and police women wear them.
After maids get married, they have a few kids and become mothers. They still look like maids, but are actually MILFs, because some of the hottest women I’ve ever seen were pushing strollers. As those kids get older, though, the maids complete the transition to mothers, cut their hair short and wear clothes that, while still stylish, reside in the muted black/gray spectrum and no longer show as much flesh.
And then there are the babucias, wearing boots and heavy overcoats to their knees, backs bent and wearing head scarves. There is barely a continuum, a blurring of distinction in Ukraine women. Rather, there really are these three rigid visual roles. You’d have to be here to see it, but the roles are that distinct, the manner of dress that conforming.
Along with that conforming is an obsession with looking your absolute best. On the street, it looks like fashion week in Milan as men and women walk around in pointy shoes, glossy leather jackets and a variety of flared and skin-tight garments that announce that how you look is to be taken seriously.
The keepers of looks are the mothers, and at no time did this become more obvious than the first time I visited my new home in Zhytomyr. I had just gotten back from a seminar at a small village in the country side. Getting there was an uncomfortable two hour bus ride, getting back was the same. I arrived home already running late to have dinner with the other volunteers in the city.
When I arrived at home, moving quickly and trying to get back out the door, my host mother, Larissa, called to me and told me to come into the kitchen. She was preparing food. I told her in Ukrainian that I had to go, that I was going to a restaurant with friends. She was visibly upset that I wasn’t staying for dinner, had forgotten or ignored that I had told her I wouldn't be eating at home tonight. She told me that I should have a glass of water with her, at least.
It was carbonated, of course, and as she asked me about my day as I gulped it down, trying to get out of there. I didn’t mean to offend her or rush out, it was just that every minute I was late was another minute the volunteers were standing outside in the cold, as we were supposed to meet by the tank monument in the center of the city.
I told her this, but she had used the time while I was drinking the water to prepare a sandwich and she now offered it to me, saying I should eat it. I told her I had to go, that I would eat at the restaurant. “Ukrainian girls don’t like skinny men,” she told me in Ukrainian. “You must eat.”
As I had only known the woman for three days and didn’t know where the line should be drawn, I started to quickly eat the sandwich. While I was eating it, she prepared another sandwich, put it on a plate, and inched it towards me.
I looked at it, but didn’t pick it up. “I’m sorry, but I have to go,” I told her. I got up, and then she noticed a small discoloration on the front of my green turtleneck, from where I had dropped some food on it some days before. I had been living out of a backpack for days, had no other sweater and no way of washing it. Actually, had she not pointed to the spot, I never would have seen it.
She followed me to the door, telling me I had to change my sweater, that I could not go out with this sweater. “I have to go,” I told her. She told me to go get one of her son’s sweaters. I could not go out with this spot on my sweater. Had I not felt so pushed with the water and the sandwiches, I may well have changed it, but I felt that at some point my boundaries had to be established.
“No,” I said, “I have to go.”
She then put herself between me and the door, arms out like the wings of an F-15, and said that I had to change my sweater. Now.
I looked at her for a second, thinking of options. The resulting answer was: I’m 25 years old. I have to spend three months living here. I’m not going to be treated like a child, whether I act like one or not.
“No,” I told her firmly. “I am leaving.”
She looked a little hurt and I felt bad, but she moved away from the door. I pulled on my green Miami Dolphins ski cap and she picked up her son’s black cap, holding it out for me. I think she hates my ugly green ski cap. I shook my head no.
She reached up with her hands and straighten the cap on my head so the emblem was in the middle, and then began picking white lint out of it while it was still on my head, as if I was some small chimpanzee. I bore this for about a minute more and then left.
I told the other volunteers. They were not surprised.
On the way home, I bought her a flower, hoping to make up. She was not happy to have me return. The host father joined the discussion, and he was on my side. I was an adult, he told her. I could dress how I wanted. She actually said this in response: “no, he is a child.”
At which point I realized that I was not going to be her third son, despite her telling me that my first night in the house. We could be friends, but I was not going to have another mother. I didn’t say this, but my stance was clear. She shook my hand when I left the next day for Kiev, a turnaround from when she greeted me four days before with a huge hug.
I felt horrible. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I didn’t want to spend three more months under a motherly microscope. I tried to explain this to my Regional Manager when I got back to Peace Corps office and he wanted a debrief on how it went. He looked at me and said: “why didn’t you just change the sweater?”
I tried to explain, and he said: “you can’t expect them to change.”
And he was right. I came to Peace Corps expecting to to conform to their culture, but that lasted barely two weeks before I was back to dressing how I wanted to dress, acting how I wanted to act. Changing how you behave is a huge thing, hard, harder than I imagined it would be. It was very egocentric to think that Larissa would give up her ingrained behaviors on how to be a mother, behaviors that are very exact in Ukrainian culture, just because I was from America and wanted to dress the way I wanted to dress.
Ironically, my mother would want me to dress the way Larissa wants me to dress: looking my best, no stains, no lint, no wrinkles, shiny shoes; my mom just doesn’t put herself between me and the door.
As an update, things between Larissa and I are going very well. She still looks dissaprovingly at some of my clothes, but doesn't say anything. Also, she's back to calling me her third son. Unlike her sons and husband, I do my own laundry, a lot of my own cooking and wash my own dishes even when she cooks. She tries not to let me do this, but I think there's an unspoken agreement that I will be independent within the household, that she does not have to do any work for me, and therefore I will be independent of her overt scrutiny. I'm sure I violate all sorts of cultural taboos by doing this (the sons, 17 and 19, respectively, watched curiously as I cooked), but it seems to be working.