“Red Square” originally meant “Beautiful Square” – red/healthy skin. Black hair & eyes – traditional sign of beauty – sort of like “lily-white” in England White skin good if you’re also red, but also associated w/ death. Worn at funerals & weddings. Bride traditionally goes to live w/ husband’s family & her family may well never see her again. Mourning in a way for her is part of wedding. New wife is subservient to mother-in-law until she has kids, when she begins to move up in the family.

Hooray! I knew I’d find a way to work Russia in. The thing that precipitated these notes was our first homework. When Mr. White returned it to us, all of them had happy Russian words written across the pen in red ink. “What does . . . k . . . r . . . what does this mean?” asked Hannah, showing the paper. Our Cyrillic was still very shaky.

“Oh, this is krasivoy,” he said. “It means beautiful! But really, it’s more like red, because the worlds are from the same root.” So he proceeded to explain the color semantics, our first lesson in Russian culture. After a while, we wanted to know if brides wore white to weddings, since it was a color of death. We were horrified when he said yes, so he had to explain why weddings weren’t always so happy. This led into a lengthy discussion of a society based around street grannies, which he finally steered back to Cyrillic.

I loved the discussion and decided that when I got old I wanted to move to Russian and become a street granny. But aside from that, I was amazed by the story of the wives leaving their families. I had heard about that sort of thing in China and such, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it happened in more western cultures, too. How difficult that must have been, to try not to get attached to your girls! Today, they may well move to another city or state for college, but at least you see them sometimes. When they get married, they probably still come for holidays and the odd vacation. You have telephones and email to keep up with them. I cannot imagine trying to be a mother in those circumstances, though. Bearing a child had brought you some status in the family, but if it was a daughter you were cursed either way. If you wanted a son, you didn’t have one. If you wanted a daughter, you had her, but you were bound to lose her. If she was married to a man from outside your village, there were almost no occasions on which you would see her again. It must have been a strange shock for the girl, too. Your family had probably trained you for this, knowing that at that moment you would be expected to take on the duties of a woman, even if you were still very young. I don’t know what the average marriage age was, but judging from what I know of other cultures, it was mid teens. As soon as you could reasonably be expected to bear children.

When you came to your husband’s house, you were Yurtle the Turtle. Being the newcomer, you had to prove yourself before you gained respect. I imagine you got stuck with the worst chores, too. How strange it must have been to step into a new life the day after your wedding and start it on the bottom rung! That’s ten times worse than going from eighth grade to freshman year. It was only when you began to have children that you moved up. After your first child, you were above your husband’s unmarried sisters. If you had more children than your husband’s brothers did, you rose above their wives. Eventually, your husband’s mother would die or become too old to run things. Then, if you had enough children of your own, you became the babushka. Instead of stepping into your mother’s shoes, as you would in a more matriarchal culture, you stepped into your mother-in-law’s shoes. It’s an odd twist on patriarchy: men dominate women, but the babushka dominates everybody. And that babushka was once a young wife, too.

I’m sure the arrangement wasn’t so bad in some families. Both my parents get along very well with their mothers-in-law, so I don’t think things would have been so bad if we had lived in Russia. By now, it would just be the four of us plus Granny. After my sister and I got married, we’d move away and it would just be she and my parents. But thankfully, I’m moving away in a year and a half, hopefully to Pennsylvania. And we have phones. And cars. And I won’t have to wear white to my wedding because I’m sad, or for any other reason.