It’s very heavy rain right now, the outside temperature is 3 °C, and I forgot my umbrella. We’re on our way home from the speech therapy, me and Nadia.
Previously, the Solomia’s mother would ‘help’ us by working as a taxi driver, helping us get home. It’s a torture to be there in that car for these 20…25 minutes. At the most recent occasions, I’d just ignore her and do not talk to her, or mostly not reply. Before that, I tried to be friendly, casual, and entertain. That costs huge amounts of my energy, and I’m pretty tired already. That feels unnecessary and extra effort I’d rather not make.
If Solomia was to deliver Nadia there and back with her mother, she would come home super angry and super irritated. Every. Single. Time. She’d attack me, spill negativity till the very late evening, oftentimes bringing that into the late night.
That ride isn’t just 25 minutes. It’s fucking hours! If not days.
Right now we’re in a huge traffic jam. One bus stop takes us about 20 minutes. No, 25. It’s about five minutes walk, this distance. Ten tops. It would take us about 40 minutes to come home by foot! On a sunny summer day, which we did.
It would took us 40 minutes home, as after that traffic jam there, the bus restored its normal speed.
In Moscow, there was this joke that it’s sad to waste your life in a traffic jam. But it’s less sad when you’re in Bentley.
In Lviv though… possibly, it could be said that it’s still sad to be in a bus, and less sad to be in that electric BMW my mother-in-law has. Right?
No. Of course not. The bus is just empty and comfortable. Our buses are from the Netherlands, and they are well built.
Thank you, Dutch people!
It’s a calm ride. Nobody wastes my energy on stupid things. Nobody casually belittles me, my wife (her daughter), and our kids (her grandkids). Nobody boasts with silly things only idiots would dare to boast about. It’s offensive just to listen to her.
On a bus, sometimes there is some tired drunk man, with his smartphone falling on the dirty floor. Again and again. With me giving him his phone back, and then some elderly man ordering him to ‘put that fucking phone in your pocket son, put it there! Right now!’ and leaving the bus then.
Sometimes there are many people joining us in the middle of this route. Sometimes not, and the bus is empty. We’re sitting anyway, we enter the bus a few stops after the terminal. Two sits or one, but usually two.
Today the bus is just super empty, one person per stop, if any.
I think of today as the worst possible scenario. The same heavy rain during the summer is easier to handle. And even the very cold winter is easier to handle, it would be snow, not rain.
And, I forgot my umbrella. This very morning, Solomia said Hnat that ‘dad is having this wonderful computer that shows weather, so you shouldn’t worry about the potential rain, we’d know about it and we’d take our umbrellas.’ I didn’t. Didn’t take the umbrella. Didn’t have any capacity to check on my wonderful computer, and this wonderful computer didn’t bother to notify me of the heavy rain. I’ve left the home, there was that light rain, and I just thought ‘naaah, not returning for an umbrella!’
Well, I believe we won’t be very wet, we’d go one bus, and then another. And then home’s just one bus stop distance away, into the blocks.
We have been discussing this delivering-us-back ‘help’ with my wife, over and over again. If her mother was truly willing to help, not to create an illusion of her helping us, she’d genuinely consider the idea of taking Nadia from her school with her wonderful electric BMW — the activity she enjoys most, riding that car and appear cool businesswoman to others on the road, herself included — bring her to the speech therapy school, which is just five mins (literally) away of her home (that’s why she’d got that idea of bringing us back in the first place: very convenient, to her), then bring the kid home. Today alone, I’ve spent five hours doing just that.
My wife might attack me for being too proud to ask (as if that’s my mother to start with), but we’re long past the illusion she’s not doing that because we didn’t ask. We did, actually. But she was never interested in helping in the first place. She only boasted about how much she would help, only to provide no help whatsoever. Or as little as possible, simultaneously making the price of that help so high that it’s ridiculous, offensive, and just not worth it.
It was Solomia’s comment on the bus being cheaper and just many times more comfortable, I just agree. The bus is nowhere to be discomfortable. It’s free for us, by the way, since Nadia is having disability status. State pays for the rides of disabled people. We’d have them many, after the war.
So, imagine how unnecessary that ‘help’ the bitch provides.
I’m truly sincerely happy she’s not ‘helping’ us, and I don’t need to invent excuses to dodge it. Speaking your mind is freeing and necessary, and I feel lighter after I threw that boulder off my shoulders.
