Pull Like a Drayhorse!

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Russian

Pull like a drayhorse! For the first time, I heard this phrase either in the first or in the second year of the university, when we were being prepared for great and cruel journalism.

“Girls, remember, if you don’t get a journalist job by the end of the course, you’ll become a manicurist,” — one of the most honest teachers of the course said with an ironic smile, later adding. “Only your death can be a valid reason for your absence either at your work or my classes.”

Such statements were not new to me at all, I picked up a “Soviet slap in the face” back in school, although I was born years after its dissolution.

“Menstruation is not a reason for skipping physical education classes.. I hope you know that most women athletes show their best results precisely during their periods”, the physical education instructor said with the same smile.

Sometimes, when I have my tears rolling, I remember my mother’s saying,

“Don’t whine!”

No, no… I don’t whine at all, just sometimes I burst into a pillow and, picking up my face later, I continue to plow like Przewalski’s horse, no matter what.

At some point, the Russian “girlish” upbringing became a training for me. This is not heroism, this is a kind of lifestyle, albeit sad in places. Russian girls’ image is fragile and tender on the outside, while possessing horse power to complete what she started and what she promised… like a man, isn’t it?

Sometimes I wish I were born and raise in another country, for example, as an Italian, an American… or a Frenchwoman: “Oui-oui”, but then I remember that I could have been born in China or even worse in the middle of nowhere…

I feel blessed for being born where it turned out, even though I’m not very useful there.

It’s good that horses like me have international fields to roam. Oh, yes… this is not me whining, but so… I am a bit nostalgic for the methods of Russian education.

By the way, is anybody present or absent today? Dead or alive?