In January 2022, I was planning a summer trip to Ukraine and Russia for my 4-year-old son and me.
I spent half of my childhood in Ukraine and half in Russia before moving to the United States when I was a teenager. When I became a parent, my one, obsessive goal — as a mother raising a child in America with a man who spoke only English — was to teach my son Russian. It wasn’t about his future résumé; it was because Russian forms such a deep-rooted part of my immigrant identity that I couldn’t imagine talking to my child in another language.
I spoke to him exclusively in Russian and found him a Russian-language day care. For three years, his Russian was better than his English. But when he turned 4 and made English-speaking friends, it started to slip. He started inserting English words in otherwise Russian sentences and talking to himself in English while playing alone.
Then, after a Christmas break with his American grandma, he spoke to me in English. I panicked. I decided he needed a full immersion as soon as possible.
A visit to Ukraine and Russia would allow him to see that his mother’s native language wasn’t a quirk of hers but something normal for millions of people. I told him he’d eat piroshki, see the circus and finally meet his cousins in Kyiv and Moscow.
One month later, Russian forces poured into Ukraine.
I did not immediately tell my son a war had started. I believe in telling children the truth, but I couldn’t even explain to myself why one of my homelands was invading the other, why my cousins in Kyiv were hiding in bomb shelters, why my cousins in Moscow were fleeing the country. Maybe I’d tell him once I had a better grasp of what was happening or, better yet, when it was over. I was certain that it wouldn’t — couldn’t — last long.
For two days, I called family in Ukraine in the early morning, before he woke up, and reserved my tears for nights. On the third day, we were hiking in a park when two American women approached and asked what language we were speaking. When I said, “Russian,” their faces contorted, and one of them said, “Oops,” as if they’d caught me doing something wrong.
If I’d been on my own, I might have said that the Russian language, spoken by many in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics where Russian was mandated, is not an indicator of political or moral affiliation with the actions of Vladimir Putin. But I wasn’t on my own, and I didn’t want my son to see his mother having to defend herself. We hurried on down the hill. When he asked me why that lady had said “Oops,” I said I had no idea.
Afterward, I grew self-conscious at stores and playgrounds and tried not to speak Russian to him too loudly.
One of Mr. Putin’s bogus reasons for the invasion was to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, even though many Russian speakers — like my family — had felt perfectly safe in their bilingual country. As tanks rolled toward Kyiv, I thought about the effort and resources I’d expended teaching my son a language that was being used as an excuse for violence. I’d entangled him in a mess that he did not have to be a part of.
Many people in Ukraine vowed to stop speaking Russian, but that didn’t feel like the right solution for us. I decided to carry on as we were and say nothing about the war until and unless he asked.
I read articles by psychologists that recommended never lying to your children, even about distressing events; they cautioned that it’s important to dole out the truth in a limited, age-appropriate manner. I found an article that said to “ask yourself whether you are lying to benefit your kids or lying more to benefit yourself.” I had a hard time separating the two. I knew that compared with my relatives in Russia and Ukraine, I was lucky to have the choice to lie at all.
I’ve read reports of parents in war zones going to extreme lengths to hide the brutality of war from their children, even as they live it. Part of me thinks that this merciful lying is a biological instinct, that it’s somehow better for the survival of the species to allow our children to believe the world is better than it is.
But it can also be cultural. Soviet history, for example, contains a lot of private grief under a gilded collective exterior. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in World War II. He hid it from us his whole life because in the twisted moral code of the Soviet Union, P.O.W.s were considered almost traitors. My family learned of his secret only after his death, when we discovered a confession letter in which he begged the K.G.B. not to tell us because he didn’t want to traumatize us with his shame. I never really understood that until Russia invaded.
As the war dragged on, the summer of our planned trip came and went. My son didn’t notice, and I thanked his child brain’s nebulous sense of time for sparing me the need to explain. That November, he turned 5. I increased his dose of Russian-language cartoons and started to teach him to read in Russian.
Then one day he came home from day care and asked, “Mama, is there a war in Ukraine?”
A mix of panic and relief washed over me. We went to the world map on the wall of his bedroom, designed by a friend from Kyiv. I showed him the outline of Ukraine, with its little cartoons of borscht and onion-domed churches. I said something about tanks, about how terrible war was. He nodded silently. I kept it limited and age-appropriate. I also omitted a crucial piece: He did not ask me who started the war, and I didn’t tell him. I could not bring myself to volunteer that it was Russia.
A few months later, I saw my son make a beeline for a Russian-speaking family on the beach. When I caught up, they were asking him — and then me — where we were from. Their tone was urgent, insistent. They needed to know we weren’t from Russia; they had recently arrived in the United States from Kherson, Ukraine. As soon as I heard “Kherson,” I sent my son off to play. Their son was just a few years older, and he seemed to be traumatized, alternating between staring into space and angry outbursts at his grandma. I listened to how the family had survived a brutal six-month Russian occupation and watched my son play in the distance.
Let his little brain know about suffering. But not about Russia’s betrayal. Not yet.