What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Read Online Free PDF

found this ridiculous. I wanted to have kids eventually, so I knew I’d get married someday. But not yet, not by a long shot. When I was a kid, I told my mom I wanted to have babies when I was as old as possible. Men got married and had babies late into their thirties and forties; I certainly could do the same.
    But this was a decade before I noticed something important:
Those older men were usually not marrying women who were also in their thirties and forties.
Ten years later, I would watch the men my age dating women much younger than they were
because those women still had time to slowly date and enjoy before they had to have babies.
Somehow, despite everyone telling me this was how it was going to work, I was sure it wouldn’t for me. When
I
was in my twenties and older guys would ask me out, I thought they were creepy, and unattractive, and way too old. It never occurred to me that I was the only twentysomething woman who found thirtysomething successful men creepy.
    “Why do you think you hate men with jobs?” Sasha would ask.
    Anyway, there I was, living with a depressed, unemployedman whom I loved but was not going to marry, when Sasha invited me on a trip to Russia. Sasha was living on the East Coast, and so for years we had been taking annual girl trips to see each other. The Russia trip happened because Sasha was born in Moscow, and immigrated to the U.S. when she was three. When I met her on the first day of fifth grade, I took one look at the little girl with the uneven bowl haircut given to her by her frugal Russian father and thought,
That is the cutest boy in school.
    But Sasha was now a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman with an expensive haircut, and had spent the last two years mixing and sleeping with princes of industry and children of world leaders at Yale Law School. Nothing made Sasha calmer than going to Neiman Marcus, because it felt like the farthest place from the smell of stewed cabbage in her childhood home. She taught me about expensive shoes before either of us could afford expensive shoes, and we chipped in together on one pair of “time-share” Manolos that we shipped back and forth between Los Angeles and New Haven for special occasions, or planned run-ins with exes.
    Sasha’s mother suggested they take a trip back to Russia, their first time back since they fled to give Sasha a better life twenty-six years earlier. I jumped on the chance to travel to Russia with Russians (the thing to do in the place, etc.) and off we went.
    On the plane, Sasha sat next to a barrel-bellied, middle-aged man from Phoenix named Tommy. He was heading to Russia to pick up his pregnant mail-order bride. Tommy pulled out photos. She was eighteen, and spectacularlybeautiful. He had met her a few months prior, when, after e-mailing with several women, he traveled to Russia to see which one he liked. The way it worked was this: the girls were put up in different rooms in the same hotel. He visited each girl with a translator, sort of taking her out for a test drive. He picked the one he liked, and spent a couple of weeks with her. She got pregnant, and so now he was going to bring her to her new life in America, where she would be a new mommy to Tommy’s two fat children from his first marriage, and would receive a tract home and a new red Buick convertible. He had pictures of the car and the fat kids and the tract home with him, too.
    “Have you learned any Russian?” Sasha asked him.
    “Oh, no, she’d rather learn English, I’m sure,” Tommy replied. “All she wants is to be American.”
    Sasha squeezed her mother’s hand.
    For a few weeks we had been practicing “speaking Russian.” This did not mean actually speaking Russian, it just meant speaking English with a Russian attitude; i.e., dramatic and full of impending doom. My guidebook told me that the national anthem for Ukraine translated roughly to “We have not yet died!” That was the most victorious and optimistic version they could