Studying abroad and living with a Russian host family began like an awkward first visit at a friend’s house. Your friend leaves the room for a minute and you have to figure out what to say to her parents. Meeting my temporary family for the first time, I found myself in that situation, wondering when dinner is, what it will be, whether it’s any good, where it’s okay to sit, where to put my shoes and coat, what I should and shouldn’t touch, and a whole mess of other things. But I couldn’t just come out and ask any of that. I was very conscious of being respectful, and even when my host parents told me their first names, I was pretty sure I should stick with Mr. and Mrs. Sokolova.
My mother, Ekaterina, spoke a fair amount of English, so I didn’t have to rely solely on my Russian. My father, Arkady, barely spoke English. He and I spoke some German, but he seemed reluctant to use anything but Russian.
Ekaterina clearly tried to make me feel at home. She showed me photos of family vacations, walked with me in the park, taught me to cook, and asked me as much as she could about my family and life in America. Despite her best efforts, though, I still knew I was not truly part of the family. I didn’t know what to call her. Would Kat or Katya be too informal? Did she expect me to call her “mama?” While that would prove she saw me as more than a guest, I couldn’t imagine saying that to someone other than my real mother. I managed to avoid referring to her by any name for my entire stay.
Even when I overcame the initial awkwardness of being an outsider in a foreign family, several weeks passed before I could give Ekaterina a hug. I could talk about class, home, or music, but I couldn’t joke the same way I did with my family. We didn’t have the years of shared experience that bring a family together.
Friday nights were perhaps the strongest indicators that I was merely a long-term guest. My host family took day trips to Finland, but I didn’t find that out until I had been there a month. Instead, I would arrive home around 6 p.m. to an empty apartment. This didn’t bother me very much the first week—who am I to care about what adults do with their time? By 10 p.m., our typical dinner time, I began to worry. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to touch any of the cooking appliances without permission. The second week, I couldn’t do my work because I kept thinking I heard someone at the door. It was hard to be alone for a long time without knowing why. I was lonely and confused, and I felt abandoned by what was supposed to be my family.
While there were many times when I felt like an outsider, the family did try to make me feel welcome. Their daughter Masha did her best to teach me how to play Call of Duty. Every night, Ekaterina checked my schoolwork and helped me study vocabulary, even when that meant staying up past midnight. The smaller gestures meant the most. She held my hand while crossing busy streets, bought me new socks when mine got worn out, and listened to me practice piano and violin. She fussed over a minor injury and fretted when I stayed out later than usual. She treated me as though I were her daughter.
Sadly, I felt most at home right before I had to leave. I heard Ekaterina in the kitchen preparing food for the next day’s meal, and it suddenly occurred to me that she was cooking a meal I was never going to eat. I would go back to my family in America, and their lives would continue without me. I knew seven weeks was not enough time to integrate into a family, but I greatly appreciated their efforts to make me feel at home. While it wasn’t always easy to be immersed in another culture, I had somebody who actually cared about me—someone who, mere weeks before, had been a stranger to me.
I left Russia a year and a half ago. Ekaterina and I try to keep in touch, and she always signs her messages as “your Russian mom.”
