Married in America: A Generation of Dependents and Loafers
'10.05.2021'
Source: baik-info.ru
Irkutsk journalist Marina Lykova, who married an American a few years ago, continues to tell curious things about life in the United States and about her marriage. Today - about modern American teenagers.
- Mom, they are different! They are not like us! They are brought up not so, understand? When I have my children, I will educate them in the same way as you raised me! - the daughter speaks to me already almost a tongue twister in a telephone receiver. - I will also make my children work, starting from the age of five. How are you me I remember that I cried, but I worked. But now I’m grateful to you for school. Bear with her a little more, Mommy. She will be leaving soon. School will end and she will move out.
- No, Lina, everything is fine. I just don’t understand how to promise and not do it.
She lives with us all the school year. She takes my car to classes at the university and generally everywhere, Marina writes for the portal baik-info.ru. She doesn’t pay for food, gasoline, cosmetics and all that girls need at twenty. Girls, I note, are not Russian, but American. The Americans need a lot of everything at once, much more than all the others. This I say, as the mother of a Russian child, accustomed for 11 years of life in Russia, to manage and be content with little. And if I can tell my daughter that she doesn’t need this particular thing right now and can be put on a purchase, then such a number will not work with a girl’s stranger living under the roof of my house, because she hates the concept of Russian hospitality. Anyway, who wants to pass for a stingy person in the eyes of an unfamiliar person?
But it’s quite different here. For example, the American white-toothed beauty and clever girl nodded beautifully and curiously to my hints and even more than once directly voiced my requests to undertake at least once every two weeks a beautiful curly blond head, but never took up a steam mop or vacuum cleaner. At my request to help with cleaning last year's foliage on the lawns around our domina, I saw nods in agreement and even heard a counter offer that nothing, if, they say, and “girlfriends come to help?” Is it okay to have such a date on Friday? After class at the university? ”
I was glad for two whole weeks. But the previously agreed Friday came, and at the appointed time, neither the girlfriends appeared, nor my blond little girl left her room. I took up the rake myself. I wiped my hands, dressed in leather gardening gloves, in blood corns, but I did. Because it had to be done. But then for a long time I didn’t make any requests to my exchange schoolgirl, and we didn’t go to any parties where I was invited, as before.
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On the eve of the arrival of my four friends from Las Vegas, I again turned to the girl with a request to help me with the preparation of something tasty, outwardly appetizing and, as they say, healthy. Without thinking for a second, my Lina’s temporary substitute (I admit, I took Liz to my post so as not to so acutely feel the absence of my daughter living in another city and even in another state; a peculiar way of dealing with what the Americans call the “effect empty nests ”) - the blue-eyed goldilocks suggested cutting ... sandwiches.
- What? Fast and normal! Moreover, I don’t know how to cook anything else!
“What about rice with saffron and seafood?” What do you think? What is this dish called? Uh ... paella? See the recipes? Choose something simpler? We’ll go shopping together when you’ve prepared a list of what you’ll need to buy there. There, it seems, you still need to add white wine when cooking ... Is there enough day for your training? Well, then, have you agreed?
- Yes! Of course! I’ll look at the recipes, I’ll find it simpler and tastier. Is it normal if we go to the store tomorrow evening? - My adopted girl is shaking hands.
... Tomorrow evening, she again hid in her room on the third floor. I am knocking.
- Liz? Are you ready? Are we going? Where is the list of products?
- You know, Marina, I looked and realized that I won’t cook it, because the wine is there, and I just 20 and I can not touch the bottle with alcohol.
- Nothing, I’ll somehow figure it out myself (I notice that a day ago I talked about white wine for the sake of a red word. There wasn’t and there isn’t any white wine in the paella recipe! And now I understand that the girl I didn’t look on the Internet, I didn’t rummage through culinary sites, as promised). You can, Lisa, then just prepare all the ingredients, cut, crumble ...
- But there is seafood! Shrimp! Mussels! What else is there? I will feel sick and vomit right into this nasty porridge!
“Where you sit down, you get down” - this is about modern American teenagers.
Lina claims that I have never received any housework during the school year, and even, moreover, I regularly cleaned the bathroom of a young American woman, throwing hair all over the house from her hairbrush and pile dirty dishes in her own room, because ... I didn’t pay her.
It turns out I had to pay her. Just as native American parents do. 20-year-old girl cleaned up the dirty dishes after dinner with herself and put her in the sink? Five bucks from the bush! Put it in the dishwasher? Again I would have to fork out so that it would be exactly the way she was at home. So, as do the lovers and souls in the child who do not read the folder with the mother. Did you bring garbage from home to the trash can? Take out two dollars and put it down. Vacuum the whole room? Here I’m even afraid to imagine how much it would have poured out to me. And washing windows that you can’t count? Are there four toilet rooms with bathrooms throughout the house? Everything, it turns out, has a price. Even the labor of living on everything is ready vein.
“You would have hired a housemaid a long time ago so that you wouldn’t flounce yourself in such a huge house!” - regularly, girlfriends from Irkutsk advise me, coming to me with almost the same regularity with which they ride their own summer cottages. But despite the words of reproach, every time at the opportunity and without saying a word, each of them grabs in my absence a vacuum cleaner and a damp rag. Because it is so customary among us Russians to help each other. Especially if we live together and it seems like members of the same family. It is not customary for us to keep an account and evaluate the value of each individual step and body movement or, there, a sandwich eaten. With us, but not with young, as it turns out, Americans.
When I hear a certain American teenager begging at a mum’s store some Chinese-made trifle with the words: “Ma'am, buy it! It’s just 20 bucks! ”- every time a story comes to mind told by my old friend, whom fate brought me here many years ago here in the States. This story happened 20 years ago, exactly when the hero was 45. In 45, when he was still living and living, six of his own children and their loving “halves” - girl friends and boyfriends, as they call it here, firmly sat on his neck. My hero’s wife, who had not worked a day in her life, seemed to be not listed as a parasite, but she didn’t seem to improve her own example of the financial situation in the family, where there was only one single getter. My hero, who worked hard from dawn to dusk five days a week away from home, returning exhausted and barely alive for the weekend, constantly heard the same thing: “Pa, a, pa! Give me money! ”(Here, each individual member of the family listed in detail what the money would go for, and in the family there are almost 13 mouths.)
- Come on! After all, it's just 20 bucks!
He was silent and opened his wallet. And then, about six months later, he was tired of it, and he, in just a day, having built a spacious patio with a bench around the perimeter at the back entrance to the house, called all his household to the fresh air the next morning. A new look on the patio and generally for conversation. All 13 came out from the morning, sat on the benches. The hero locked my house and says: “Here, my dears! Morning is now. In the evening, who wants to have dinner at home and spend the night, be so kind as to bring me each of 20 bucks. You’ll get the money before - maybe you’ll be in time for dinner. This, of course, does not concern your mother. ”
“Well, where do we find the money ?!” The yelled crowd screamed.
- Who where. Look, neighbors need to mow the grass on the lawns. Someone will be glad if you walk with the dogs next door. Help people weed weed. Yes, you never know the work! If you wish, you can find it, especially since you have a whole day in stock.
- But it's the whole 20 bucks! - Young household members were indignant at the choir.
- Well this is just 20 bucks! - answered my hero and retired with his wife to the bosom of the house, locking the door behind him from the inside.
By evening, he says, everyone returned with their twenties, but few worked. Worked with friends, and the lesson was as if not learned. Then, after about five or even six months, my hero, silently demolishing the fact that none of the young Yankees voluntarily wants to get off his neck and that all the food purchased for a week is consumed lightning fast at home, and none of 12 are mature and able-bodied people do not even try to get a job, once again convened his large family one early morning on the patio. This time my hero was much more specific.
“I'm tired, guys, from your parasitism,” he says.
- What are we? We, this one, cannot get a job. No work is normal! - 12 gluttonous mouths rustled.
- Here you are, Mike, you've been looking for work for a long time, but you don’t find everything. Eight months live here? Nine? More? You live on everything ready and do not blow into your mustache. What prevents you from starting to feel like a man? Who do you want to be, that there is no work for you? - asks my hero the boyfriend of his eldest daughter.
“I want to drive trucks, but they don’t take them,” replies the dumb American Bear.
- Do you have any experience? What about skills? That's it! Who will take you without experience? So, maybe, while getting settled where they take, eh? For example, in stores at night to put goods on shelves? - my hero does not stop.
- Oh no! At night ?! In the shops?! Have you seen in the cinema that at night, even at shops, gangsters hang around and can shoot? - laughs off the young idler.
My hero in response to these words silently rose from the bench, walked to the front door and locked it with a key.
- Good. Let's do it. By evening, each of you should return home with work. Employed. Mom, this, of course, does not apply ...
By evening, everyone had returned as workers. Everyone went home with their heads proudly raised, and one boy, the eldest son, even with two works managed to come home. And it began from that memorable morning in their family a completely different life. Much happier. With meaning, life has begun. And, most importantly, they all suddenly ceased to beg for money from the folder, because they realized that “all 20 bucks” had to be earned by working for more than one hour. And still, all of a sudden, they suddenly realized that buying food for all family members or taking their parents and all their roommates to a movie or a buffet is infinitely great, because there is an inexplicable joy in giving.
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Money changes life, and this is not news. The richest man in the world can easily spend every day (!) 2,7 million "green". Daily! But the money, they wrote in the media, did not make this person happy. Which teenager is happier? From the poor of India or Nigeria? Or this one, which has a sotik for 1000 dollars, a fancy camera on a “stick” for a “selfie” for 600 bucks, its own brand new car and other new-fangled toys?
The answer is obvious: the happiest countries in the world are not the wealthy old woman Europe and certainly not North America. And the poor barefoot boys from all the same Africa and South America live happily because they do not envy anyone and do not worry about the fact that they don’t have something there that their peers have. But they have a sea of relatives, they celebrate and grieve over the whole village and the whole village go to church. And they do not care about envy, simply because everyone is equally poor. Not so in America. Here, if you are an American teenage girl, you will feel uncomfortable without hair extensions and eyelashes, just like most rich class girls have. And if you are a millionaire of any gender, you will certainly be envious of multimillionaires, trying to keep up with them.
It is known that the majority of those who donate money once or twice donate for various needs (for a church, to help refugees or cancer patients). They know firsthand that sacrificing for the benefit of others is the main joy in life.
Here is a terribly popular site called "My terrible life." You read - do not come off! Real people write their really scary stories from life. Different age. Different skin colors. Different professions. Different incomes. Different life experiences. But all of them, these Americans, are equally unhappy, because their life (in America itself! In the happiest country in the world! In a country where millions dream all over the world!) Is terrible. Because if there is work, then it is a dead end. If there is a wife or husband, then sucks. If there is a stove, then no one - neither small nor old - can cook. If there is a roof over your head, then there is no one there to tidy up under this roof, because with a dead end, there is no money to hire a housekeeper to sweep, wipe off the dust and even clean up a little in your own house. In general, not life, but a complete nightmare!
Recent studies have found that an American needs 75 000 dollars annually to feel happy.
I don’t argue, it’s easier to feel miserable when the wind is walking in your pockets, and more than half of those Americans who earn less than a thousand dollars a month feel constantly depressed and “under stress”. Just because the people living in the Jones neighborhood are ... greener. Those who already receive 3000 “greens” (middle class) per month live happier: those who suffer from longing in this group counted only 24%. Among those who earn 75 000 or more a year, sadness is gone! But there are still such a minority in America - the wealthy ones.
- ... Mom! Well ma-am! Give me money! After all, just 20 bucks!
