On the one hand, she was a very controlled, intelligent, good-looking woman and on the other, she was falling apart. Life at home was a misery, there was no money, she had a man who didn’t care to be a father or a husband and I suppose drink was the only way she saw that she could let herself go. Maybe she thought it was the only way she could cope. She would invite lots of friends over to celebrate moving to our new home as she didn’t want to be alone, but then it would become a day or two of celebrations and the drinking would continue. I think she gave up on a little bit of herself at that time, too. She was thirty-four years old and she knew her marriage was coming to an end. If life wasn’t bad enough at that time, the other factor that broke my mum’s spirit completely was that my grandmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. By the time it was diagnosed it was terminal and she wasn’t going to live very much longer.
Mum went back to visit my grandmother in hospital every single day after work. She would wake up early, make lots of amazing, healthy food, which she would take to work and then take on to my grandmother. She would then get home very late and only have a few hours’ sleep before doing it all again. Every night she would cry and my father, to give him his due, actually tried his hardest at this point. He tried to be there for her and offer his support as best he could, which I suppose helped in some small way.
I knew my grandmother was very sick but I didn’t know she had cancer. She didn’t know she had cancer either – my mother tried to hide it from her because she thought that she would give up psychologically if she realised just how sick she really was. It was awful, as she eventually found out when another woman on her ward read her medical notes and told her the truth. Can you imagine how dreadful that was? I remember my mum said to me that I had to go and visit her because she wasn’t very well and I made some excuse that I didn’t want to go because it seemed like a bit of a chore. But she insisted I went and then for a very long time afterwards, I went back to the old flat to see my grandparents on a regular basis. I also saw my friend Vera and it was sad as I still felt like this was home to me; this was my happy place.
I was pleased to be back in my old area and happy to visit my grandmother, even though she looked so poorly. That was the last thing I remember about her. After one visit I had come home and the next day, I don’t know why, but I rang my mum at work. I can’t remember why I needed to speak to her but I called and the person who answered told me she wasn’t there because her mother had died. And that is how I found out about my grandmother: it was horrible. I thought to myself maybe it wasn’t true or someone had made some kind of mistake. You don’t want to believe something terrible like that has happened and you don’t want to accept it.
That evening when my mum came home she didn’t talk to me and I didn’t talk to her – that way I didn’t have to face up to the truth. But when she went to work the next day she must have realised that someone had told me the news, as when she came home later that evening she told me that it was true, that my grandmother had died. It was an awful time for my mother; she had lost the last person who had loved her no matter what. My dad also took my grandmother’s death extremely badly – I think he always knew deep down that she was the one who was trying to help out between him and my mum. However angry Mum had got with him, it was always my grandmother who would be there to feed him, calm him down and try and make him feel better about himself. He loved her very, very much and she helped both my parents so much while they were young students and struggling. For a while, her death brought them together as they were both so upset over her passing and things at home were a little better.
In fairness, my mum really wasn’t at home that much either as she was working so hard to try and support her family. It was a difficult time and not just for us, everyone was struggling. Mum then decided to quit her job shipbuilding in 1992 as she hadn’t been paid for months and months and we could no longer continue. She needed money to support what was left of her family so she became a cleaner and a maid for a hotel. My mum, who had such an incredible education and was so clever, was washing floors. She would do shift patterns and it was decent pay compared to other jobs, but she was devastated as she felt degraded. However, we had to survive and so she had to do it.
Eventually I found a dance school in the centre of my town, which was just under half an hour’s travel by public transport, and I started to go there. I can’t tell you the relief when I started to dance again. I felt alive! My dance teachers were a married couple, Igor and Olga, and they were very good with all the students. Already they had established themselves as good teachers as the children they taught did well in competitions around the area. And they were very caring people, too. Olga was a former gymnast who used to tell us the story of when she was chosen to represent her age group in a big competition. She had previously hurt her knee very badly, but she was determined not to let anyone down and so she just taped her knee so tightly and carried on competing. Not taking part wasn’t an option and she and Igor instilled this mantra, this sort of ‘programming’ into us right away – you can’t let others down. You are part of a team, you put yourself second and you have to carry on whatever.
When I joined the school there was a boy already there who they thought I could dance with – he was thirteen and they said we could start competing straight away. But I felt a little out of my depth because I hadn’t danced for over a year and this was a very good school. I didn’t want to let anyone down either. Of course I wanted to compete, it was in my blood, but life at home was so bad – what with all the arguments and my mum drinking and trying to hold down a job as a cleaner. I did find it stressful trying to hide everything that was happening at home. I remember my first competition with this new boy, Maxim, and I had to borrow a couple of costumes from another girl – my mother couldn’t afford to buy anything to make me a costume of my own.
We danced so well in the competition. It was only a local competition between the other dance schools in the area so nothing serious, but I was in an older dance category and so it felt wonderful. We came second or third and I should have felt so happy about that, I should have been so pleased, but I was so sad I didn’t have anyone to share my joy with, so what was the point of being pleased with myself? My mum didn’t come to watch as she was often drowning her sorrows with her girlfriends and Dad was hardly around.
I think this is when I realised that home to me was my dance school because my actual home wasn’t a nice place to be. If my mum was at home, she wasn’t in a good place as she was drinking and that would really upset me. But I suppose if there was any good to come of not wanting to go home, it was that my dancing improved very quickly as I was spending so much time at dance school!
Thankfully at that time, even though things were changing a lot in the country, there was still a good amount of money going into dance schools. My parents would not have been able to send me there if they had had to pay for it. We were lucky to have a roof over our heads really. At that point I realised that my father just didn’t care about me, or what happened to me, which was a hard truth to face. I think I had a conversation with him at one point, when I was thirteen years old, and he told me he couldn’t be with my mum any more because she was drinking all the time, and I then became angry with Mum because she was drinking a lot and she was degrading herself in my eyes. Here was this intelligent and beautiful person completely falling apart. Her behaviour was unrecognisable and she would be rude to me but it was because she was drunk all the time. She would be just sober enough to go to work at the hotel but as soon as she got back, she would drink.
Alcohol cost next to nothing in the early 1990s as the country was still completely in chaos. In Soviet Union times it was quite strongly monitored, but due to all the corruption you could buy a bottle of vodka quite cheaply. It was a horrible time: at thirteen years old I felt completely alone and I was dealing with a mother who was an alcoholic. I will never forgive my dad for that – he should have been responsible. Years later my mum
told me she felt that the biggest problem was that he should have taken her to the doctor and got her some help – but he didn’t. All he would do was yell and shout that she was an embarrassment to him and herself because she was a drunk. How was that going to help a sick person? It didn’t do any good, of course, her being shouted at and my father not trying to get her any help. Dad never made an effort to take her to a doctor. Instead he left me, just a child, to deal with it. He was weak, he didn’t want to deal with it, perhaps he just didn’t feel strong enough to deal with it, and so he left us. I think I heard from him a couple of times after that, on my birthday or something, but that was about it.
*****
So my life was pretty dark and the country wasn’t faring much better either. The gap between rich and poor was becoming increasingly defined as those who worked high up in the government had bought all these closed-down factories for next to nothing and sold them to the highest bidders. By then it was all about making money rather than trying to help build up the country again. It tore Russia apart and for the poor, like my mother, it was hard. For normal, honest people it was very difficult. Doctors, engineers, teachers… they were all struggling as the government who used to pay their wages now didn’t, which meant they had to find new jobs like cleaning floors or washing clothes to survive.
Vladivostok became an open city in 1991 so, in a way, my mum working at a hotel was quite good as the tourists tipped well. At that time it was all about survival, not living life. But we never starved – there was always some kind of food like rice or vegetables. You could buy other foods but they would be so, so expensive – for everyone. My mum had the advantage of still being young, too; she still had the ability to change her career, to work, to adapt, and although it was demoralising for her, she didn’t have much choice. Any other jobs that she could do with her shipbuilding qualifications as an engineer weren’t an option – the companies were now owned by private firms giving the work to other people less qualified and not so skilled – whoever they wanted to give them to, in all honesty. It was about who you knew and not what you knew and my mum was just a hard worker from a simple family. She didn’t have any connections.
You could bribe your way into a job; you could buy yourself a diploma… corruption was all around us. The older generation struggled the most because they grew up in the Soviet Union system and had sixty years of savings in the bank from their working lives, thinking that when they retired they would have a decent amount to live on. But that all went wrong and their savings were lost and the price of medical care rocketed. There was no free healthcare system any more, which I think was most terrifying for them.
If the country and my home life were rubbish, at least I could say that dancing had once again been a blessing in my life. By now I had started teaching with Igor, who had asked me to help out in some of his lessons. I would assist him with his classes when he taught the five-year-olds and it was amazing as I was just fourteen years old and managing to earn a little bit of money. There was also a local theatre that was being used by a singer every evening and on some occasions she would want a theatrical feel to her show. So she came to the dance school to ask me and my partner to perform some background ballroom dances while she sang. She must have seen us in a competition or something somewhere and was happy to pay us a little, too. So I was earning from two different places, and at fourteen years old this was brilliant! For the first time I felt independent, and that I could spend a bit of money on myself as I had earned it.
And earning was something my mum wasn’t doing as she eventually lost her job because she was drinking so much. She tried to get a few other jobs and because her education and credentials were so good, she could apply for better jobs in the hotel industry and lots of opportunities were open to her. But she couldn’t keep any job as she slipped back to drink so easily. I think she had a weakness and as I have said before she might have inherited this addictive gene from my grandfather. She did try and get help quite a few times and tried several stints in rehab, but she would always have a relapse after a couple of months. The times she was in rehab I would be on my own at the flat and I can honestly say, even though I was only fourteen years old, I preferred living alone at that time than with her. Her drinking just caused arguments and then I would yell at her and she would be yelling at me – I was better on my own.
And I was good at hiding what was going on at home, too. I couldn’t talk to anyone at school about it because I was too embarrassed and ashamed. And I think people at dance school knew by then that my parents had split up but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to them about my mother being an alcoholic. For me it was too embarrassing to admit to anyone. If ever I was a bit low I think they just assumed it was because I was struggling without my dad being around.
As well as teaching, every moment I had was spent dancing; my partner and I would try and compete as much as possible. And there were times when my mum, who had just come out of rehab and was sober, would come and watch me and make an effort but then she would slip back to alcohol. Our relationship was so strained at that point: I hated her, and I hated being at home when she was there. This went on for the next two or three years so I would just try and be away from home as much as I could. So I did all the competitions that were available, especially if they were in different parts of the city. I loved being away from home. Not that it was a home with my mother; I think the last time I felt I had a home was when I was living with my grandparents. My survival mode became dancing and working and I felt as long as I had those things, I would be OK. Even now, if people ask me why I have done certain things or why I have made the decisions that I have, like sacrificing a relationship for a job, it stems back to this time in my childhood. I know people say I put my work above everything else but I think this is why: it was about survival. It made me feel normal, and dancing and teaching were ways of controlling my life and gave me something to focus on. I felt very isolated, too, because I was an only child and I didn’t know how to deal with an alcoholic mother. So I focused instead on what made me happy, and that was dancing.
And you know what? When you’re dancing, you can’t think about anything else. You can’t think about anything other than what you are doing, the steps you are making right at that moment, so it was a way I could escape into a different world.
And teaching those young children gave me such a real boost. I loved it and I was surrounded by their love, too. They were so open and wanted my praise so much. It made me feel useful and worthy and even though I felt I had no love at home, I was OK because I had children who wanted me to teach them. I had people who respected me as a dancer too, so I figured as long as I had that, I was OK. Emotionally I felt worthy and so I survived because I was making money and I was very careful with the little I earned.
I was paid in roubles so I couldn’t say what that is now but with the teaching and being hired to dance in the shows, it was a good deal of money. In fact I could make as much in one night as my mum would make in a month when she was a maid. I think that is why I work so hard now, because I always have the fear of not being able to eat and being poor at the back of my mind. Also, I am able to provide for my mother now, which was something she couldn’t do for me when I was younger.
She was a middle-aged woman who had lost her husband, lost her job and lost her mother all around the same time, so she turned to alcohol for help. Later she told me that she felt like she was drowning but she always thought I would be OK as I had dancing in my life. But for her, things were not OK at all, and one day she decided to try to commit suicide.
CHAPTER 7
The dark days
The day my mother tried to kill herself was the day when I knew I couldn’t deal with this on my own any more: I had to tell someone. So I called my aunt, my grandad and my grandmother’s sister, who was a doctor.
‘I don’t want to end up with a dead mother at home, you’ve got to help me,’ I said.
So they did. It was a relief to t
ell them the true extent of her drinking and that I couldn’t deal with it any more, that they needed to help me. I was just sixteen years old at the time. My aunt and grandad took her to rehab and she was there for about four months. They knew she was a drinker and they had been on her case in the past about it but they had no idea how bad it had got, absolutely no idea. My aunt would sometimes take my mum out for the evening and they would all end up drinking so I suppose she was aware of her reliance on alcohol but this was more than just reliance, this was a need to survive.
I will always remember that day she tried to commit suicide. I had come back after a couple of days away at a dance competition and she started arguing with me as soon as I came through the front door. She was completely drunk and I just didn’t have the fight in me any more – I didn’t need this the moment I got home. She was screaming at me and I was screaming at her and so I told her I hated her and didn’t want to be around her any more. The next thing I knew she took a whole bunch of tablets – I think they were sleeping tablets, I couldn’t tell you for certain. She just found them in the drawer and started taking them. I called the ambulance and then made her throw up all that she could and drink lots of water. The ambulance took her and put her on a drip and when she came back home from hospital, I made sure everyone was at the flat so we could confront her together.
She kept trying to tell us all that she didn’t have a problem and that we just didn’t understand what she was going through, and how hard it was for her that she had lost her mother. But as I had gathered everyone to be there at the flat when she got home, we started telling her some home truths – that she would lose me and she would lose them unless she tried to deal with her problems.
Dancing Out of Darkness Page 5