The woman who always got a ticket

My mother never taught me to tie my shoes with a lecture. She taught most things by doing them in front of me, badly explained, impossible to argue with.

Here's one I still don't fully understand. We'd walk up to a theater in Saint Petersburg for the most sold-out show in town — tickets gone for months. She'd say, "I'm going to buy a ticket now." Not hopeful. Not "let's see." A statement of fact about something that, on paper, could not happen.

She bought a ticket. Every time. I never asked her how. I don't think she could have told me.

In the early 90s, when the Soviet Union stopped existing and took most people's professions down with it, my mother was a chemical engineer. She'd worked through Chernobyl — the real one, not the miniseries. Her expertise, her degree, her years of training: worth nothing overnight. So she sold Indian blankets on the street to put food on the table.

I don't remember her complaining about it. I remember her laughing about the customers.

Somehow, wherever she went, good people found her. Not luck exactly — more like she walked around assuming the world would be decent to her, and it kept proving her right.

Years later, after we'd moved to Germany, she got a diagnosis. Not cancer, but standing close enough to it that the doctors handed her a stack of pills and, not long after, a pamphlet. German social services are efficient people — the pamphlet was about how to prepare your family for your death.

She read it. Then she put the pills aside and found some strange gymnastics routine instead — nothing a doctor prescribed, nothing in any pamphlet. She did it every day, stubbornly, the way she used to walk up to sold-out theaters.

A year later, new tests. The doctors didn't believe what they were looking at. The diagnosis that was supposed to be closing in on her — gone, or never quite what they thought. I still don't know which. Neither did they.

I spent a long time thinking my mother was simply an optimist, like it was a personality trait she got for free. It took me most of my life, a broken engagement, a locked psychiatric ward, and a bankruptcy proceeding of my own to understand what she actually had.

It wasn't optimism. It was trust — in people, in tomorrow, in her own stubborn body — deep enough that she acted on it before there was any evidence it was justified. She didn't wait for the world to prove itself first. She showed up expecting good, and more often than not, good showed up back.

She never once used the word love to describe any of this. She didn't need to. Showing up for a sold-out show believing a ticket exists for you, or refusing a death sentence because you'd rather trust your own body — that's not blind luck. That's a form of love for life so unshakeable it becomes indistinguishable from faith.

I didn't inherit her gymnastics routine. I don't know if I inherited her luck with theater tickets. But somewhere underneath every "we'll figure it out," every stubborn refusal to stay down, I think I inherited that same thing — a long time before I had a name for it, or a reason to need it.

I love, therefore I am.