“A Tale of Two Mothers: Echoes of Warning Across Continents”

Maria Ivanovna stares out her Leningrad window, cradling her third son – her only surviving child.

The siege has left its marks on her soul, just as surely as the cold has etched lines into her hands.

She whispers prayers for this late-life gift, this boy who seems to carry all her hopes. Yet in his quiet, watchful eyes, she sees something that makes her cross herself when no one looks.

Across the ocean, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump adjusts her carefully styled hair in her Queens mansion mirror, her Scottish pragmatism still stubbornly intact despite the gilt and glamour surrounding her.

Her son’s latest newspaper headline makes her purse her lips. “Politics,” she mutters, “would be a disaster.”

She sees in her son’s bombastic certainty an echo of something that terrifies her – a hunger that no amount of wealth or power could ever satisfy.

Two mothers, shaped by wars and hardship, raising sons who would one day circle each other in a dangerous dance of power.

Maria, who scraped burnt wallpaper paste for soup to survive, watched her boy build himself into a fortress.

Mary Anne crossed an ocean for a better life, watching her son build towers that reached for the sky but somehow never touched the ground.

What warnings would they share if these mothers could speak to each other across time and space?

What would Maria say about a son who learned too well that survival means control?

What would Mary Anne confess about a child who mistook attention for respect, wealth for wisdom?

Perhaps they would commiserate over cups of tea, these women who bore sons that would shake the world.

Maria might speak of how her boy learned to hide his hunger behind an ice mask, while Mary Anne might describe how her Donald wore his hunger like a crown.

Both might see in each other’s eyes the burden of watching their children become exactly who they feared they might be.

The tragedy lies not in Trump’s belief that he comprehends Putin, but in the fact that neither man could truly grasp the whispered wisdom of the women who knew them first.

Mary Anne saw the disaster coming in her son’s refusal to listen, while Maria’s prayers for her boy’s soul suggest she, too, recognized the price of survival.

In their sons’ current power play, we might hear the echoes of two mothers’ unheeded warnings: one son who learned too well that power means never having to listen and the other who learned that survival means ensuring no one else can speak.

May harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. Consider the chess metaphor: While the Soviets were crafting grandmasters through systematic cultural and intellectual cultivation, Trump approaches geopolitics like a checkers player who thinks he’s mastered chess because he knows how the horse moves. This isn’t just about different cultural perspectives – it’s about the profound danger of mistaking superficial observation for deep understanding.