— “You’re sixty—what job?” my son-in-law Vadim chuckled, tossing his car keys onto my perfectly tidy entryway. “Go babysit the grandkids, Galina Sergeevna.”
He always called me by my first name and patronymic, as if to underline the distance and my age. As if hammering nails into the coffin of my professional life.
My daughter Sveta, his wife, gave an apologetic smile. She always did that when Vadim cracked his “jokes.” That smile was her shield—from his bad moods and from my unspoken reproaches.
“Vadim, stop.”
“What did I say?” He strode into the kitchen, opened the fridge like it was his own, and looked through it without a shred of ceremony. “Yegor needs a full-time grandmother, not a retired career woman. It’s only logical.”
I silently looked at the screen of my new laptop. Thin, silver, it seemed like a foreign object in the world they’d defined for me—a world of pots and pans, knitting, and bedtime stories.
On the screen glowed an email. Two words that tightened everything inside me into a taut, ringing knot.
“You’re hired.”
And below— the company name: “TechnoSfera.” The company Vadim had been trying and failing to get into for the past three years, always finding someone else to blame for his failures.
“Mom, you said yourself you’re tired,” Sveta sat down beside me, her voice soft and enveloping, like sticky cobweb. “You should rest. Spend time with Yegor. We’d pay you, of course. Like a nanny.”
They would pay me to give up myself. To turn me into a convenient function in their comfortable life.
I slowly closed the laptop lid. The message disappeared, but the words were stamped on the inside of my eyelids.
“I’ll think about it,” I answered evenly.
By then Vadim was already regaling Sveta with his “grand” successes. How he was almost promoted. Almost.
“This new project… it’s going to change everything!” he declaimed, waving a piece of cheese. “Even Andrei Valeryevich, the head of development, will notice me. He appreciates grit and ambition.”
I knew that manager’s name. I’d spoken with him yesterday. Four hours on video—no room for ambition there, only clean code and architectural solutions.
He’d asked tricky questions about systems Vadim dismissed as “outdated.” I had built those systems.
“Can you imagine? They’re looking for a lead analyst!” the son-in-law went on. “The requirements are insane. Twenty-plus years of experience. Where are they going to find such a dinosaur in their right mind?”
I stood and went to the window. Down below, the city lived its own life—honking cars, people in a hurry. A life they were trying to wall me off from with apartment walls and a grandchild’s cries.
“By the way, dinner on Saturday,” Vadim tossed at my back. “We’ll celebrate my future position. You’re on something tasty. You’re the master of that, after all.”
My role had long been assigned and approved: support staff for his ego.
“Of course,” my voice sounded calm—perhaps too calm.
I turned to them. Sveta was already chirping about what dress she would wear. Vadim smiled down at her indulgently.
They didn’t see my look.
They didn’t know the war they’d been waging against me in my own apartment was already lost.
All that remained was for them to show up for the capitulation.
On Saturday. At dinner.
The next two days my phone wouldn’t stop. Sveta called to discuss the “work schedule” with Yegor.
“Mommy, let’s do nine to six, like everyone else. And weekends are yours, of course!” she trilled, as if bestowing upon me the greatest favor.
I didn’t argue. I listened to her voice while reading the corporate documentation from TechnoSfera they’d already sent me. Complex diagrams, multilayered tasks.
My brain—which, in my son-in-law’s view, was good only for recipes—woke up and hummed under load like a powerful processor.
On Friday evening Vadim showed up unannounced. He dragged a huge box into the hallway.
“Here, for Galina Sergeevna’s ‘work’!” he announced proudly.
Bright plastic panels of a playpen peeked out.
“We’ll set it up in the living room,” he decreed, scanning the room that had been my study and library for the last thirty years. “Right here, by the window. Good light, nice spot.”
His gaze fell on my desk. Old oak, heaped with books on programming and systems analysis.
“This junk can be pushed aside,” he tossed off carelessly. “It’s not like it’s being used. You’re not solving crosswords on it.”
He flicked his hand in the direction of my desk. My world. The place where for decades I’d created what he called “outdated.”
This wasn’t an encroachment on furniture. It was an encroachment on my identity.
Sveta, scurrying behind him, shot me a frightened look.
“Vadim, maybe don’t? Mom has… her things here.”
“Sveta, don’t be naive,” he cut her off. “The child needs space. And your mom needs to get used to her new role. Logical.”
He began unpacking the playpen, and the harsh smell of plastic slapped my nose, crowding out the familiar scent of old books and wood. He was invading my space. Physically. Brazenly.
I kept silent. I just watched that tasteless, alien thing take over the spot where my thoughts were born.
I didn’t see a playpen. I saw a cage they were building for me.
“Perfect!” Vadim rubbed his hands when the ugly contraption stood assembled, gobbling up almost the entire free corner. “On Monday, Yegor will take it for a spin. Get ready, Granny!”
He left, pleased with his “practicality” and “care.”
I stood in the middle of the room. The smell of plastic tickled my nostrils. The playpen by my desk looked like a monument to my defeat.
But I didn’t feel defeated.
On the contrary. Every word, every action of theirs only strengthened my resolve. They themselves were putting the weapons into my hands. They themselves were writing the script of their humiliation.
I went to my desk and ran a hand along the book spines. Opened the laptop.
I wrote a short email to my new boss—the very one Vadim was so eager to impress. I confirmed I’d be starting work on Monday.
Then I began to prepare dinner.
I didn’t choose recipes like a housewife. I chose them like a general preparing for a decisive battle. Every dish had its meaning.
It wouldn’t be just a dinner. It would be a performance.
With one audience member in the front row who had no idea the lead role was his.
Saturday evening wrapped the city in coolness. My apartment smelled of meat roasted with herbs and, faintly, vanilla. No plastic smell. I had dismantled the playpen and hidden it on the balcony behind an old wardrobe.
Sveta and Vadim arrived at seven sharp, dressed up and excited. Vadim headed straight for the living room, carrying an expensive bottle of wine.
“Well, Galina Sergeevna, ready to celebrate my triumph?” he boomed.
He spoke as if the promotion were already in his pocket.
“Always ready, Vadim,” I replied, coming out of the kitchen.
I set the table. Everything was perfect: starched tablecloth, antique silverware, crystal glasses. An air of solemnity that Vadim immediately appropriated for himself.
“Now this is what I like!” he approved with a nod. “The right vibe! To my success!”
We sat. All evening Vadim held forth. He talked about TechnoSfera as if he were already sitting in the boss’s chair. He spoke of incompetent colleagues, of short-sighted leadership that was about to appreciate him at his true worth.
Sveta echoed him, gazing at her husband with adoration. I silently refilled the wine and served the courses.
I was the perfect set piece for his one-man show.
Finally, when it came to dessert—a light berry mousse—Vadim leaned back in his chair.
“With this project I’ll wipe the floor with all of them,” he concluded smugly. “Andrei Valeryevich, the head of development, will definitely notice me. Smart guy, though old school. He values fundamentals.”
He paused and looked at me.
“Speaking of dinosaurs. Imagine, they actually found that lead analyst. Some woman. Must be someone’s protégé. At that age, and for that role… ridiculous.”
My time had come.
I set my cup carefully on its saucer.
“Why ridiculous, Vadim?” I asked quietly.
“Well, why?” he snorted. “She must be, what, sixty? What can she teach the young? The brain isn’t the same anymore. She should be minding grandkids, not all this.”
I looked him straight in the eye.
“Did it occur to you that at that age one has precisely the ‘fundamental’ experience your boss values so much?”
Vadim frowned, not grasping where I was going.
“That’s all theory. In practice you need a fresh outlook, flexibility…”
“For example, flexibility in the architecture of multithreaded systems?” I interrupted mildly. “Or a fresh take on legacy co-integration principles? That’s exactly what Andrei Valeryevich was very interested in hearing my opinion on.”
The manager’s name, spoken by me so matter-of-factly, froze Vadim with a spoon in mid-air.
“Your… opinion?”
“Yes. We spoke at length on Thursday. A pleasant man. He’ll be my direct supervisor,” I took a sip of water. “At TechnoSfera.”
A stunning silence fell over the room. The only sound was the distant city hum beyond the window.
Sveta looked from me to her husband. Her face stretched in bafflement.
Vadim blanched. The smug smirk slid off, revealing bewilderment.
“What? What… supervisor?”
“Lead Systems Analyst,” I clarified in the same calm voice. “That very position. The very ‘dinosaur’ they’d been looking for so long. I start Monday.”
I watched his world crumble. Watched his “triumph” turn to ash right there at my dining table.
He opened his mouth, shut it again. No words came.
“Oh, and Vadim—you can take the playpen with you when you go,” I added, rising from the table. “I won’t be needing it. I’m going to be very busy. At work.”
They left almost immediately. Sveta tried to babble something about how happy she was for me, but it rang false. Vadim didn’t say a word. He silently, with a kind of methodical fury, dismantled the plastic cage in my living room. Each click of a latch resounded in the tense air. He didn’t look at me. He couldn’t.
When they left, for the first time in a long time he didn’t call me “Galina Sergeevna.” He didn’t say anything at all. He just shoved the dismantled playpen under his arm and walked out the door that Sveta held for him.
The apartment suddenly felt astonishingly spacious.
On Monday I stepped into TechnoSfera’s gleaming lobby. Everything here was different: glass, steel, the buzz of voices, the scent of expensive perfume and coffee. I felt as if I had put on a perfectly tailored suit after years of a shapeless housecoat.
Andrei Valeryevich turned out to be a fit man in his fifties with lively, intelligent eyes. He shook my hand firmly, businesslike.
“Galina Sergeevna, welcome. I’ve heard of your projects since the ’90s. It’s an honor for us.”
He showed me around the open space. I briefly glimpsed the department where Vadim worked. He sat hunched over his monitor, pretending not to notice me. But I saw the tension in his back.
My workstation was by the window with a view of the city. They brought me a powerful computer and a stack of documents for the new project—the very one my son-in-law had been counting on.
That evening Sveta called. Her voice was quiet, contrite.
“Mom… how was your day?”
Not a word about Yegor, no hint of a “schedule.” Just that timid question.
“Excellent, Svetochka,” I said, looking at the diagrams on my screen. “A lot of interesting work.”
“Mom… Vadim… he’s beside himself. He thinks you… undercut him.”
I smiled.
“Tell Vadim positions aren’t handed out over a family dinner. They’re earned by competence. And tell him I expect his preliminary analysis report tomorrow by ten.”
Silence hung on the other end.
I hung up. Leaned back in my chair.
I didn’t feel gloating. Nor some glossy, all-consuming happiness. It was something else—a sense of restored justice. The feeling that things had finally fallen into place.
My old oak desk at home was waiting for me, but now it would hold a work laptop, not patterns for a grandchild’s clothes. And no one would ever again call it “junk.”
I hadn’t won a war against my son-in-law. I had won the war for the right to be myself. And that victory was quiet, like the hum of a system unit, and solid, like the architecture of well-written code.
Six months passed. Frost had time to cover the city, and then melt, giving way to the first timid green. My life didn’t change as drastically as someone might think, but it changed as deeply as I never expected.
At work I became one of the team. The young guys from Vadim’s group, who at first eyed me warily like a living museum piece, gradually thawed. They saw not a “grandma,” but a specialist who could spot a logical bug in ten minutes that they had wrestled with for two days. I didn’t lecture them about life; I just did my job. And that earned respect.
Vadim kept his distance. In meetings he addressed me strictly as “Galina Sergeevna” and stared somewhere past me, at the wall.
The reports he sent me for review became impeccably precise. He no longer allowed himself any sloppiness.
It was his form of acknowledging defeat. He didn’t quit. Pride wouldn’t let him. Or perhaps he was waiting for me to go off to a “well-deserved rest.” But I wasn’t planning to.
My relationship with Sveta turned into a fragile, taut rope. She called, but our talks were different now. She no longer rhapsodized about her husband’s plans.
She asked about my projects, about the people I worked with. Sometimes there was something like envy in her voice. She, who had devoted herself entirely to home and husband, suddenly saw another path—the path her own mother had chosen at sixty.
Once she came to me alone, without Vadim or Yegor. She sat in the kitchen, was silent for a long time, and then quietly said:
“Mom, how did you dare? I could never have done that.”
“You never tried,” I answered. “They convinced you your place was here.”
For the first time in years we spoke not as mother and daughter, but as two women. I didn’t give her advice. I simply told her what it’s like when your brain is working at full power again. When you’re solving the hardest problems instead of wondering what to make for dinner.
I still loved my grandson. But our time together was different now. I wasn’t a “full-time grandmother.” I visited on weekends, and instead of pies I brought complex construction kits. We built intricate models together, and I explained the basics of mechanics to him. That was our way of being together. My love. Not sacrificial, but equal.
That evening, after Sveta left, I sat by the window for a long time. My old oak desk was piled with work papers. Beside it stood a cup of hot jasmine tea. I realized I hadn’t become freer or happier in some glossy, magazine sense.
I had simply reclaimed a right.
The right to be not only a function—a mother, a grandmother, a housekeeper. But a complex, multifaceted person. Tired after a hard day.
Thrilled by a new challenge. Entitled to mistakes and to triumph.
My life didn’t start over. It simply continued—without discounts for age