The Builders Behind Me

The people who shape you aren't always loud about it. Sometimes they do it simply by being who they are — consistently, quietly, over years you don't recognize as formative until much later.

Both of my parents were engineers. My father, Val, led an electrical engineering group at a machine-building plant. Our home overflowed with technical books, not for show. Dad read daily, the way other people ate or slept. It wasn't discipline. It was just who he was. I think I inherited that from him.

One of our favorite family stories starts when I was about two. I'd wake early, and my sleepy parents, trying to steal a few more minutes of rest, would hand me one of Dad's engineering books to keep me occupied. I'd flip through the pages, point at charts and diagrams, and ask, "What's this?" They'd answer, "Chart"', and I'd repeat it back: "chat."' "Graph"' became "gaff."' Those toddler mispronunciations quietly entered our family vocabulary. We still laugh about them.

Dad had an entrepreneurial instinct long before it was safe to. After the Soviet collapse, he launched one business, then another. But his real childhood dream had nothing to do with engineering. He had wanted to be a pilot. His eyesight disqualified him from the military. So he let the dream go temporarily. In his forties, with stability built and children grown, he went back to it. Earned his pilot's license. Built small planes with his own hands. And flew them.

Dreams can be delayed. They don't have to be discarded.

There's a line I keep coming back to, warning myself: "If your brain is closed to possibilities, your eyes won't see opportunities."

Someone asked me once about my hobbies. The question stumped me. In the Soviet Union, hobbies weren't really a concept. Everyone worked hard. Personal time felt like an indulgence, something you hadn't quite earned. The collective always came first: your family, your school, your workplace. What you wanted existed somewhere at the bottom of the list, if it existed at all.

It was only recently that I understood: I do have a hobby. It's learning. Not for certificates or recognition, but to apply, to take something in and build something real with it. That instinct, I now know, came straight from my father's bookshelf.

My mother, Jane, was an industrial architect who spent twenty-five years at a major design bureau. From her, I inherited a structural way of thinking, but also something harder to name. A sense of beauty. An attention to how things look and feel, not just how they work.

She was graceful. Always stylish. People would stop her on the street to say so, strangers compelled by something in the way she moved through the world. It wasn't luck. It was her dream, tended quietly.

Once, she received an offer to model for the local Fashion House. She was ecstatic. But in that era, a second job required written permission from her primary employer, and they refused her permission. Red tape, simply. A door closed for no good reason.

What I remember is not the refusal. It's how she carried herself afterward. With poise. Without bitterness. She didn't let the loss make her smaller. That left a mark on me that I didn't fully understand until I was much older.

My mother's mother, Sasha, was a force of nature in an unassuming frame.

She was born in a village and moved to Murmansk — my birth city, above the Arctic Circle — at seventeen. Her life held more hardship than most: she lost her husband when my mother was four. Of her six children, only three survived.

Grandma had a basic education. Her handwriting looked like a child's. Her grammar never quite settled. But her love was precise and unwavering, the kind that doesn't require language to land. She adored me. Perhaps because I was her daughter's only child at the time, perhaps simply because that's how she was made. Whatever the reason, I felt it completely.

Her letters are among my most treasured things. Uneven lines, misspelled words, warmth in every sentence. She believed in me before I knew how to believe in myself. That early, unconditional certainty became something I carried forward. A quiet confidence that held its shape even when everything around it shifted.

That kind of love doesn't fade. It stays. Certain. Steady. Long after the person is gone.

I didn't choose these people. But I am, in no small part, made of them — their tenacity, their elegance, their hunger to keep learning, their refusal to be diminished. The builders behind me didn't always know they were building. That may be the most important thing about them.

A couple of questions before you go:

Who built something in you without knowing they were doing it?

And have you told them?

With intention,

Nadia Granski