Your country is your baby. You’ll never, ever leave it. You won’t abandon it for a minute. You wake up when it’s awake. Your brain is designed to record its audio waves. It depends on your milk. It is reaching for your warmth. It can’t survive without you, and that’s why you can’t manage without it.

You take it underground with you, to hide from the missiles. It might have been born there, in the darkness of the dungeons. It might have been months before it saw the sky and the birds flying. Its lullabies are chopped off by fragments of enemy bombs. They are sung in a G-minor, in unison with the sounds of prolonged air alarms.

You didn’t immediately feel its presence inside you. You didn’t know right away whether to keep it. You might have seen it as a threat to yourself. You might have seen it as a prison for your freedom.

But then everything changed, suddenly and forever. The country has become your kin and forever alive. You began to recognize its smells and colors. You started looking forward to the moment when you can touch its skin. You looked into its eyes and recognized your own consolations and your own pains.

Your country is your baby. Everything in it now depends on you. Go out for a day and it will die. Get on the plane, fly across the ocean, and it will choke crying. Forget about it for a week, and it will be stolen from you forever. Give up your rights for a moment, and you won’t get them back. It will disappear without you; it will fall ill; it will starve to death. Its death will be your death. Its tomorrow will be your tomorrow. Your country is your baby.

It needs you every day from now on. When you go out for milk, you call and ask how it feels. You buy that milk, and bread, and candy, and you call again and ask if everything is all right. You call even when you’re in the elevator and you’ll see it in a minute. You ask how it is, you open the door, you take it in your arms, you ask how you are, it’s me. Your country is your baby.

It demands daily action. It makes you forget the words “rest” and “weekend”. It narrows your space and time, turning them into arrowheads. Those tips may be able to help you someday, at least you will not be unarmed then.

You know that — who else but you. You know that you are indispensable here now; there is only you and no one else. And suddenly you realize that there are millions of irreplaceable people in this country. They all think the same way you do. That being indispensable today is a duty and a privilege. Your country is your baby.

At the same time, no, it’s not. Your country is an old man who has grown into the trees of thick forests. He has the wisdom of the root and the hardness of the bark. He’ll give you a language when you’ve forgotten it. He will remind you of those who gave you a chance to have this day, and another day, and yet another one. He will remember who was born and died on this earth. He will preserve the memory of you, give it to your descendants, with underground water and cold autumn air.

But this old man grew up out of people like you. They are people who think they can always do more than everyone else. Those who thought that the earth would not manage without us. That it wouldn’t live to see the day of tomorrow if you do not do something right now, today, at this point in time.

A nation is when you give more than you take. When you always have the power to give something else. When through fatigue and despair you still see the sun and tomorrow. When so much depends on you and on those who stand shoulder to shoulder with you. When if you fall asleep today, the sun will fall on the earth and the Dnipro River will turn the tide north.

A nation is made up of independent people. Those who are always ready to go against all odds, but when needed, they are ready to be in the same boat. Those who know that, by and large, no one owes anything to them, and so it will always be. Those who are ready to take in their hands the country, their baby. To stay with it today, tomorrow, a year from now, and till the end of days. And to say, yes, this is my country, yes, my dear, it’s me.

18 October 2022

The Ukrainian version of the text was written for the Ukrainian weekly magazine “Krayina”, translated into English for the “Wars.Ukrainians.Humanity.” programme and published with the consent of the author.