M. Gessen

The judge's decision read in part, I think that's the judicial equivalent of, I'm fed up with your shenanigans.

The judge ruled that Priscilla was no longer obligated to allow Lena any visits with the kids.

And the judge also ordered Lena to stop criticizing Priscilla on social media.

I no longer have access to all of Lena's Facebook posts.

But from my past exchanges with Lena, I can imagine what the court decision is aiming to ban.

I gather that Lena is still convinced that she, and only she, knows the right way to raise these children.

Anna has always approached child rearing as a sort of design project.

When I was a teenager, she told me that she had chosen Alan's biological father for his hereditary talent.

His own father was a famous poet, and for his excellent hair.

At the time she said this, Alan was a little kid with an impressive head of hair.

but he lost all of it by the time he was 30.

And as for literary talent, I mean, yes, I found the locked-up lore pretty engaging, but I think it's fair to say that a self-published book written in prison is not what Lena once had in mind.

When Priscilla and Alan named their son O, Lena pointed out to me that his name was a sort of mirror image of my own son's name.

And when they write a book together, the names will look good on the spine.

O was Lena's new project, which is, I think, why she felt she had to have full control of him.

Years earlier, when Alan was in jail on kidnapping charges and Priscilla gained full custody of O, my father became a go-between.

He Skyped with O regularly and reported back to Lena about how her grandson was doing.

She demanded to know which pages of which Russian books O was reading and how many pages, and expressed her dismay regularly.

Not enough pages.

Not of all the right books.