A colleague’s son had to get married when it turned out the girl was expecting a baby. They were both young, unprepared for responsibilities and children. And if he still somehow imagined married life and fatherhood, not without the help of his mother and father, she was afraid of everything and didn’t want to take responsibility. People said that after the baby was born she would awaken her maternal instincts and get into it, but nothing of the sort happened. She tried to spend less time at home, less time seeing her crying daughter, leaving her to her grandmother and her husband.
One day she was alone with the baby because her relatives were away on business, and the girl had a high fever. Her mother did not even realize that the girl was hot, only her grandmother, when she came back from the clinic, noticed that the baby was burning. She called an ambulance. The doctors spent several days trying to cure the baby, but the mother didn’t give a damn. She did not even try to save her daughter or at least stay with her in the hospital, she left it to her grandmother.
There were scandals with my husband about it, he blamed her that they almost lost their daughter, and she said: “Had they lost her, that’s all right, it would have been less trouble.”
A divorce followed, raising the child alone. As the years went by, the father managed alone with his daughter, but became very ill. My mother was very old, she couldn’t do much to help with an eight-year-old child, so he met his ex-wife in the hospital. She was a nurse there. Early marriage and having a child did not allow her to go to the coveted university, become what she dreamed of, and get a decent job, and once divorced, was able to achieve it. Now she worked in the maternity ward and considered each new life sacred.
They chatted at length with her ex-husband, about her daughter too, and then a request slipped into the conversation:
– Come back. Mom can’t raise her daughter alone. No one knows how long she has left, and if we both do not make it, the girl will be sent to an orphanage. So please come back.
It’s like she was waiting for an offer like that. She said she needed to think about it, but by the end of the day she agreed. Her mother-in-law treated her badly at first, much worse than at the beginning of their marriage, but after she noticed how her daughter-in-law had changed, she relaxed and became gentler. The husband recovered, came home, took over a lot of work again, and the girl was becoming a “mama’s girl” more and more quickly.
No one knows how people can change and where life will turn. It seems to be like a straight road, but for some it is a circular road on which they circle and circle until they collide again.
