We always lived with my dad and grandparents. When my sister and I would have questions about why the other kids had a mom and we didn’t, but my dad would very delicately hint to us that we had a mom too, just that she was far away and had her own life. There are plenty of kids who grow up in single-parent families, but then again, we have three! Grandma and Grandpa loved us very much. I’ll never forget how Grandpa used to tell us stories at bedtime, and how Grandma used to bake us tasty cherry pies in the morning.
It was a wonderful childhood that Mom took from us. Dad worked his ass off and had a heart attack at work. We lost him, but the kind people from his job collected money for his daughters more than once, and Grandma and Grandpa didn’t want a penny for us. And then my mother came along. She claimed legal guardianship and took us away.
My younger sister was more willing to go than I was, but later we both regretted it a lot. Mom didn’t like us. She took us to our second grandmother in the village, where we never saw the light of day and forgot what love and care meant, going to school in the neighboring town on weekdays, and working in the gardens during the day and on weekends. The second grandmother never said a kind word, and we could not go back to our real family, because my mother said that she would never give up on us.
We went back to our grandmother many years later, when we grew up. Grandpa was gone by then, but Grandma welcomed us with open arms. We can spend enough time with her, and she loves us just as much, only now we are no longer children. We have studies, work, some plans for our family life, and childhood is long gone…
