My mother herself did not want to share the story of my life with me. If it wasn’t for my grandmothers in the village, I would probably never have known that my mother was not my own and that my father was a bastard.
My father was married to a woman from the city, who did not want children at all, and when I was born, my father had to take me to the village to his family. I grew up first in his sister’s family, with cousins, but when I was about five (I don’t remember that time at all, to be honest), he separated from his wife and moved to the village too. There he met Barbara, my most beloved and real mother, who raised me and continues to support me now. They got married because no one else was looking at my mother, and my grandparents wanted to marry her off as soon as possible. They didn’t care one bit that there was already me.
So I grew up in full confidence that Barbara was my mother, just for some reason I had been living with my aunt for a while. My friends at first thought it was because my parents worked so hard-many parents were so busy working that the younger ones were literally raised by older siblings.
When I was ten years old, Dad left the family and married for the third time to someone who lived far away from our village. That’s when my grandmother and her neighbors began to pick at his buttons, trying to remember who he was, what he was, and whose child I was.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but listening to this at ten, twelve, fifteen and seventeen, sooner or later you begin to understand that Barbara was not my mother, that my father had abandoned me, and that I would never find my own mother. But I don’t miss my father. Sometimes, of course, I feel sad, but I’m nineteen, a grown-up guy, I’m settling in at the sawmill, and I have no time to miss those who have left my life. The important thing is that my mom is there for me, that she does everything for me, and I do everything for her. That this complicated story of my past makes me look at the future differently, making it clear what I want to be and what I don’t want to be. And what mistakes I definitely shouldn’t make again.
