My wife and I lived with each other for almost six years. Our daughter Katya was growing up. Everything was great and beautiful.
My wife and I both came from an orphanage. Neither of us knew our parents. We were brought up in different orphanages and got to know each other later.
And that’s what united us somehow. I always wanted and dreamed of a family, and my Luda, too, dreamed of family happiness. We got married at the age of twenty-three.
We were the same age as she was. Luda was quite a complicated character. She was used to doing everything on her own. It wasn’t easy for me either, but I was gentler.
When Katya was born, I hoped that my wife would be kind and attentive to her. But I was mistaken. Luda performed her duties as a mother, but it was all as if on automatic.
It even seemed to me that she did not love the little girl. She never cooed with her, and if I did, then she yanked me back, for some reason, she did not like it.
My daughter was growing up, but without any maternal tenderness. I tried my best to make our Katya a happy child. When she was five years old our family had a lot of quarrels.
Luda and I just didn’t understand each other anymore. Things began to smell like divorce. And one day my wife said that she left me for another man, and went with him abroad. Adding at the same time:
“I’ll leave Katya to you for now. Then, when things settle down at my place, I’ll take her away.”
Personally, I had no idea, give my daughter to her. I broke up with Luda easily. But in order to leave, she had to write a renunciation of her daughter, and get permission to leave, which I gave her with pleasure.
My daughter and I were left alone. It was hard to explain to a little girl that her mother had gone away and was unlikely to come back. Katya cried a lot at night, calling for her mother. And I just wanted to kill Luda for abandoning the baby.
Eventually Katya forgot that she had a mother. Our neighbor Zhenya started coming over often. She was bringing up her own son, who was the same age as my daughter.
It was very convenient when I could not meet my children from school, Zhenya met them and vice versa, when Zhenya was not able to, I met the children and took them to my place. All of this made us very close, and we decided to merge our fates.
The children were only too happy. A couple of years later Luda showed up. She suddenly decided to remember her daughter, except that her daughter no longer remembered her.
She had long called Zhenya “mom”. Luda insisted that she wanted to take Katyusha. But I reminded her that she gave her up for a beautiful life in another country. And Katyusha said categorically that she wasn’t going anywhere.
Luda tried to seduce her with beautiful pictures and stories, but she failed.
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I have my father, my brother Antoshka, and my mother Zhenya. And I don’t know you, and I don’t remember you,” that’s how Katusha answered her biological mother.
Zhenya, long ago, replaced her. She was affectionate and gentle with her, which my Katya never got from her mother.
Luda had to leave with nothing. She never showed up again, and we didn’t care where she was or who she was with.
