I never had any plans to become a parent at eighteen, and even now, at twenty-five, looking back, it still feels
as if I am living through someone else’s life as a memory rather than my own, especially because fate didn’t give me one child, but two right away—two newborn girls who, in a single moment, completely rewrote my future.
Back then I was still just a final-year high school student living with my mother, Lorain, in an old, neglected, cramped two-room apartment where the walls always felt too thin
to hide the tension, and where even silence was often as oppressive as the shouting that occasionally filled the rooms.
My mother was unpredictable, like a stormy sky that promises calm in one moment and darkens everything in the next, and you could never know
which version of her I would see in the morning when I woke up, or in the evening when I got home from school.
There were times when she cooked and smiled, as if we were part of a normal life, but at other times she reacted with such anger to the smallest things, as if the world owed her something, and somehow she was trying to collect that debt from me, as if I were the target of all her frustration.
Then one day she came home pregnant, without any explanation or warning—just standing in the doorway, her body already carrying proof of a new life that had suddenly and irreversibly entered our already unstable world.
For a moment I thought maybe this would change her, that the arrival of a child would finally bring some stability into her life, and that there would be something
that would make her try to live more responsibly, but that hope faded very quickly as the real days began.
Instead of becoming calmer, she grew more and more irritable, as if all the tension inside her only kept building, and more and more often she would unleash an anger that she directed sometimes at men, sometimes at the world, and sometimes, in a completely incomprehensible way, at me.
She never said who the father was, and when I once asked too many questions, she slammed the kitchen cabinet so hard that the entire apartment shook, and from that moment on I learned that certain questions had no place in our lives.
I remember nights when she would walk around in the dark, slamming doors, muttering that men always disappear and women are left with all the burdens, as if this were an unchangeable truth from which no one could escape.
Then the girls were born, Ava and Elen, and I was there the day I first heard their cries, and although I did not yet understand
how much that moment would define my entire life, somewhere deep down I already felt its weight.
In the first days my mother seemed to try to fit into some imagined role, as if she suddenly wanted to become a mother, but this attempt felt more like a fragile performance than a real commitment backed by responsibility.
She changed diapers, fed them, then disappeared for hours, as if reality was too much for her, and more and more often I was left alone with crying infants while I myself was barely more than a child.
I had no idea what I was doing, and every day passed with the same uncertainty, while I tried to survive the days and nights, which were equally exhausting.
Then one night she simply disappeared, without any goodbye or explanation, as if she had just stepped out of our lives and left behind everything that had been our world until then.
She left no message, no explanation, not even a single sentence that would have let us know whether she would ever return or had left for good.
At around three in the morning I woke up to crying, and when I stepped out of the room, the apartment was empty, and only the mess, the silence, and my mother’s faint scent remained behind us, lingering in the air for days.
I stood in the kitchen, with Elen in one arm and Ava crying in the other room, and in that moment a single thought took hold of me and defined everything that came after: if I fail, they will not survive.
It was not dramatic exaggeration or oversensitivity, but a pure, cruel reality in which there was no room for choice, only survival and responsibility that fell on me without any preparation.
In that moment I gave up all my future plans, including going to medical school, which I had nurtured since I was eleven as the only way out of this life.
Instead, something began that can only be called survival, because every day started and ended with the same question: how do we get to the next day without everything falling apart.
I took any job I could find, whether night warehouse work or daytime delivery, because there was no other choice if I wanted there to be food on the table and diapers for the children.
There were times when I carried boxes until dawn while my back was practically giving out, and times when I drove home in snow and rain, counting every single penny to make it last until the end of the week.
I learned how to stretch thirty dollars over an entire week, how to apply for aid, and how to obtain things that were natural for others but a luxury for me.
In those years, while others were partying and making plans for the future, I was heating baby bottles at night, trying to stay awake so I wouldn’t collapse from exhaustion.
The girls quickly learned the word “buba,” and the name stuck to me, as if I were no longer a person to them, but a constant point of safety that is always there, no matter how hard things get.
Even the daycare workers called me that, and over time even strangers looked at me that way when I held two children at once in the store, as if I belonged to a separate category.
But at home none of that mattered, because when they slept on my chest, or when the three of us were drawn together in their pictures in a small house, there was still something that gave meaning despite all the hardship.
Every night I promised myself that they would never feel what I had felt—the emptiness and abandonment that had followed my own childhood.
And for a long time I thought the hardest part was already behind us, but seven years later I had to realize that this was not true, because my mother came back.
That day is burned into my memory; it was Thursday, and we had just come home from school when someone knocked on the door, and everything changed.
When I opened it, I did not recognize her at first—she was so different from what I remembered, in expensive clothes, perfectly put together, and with a confidence that felt completely alien to my old mother.
She said my name, and in that moment everything inside me tightened, because the past and the present collapsed onto me at the same time, and I did not know which one I belonged to.
The girls were playing in the background, then stopped, as if they instinctively sensed that something foreign had entered our lives—something that might not bring anything good.
She said she had come back, but her voice sounded more like a rehearsed role than a real feeling, and after every visit I increasingly felt that she was not returning to us, but pursuing some purpose of her own.
She brought gifts, took them for walks, smiled, but behind every movement there was a tense, artificial layer that prevented any real connection from forming.
Then the legal papers arrived, and I understood that she did not want to come back—she wanted to take them, as if the past seven years had never happened.
When I confronted her, she sat calmly on the couch and said she was only doing what was best for the children, but I knew that was not true.
The court hearing ultimately decided everything, and the girls clearly said they wanted to stay with me, which closed everything, but also began something new.
Life did not become easier, but it became quieter, and for the first time in a long time I could sleep without constant fear.
Now I am twenty-five years old, working part-time and studying, trying to build a life I never planned, but which I now feel is my own.
My mother has not returned since; sometimes she only sends anonymous letters, without explanation, but I no longer wait for anything, because I learned that real family is not the one who leaves, but the one who stays—and I stayed.
