Too Painful to Remember
As I was growing up, I was faced with challenges that many kids my age never even dreamed of. I grew up in little town called Tambov, only three-hundred miles south of the capital of Russia, Moscow. I lived in an orphanage since I was nine years old with my little sister Anastasia. I thought that I was very different from all the other kids in the orphanage. I actually still had parents that were alive. Most the kids in the orphanage didn’t have parents anymore. I always thought that I was really fortunate to still have parents. But that did not matter much to me; to me they would be better if they were dead. I hated them for leaving me and my sister and not caring enough for us to raise us properly.
Before I ended up in an orphanage, I thought that I had a pretty good life. I lived with my mom and her boyfriend in an apartment. My parents split when I was only four years old. My mom moved on with her life, and I just went along with her. I did not see my father that much; he was spending most of his time with the kids of his girlfriends. As I came to think about it, even though I had a pretty hard life, I still had the good stuff happening to me.
“Honey, you are going to be a big sister!” my mother said quietly to me. I thought that I didn’t hear her right. I asked my mother to repeat it. My mother took a deep breath and said, “Baby, you are going to have a baby sister.” I didn’t even let my mother finish the sentence and ran out. I didn’t know what to say to my mother. As I was leaving, I got the feeling that I was being unfair to my mother and inpatient. I locked my bedroom door. I did not dare to come out till I had to go to school the next morning. “Why now?” I kept saying to myself. “Why couldn’t she wait for another year or two?”
When I came back home from school, my mother was waiting for me by the door. When I saw my mother, a frown appeared on my guilty face. I did not want my mother to see how ashamed I was for...