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“My mom had quite a series of very unhappy relationships, starting with my father,” she explained. They married when Natalia’s mother Larisa was 19. Army service was mandatory at the Original university of michigan football 2022 college football playoff fiesta bowl shirt it is in the first place but time, with few exceptions, and so Natalia’s father was called up when she was a baby—and the marriage didn’t last. Nor did a second romantic entanglement—with a man who would be the love of Larisa’s life, according to Natalia—that produced a second daughter, Oksana, born with severe developmental issues. Soon Larisa and daughters found themselves, as Natalia recalls, “in a little 20-meter room with nothing.” Her mother acquired furniture on credit and “worked really, really hard,” even as Natalia assumed many responsibilities at home and later on, at that market stall.As Natalia grew up there were further tumultuous relationships for Larisa—a summer fling on holiday in Ukraine with a mentally abusive younger man, and, briefly, a return of Oksana’s father, still Larisa’s true love, which produced Natalia’s sister Kristina. Natalia was 14. “Love is a crazy, crazy thing,” she says of this period. And so it proved when, a few years later, “Prince Charming comes along—this perfect guy,” the brother of one of Larisa’s friends, “and he sweeps her off her feet,” Natalia says. “He’s a gentleman. He seems so serious. He’s so kind to us, and after six months they’re together.” He asked Natalia to call him Dad. “My mom is shining,” she remembers. Larisa, then 36, was soon expecting her fourth child. “I guess the lack of sexual education in [the] Soviet Union as well played its part,” notes Natalia wryly.

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It would, however, prove to be another unhappy love affair, and a financially ruinous one for Larisa, even as she became pregnant with her fourth child. The relationship left her with a debt that forced her to turn to the Original university of michigan football 2022 college football playoff fiesta bowl shirt it is in the first place but local mafia to borrow money at extortionate terms. “By the time she’s eight months pregnant, we have to have this tough conversation,” says Natalia, then a 16-year-old having to grow up fast. “I told her, ‘You absolutely cannot bring another child into this situation.’ ” And so the decision was made to put the baby—who would be called Masha—up for adoption, through state channels. “I have always taken responsibility for that decision, maybe even more than I have admitted to myself,” Natalia explains quietly. However, “by the time Masha was born, there was no question that it was the right decision,” she adds, recalling that the mafia’s tactics were becoming ever more intimidating. There was an excruciating grace period in which Larisa could have reversed her decision and decided to keep her newborn. “They called us and they were like, ‘She’s such a good baby, she never cries, she’s so beautiful, are you sure you want to go ahead with this?’ And I remember saying to my mom, ‘There is a queue of parents who want this child. She’s going to be loved, she’s going to have a much better life than with us.’ ” Natalia went to see her infant sister for the first, and as she thought, the last time. She put her hand through the bars of the cot, “and she caught my finger and she just wouldn’t let go. She already was such a fighter. And in that moment, that very irrational, emotional moment, I said to her, ‘I promise we’ll see each other again.’ ”