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This is not just a story I read in a book, or see in a film. It is you, my childhood friend, who possesses this tale of sorrow and anguish, uncertainty and trepidation. You live in fear, haunted by doubt and disappointment, all the while raising two young children, living in the home of your partner and his parents, working for the family business in a land freshly foreign, day in, day out. Isolated and misunderstood. Striving to survive, to keep your children’s world unharmed, and intact.Two months before your first child was born your then-husband told you to pack your bags and leave. You were 7-months pregnant with his child, and he told you to go! I can’t imagine how you nursed the wounds this must have wrecked on you. Come to think of it, you had no time to fall apart and break in misery, let alone heal properly. Instead, you gathered fortitude and pulled resilience from all corners of your being to re-establish your independence. You and your baby – you built a life together, out of love, for love. It is just as Elif Safak muses in her novel Love: “Broken hearts harbor immense treasures.”

But could you do it all over again? Do you have to do it all over again?

You know why I’m asking.

Two years ago, filled with hope, you took your baby and decided to start anew AGAIN: a different land, new fiancé, and soon thereafter a second child.

You are a daring one.

There is no great reward without a great risk.

So you jumped in the deep end.

And now you’re drowning.

Highly-educated, career-bound, dynamic, charming, beautiful and driven, you are now in a society of people who expect you to serve your fiancé, abandon your friends, resign from being a decision-maker in your life and the life of your children. “They can barely read,” you tell me of your fiancé’s parents,”but they are warm, good people.” They love and care for their two granddaughters.

You wonder, do they care about YOU? Or do they care about a specific version of you? Does he still believe that your most attractive quality is your independence? Or does he try to maneuver around it, stifle, annihilate it?

You tell me he forbids you from talking to your second child in your native tongue, for in his mind his daughter is Greek. You can’t take her to visit your parents, even though they are a mere four-hour car ride away.

You are not at peace.

You are in a constant battle.

With him.

With those closest to him.

With yourself.

With what you think your life should be.

With what it actually is.

With your ex-husband.

With his parents.

With one country’s judicial system.

Then, another.

It is exhausting, unnerving, despairing.

“I have conceded to the notion that she is not so much my daughter, as she is theirs,” you breathe unto the world around you. “They tell me they could raise her on their own.” I catch this with eyes wide-open, nigh-believing. Is it possible that you dare give up on your relationship with her? A mother forsaking her child? It is forbidden, this thought. Unfathomable.

But what if this line of thinking is not a sign of weakness before a hostile set of circumstances, but is rather powered by the brain’s proclivity to exercise agility in the name of survival? Yes, how else could I explain a loving, capable, even fierce mother considering relinquishing her relationship with her baby. Backed against a wall, you must find a way to rationalize your fears, impending decisions, in order to make it all bearable, livable.

Of all species, we are the most adaptable ones, even to our own detriment. We might believe a situation favorable when we’re in the midst of it, only to find out it had actually done us disservice, when looked upon retrospectively. Our (human) ability to *deal* with most types of climate, social, economical, political, familial, living, and kind of conditions such as they might be, while necessary, can occasionally prove short-sighted, plainly damaging in the long-term.

I can’t believe the things you tell me. I can’t wrap my head around them. How did you get here? You tell me that if you took the two kids and brought them back home, you’d feel like a failure. You tell me that if I returned back home with my two kids, and a failed marriage, you would think of me as a failure. I’m confused. What do they matter — these types of general, ultra-committal generalizations of somebody’s path in life? Aren’t our lives ever-unfolding processes – actual living, occasionally evolving, oftentimes devolving living organisms. What is the standard you hold yourself up against? Does it raise you, or does it bring you down?

What has come to sustain you in this chaos of a madness? How will you find the answers you are looking for?

It starts with you, my darling.

I wish you would stop looking for someone or something to blame. Including yourself. I wish you would stop listening to others’ complaints and self-serving opinions. Even your own. For some people, they say, it is important to find something to help ground them. I don’t think that this is the case for you. If anything, you get so preoccupied with reality, and making the best of it, and as soon as possible, that it prevents you from seeing yourself and those around you, for who they are. Slow the sprint down to a jog. Allow yourself to think for yourself.

This time — take your time. Soak everything in. Dissect it. Swim in it. Divulge it. Remind yourself that the work will never be done. You, your relationships, your children, and your life are an unfinished masterpiece. Pondered from the right angle, your vulnerabilities can empower you all. You could set the tone. Not by ordering around, nor by submitting, but by listening, sometimes compromising. Yet never giving up.

You could be a pioneer.

Think about it, my dear.

How do you counsel and empower a friend, whose life has become quite entangled in a number of missteps? Where do you start? Where and how does she/he begin to instill positive change?

Written by Ogniana Hristova