I often think about how strangely life works: sometimes the most important things happen not when you are ready, but when you have no idea that this is it.
We met in 2010. Back then everything was simple and at the same time too complicated for us. Roman told me how he felt. But I could not return his feelings: there was already another choice, another story in my life, and I honestly stayed in it.
But some stories cannot end just like that.
Two years passed. And at some point, without loud twists or dramatic returns, we found ourselves together again.
There are people with whom you do not need to start over. With them, what was somehow interrupted simply continues.
Then came the wedding. Small and intimate, in June 2016, in our beloved Kolomenskoye park.
And then life began — far from a perfect picture. Two doctors in one family means schedules that rarely match. It means tiredness that does not always have time to turn into a conversation.
There were trips. We opened up the world to each other.
There were children.
And there were trials. Our son’s serious illness, when a family’s life shrinks to hospital corridors, waiting, and the realisation that your child might die any moment.
Two pregnancy losses before our Tasya arrived.
There were quarrels too, and we were on the verge of divorce. Very different times. There are trials after which people either part ways or become each other’s only steady place in the world.
Every time, we choose to be together. And every time, we put our family first.
I know what it is like to wait and not know. To believe and be afraid at the same time. To keep going when there are no guarantees inside.
And perhaps that is exactly why I feel so clearly the value of what we have now.
Our children. Their laughter.
My husband, the way he looks at me.
I do not think of our life as easy. It never was. But I know for sure: everything we went through did not break us. It brought us together.
And perhaps that is why I understand other women so well: much of what you are going through, I have lived through myself.
Victoria