When I was about six years old, I went sledding and tied my sled to a parked car. My dad and grandma were sitting on a bench nearby, but I figured they wouldn’t notice what I was doing. And sure enough, they didn’t!
But when the car started up and pulled away, I was so terrified that I began screaming at the top of my lungs: “Help! Somebody help me, for Christ’s sake!” The words just sprang from somewhere deep in my subconscious, because that was what my granny used to say.
For years afterward, everyone in our courtyard would talk about the looks on my dad’s and grandma’s faces when they saw me whizzing past on my sled, tied to the back of a moving car, screaming at the top of my lungs and invoking the name of Christ.
Thank God, everyone quickly realized what was happening and managed to stop the car. Of course, I got a darn good spanking from my dad. My grandma, on the other hand, heaped praise on me: “Well done, grandson! Always call upon the name of Christ in times of trouble, and everything will be all right!”
Though, to tell the truth, while my dad was giving me that spanking, I was also screaming, “Save me, for Christ’s sake!” But that time, it didn’t help…
Not long ago, I wrote a story about how we lost our little Masha in Yeysk. Somehow, it inspired others to share their own childhood stories.
“I’m eight, and my name is, Don’t Know”
“My mom had seven kids, and I was the oldest,” recalls a reader named Anna. “One day, Mom took all seven of us to the market. To make things easier, we split into two groups; some of the kids went with Mom down one row of stalls, while the others came with me down another. The trouble was, our little sister Lena, who was about four at the time, somehow got left behind. Each of us must have assumed she was with the other group. Or maybe Lena simply decided to go her own way. She was always an independent little soul.
“Anyway, we all got home and sat down to eat. Suddenly someone asked, ‘Wait a minute, where’s Lena?’
“‘Anya! Quick, run back to the market!’
“So off I ran. When I got there, the vegetable sellers told me, ‘Oh yes, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker about a little girl who’d been found. They didn’t give a name, though. Hurry over to the market office!’
“I rushed over, and there was our Lena, perched on a chair, swinging her little legs and happily chatting away.
“‘We asked her how old she was,’ they told me. ‘She said she was eight. And when we asked her name, she said, ‘Don’t know.’”
That reminded me of something that happened at our church. Once, our priest asked my daughter Varvara, who was two at the time, what her name was. “Bus!” she announced confidently. For some reason, batiushka turned to me and said, “Pray, Mother, pray!”
And speaking of lost children…
A friend of mine, who also grew up in a large family—and a priest’s family, no less—once told me how her mother accidentally left her behind at the famous Detsky Mir (Children’s World) department store on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. She was only four years old. Her mother had told her to stand in line, then wandered off with the rest of the children, completely forgetting about her.
The little girl waited for a while, but when nobody came back for her, she decided to make her own way home. On the metro. All the way to the outskirts of Moscow.
How she managed to get through the fare gates, let alone find the right train going in the right direction, even she can’t explain to this day. But somehow, she made it home safe and sound. Everyone was absolutely stunned… Surely it was the power of her family’s unceasing prayers that protected her.
Photos in front of the portable toilets
“We lived in a ground-floor apartment,” another reader wrote. “Our door was practically always open, since everyone in the building had to pass it on their way to the elevator. And in the summer, when the kids were constantly running in and out, we didn’t even bother locking it. We just pulled it shut.
“Apparently, though, someone forgot even to do that. Because one day, our neighbors brought our baby back to us. The little one had spotted a crack in the door, crawled out of the apartment wearing nothing but a diaper, and headed straight for the elevator.”
Nobody ever brought my baby back to me, but I do remember the day our neighbors rang the doorbell and asked:
“Is that your baby crying out in the hallway?”
I can’t remember exactly which of my children was the youngest at the time, but it was probably Dunya,1 our third.
It was winter, and we’d just come back from a walk. Dunya had fallen asleep in her stroller, so I thought, “I’ll leave her sleeping by the elevator for a few more minutes while I help the older girls get undressed.”
So I went inside to help Varya and Sonya take off their winter clothes. Naturally, they immediately announced that they were starving. One thing led to another, and Dunya completely slipped my mind.
I warmed up some food, and we all sat down to lunch. I even remember thinking, “Ah, how lovely! So nice and quiet!”
And then came the neighbors.
I suppose I still hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that I had three children now, not two.
“I just remembered another story about a lost child,” wrote another reader. “And this one comes with a bit of history.
“It happened in early September 1997, when Moscow was celebrating its 850th anniversary. What a celebration that was!
“We were all at VDNKh, the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements. There were festivities everywhere, and the crowds were unbelievable! We’d come as one big group: our family, some relatives, and our dear, beloved guests from sunny, cheerful Odessa.
“And that was where, for the very first time in our lives, we saw—pardon the subject—portable toilets! They were so shiny, so clean, so bright blue, and so wonderfully unusual! We were so impressed that we even took pictures of ourselves posing in front of them. We still have those photos!
“Then, at some point, we realized that our youngest daughter was missing.
“Oh, no!
“The place was packed so tightly with people that there was hardly room to move. A cold fear began creeping into our hearts.
“Thank God, we found her quickly. She had wandered off toward the Stone Flower Fountain.
“‘Why did you go over there?’ we asked.
“‘Because it’s pretty there, and I can see the sky!’ she explained.”
What tore friendships apart then—and still does today
“Our sunny, cheerful Odessa…” I know the author of that comment was writing about something entirely different, but those words struck a chord deep in my heart. They brought back memories of a life that will never return. A time when everything still seemed right with the world. And once you start remembering, it’s hard to stop…
I also have a childhood story of my own from Ukraine.
By then, relations between our two countries had already taken a turn for the worse. It was 2015. Donbass was under bombardment, and the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) was in full swing. Some of our Ukrainian friends supported one side, others the opposite side. It was then that I came to understand, painfully and firsthand, what civil war really means. Not something you read about in history books, but something happening right before your eyes, tearing friends and families apart.
In 2014, I was pregnant with Tonia, our fourth child, and for the first time we didn’t make our usual trip to visit my mother-in-law in Energodar. We were frightened, and besides, nobody really knew what was going on. But in 2015, we decided to go.
To tell the truth, I was just as scared as I had been the year before. We’d heard all sorts of stories about Ukrainian customs officers and border guards, and about their Russian counterparts, too, who had supposedly gone into overdrive after the events on the Maidan, searching everything so thoroughly that they even pried open cans of food.
But our journey went surprisingly smoothly. When the border guards saw that I was a mother with several small children, neither side subjected us to any checks. They didn’t even look through our luggage. And so we arrived.
On the surface, life seemed much the same as before. And yet everything had changed. When we ran into old acquaintances on the street, I suddenly found myself listening to all their grievances about Crimea.
One day, I took my daughters to our beloved old playground. There was a children’s festival going on, and women wearing red-and-black2 wreaths were handing out anti-Russian leaflets.
An eight-year-old boy who joined my daughters on the slide casually told them that when he grew up, he wanted to join the army and kill Russians.
Thankfully, most people still seemed to have their heads on straight. And I was soon to see that for myself when we lost our little Evdokia. She was three years old at the time.
“Was that your little girl the patrol picked up?”
We were out for a walk in that same children’s park—Varya, little Dunya, one-year-old Tonya, and me. Sonya had stayed home with my mother-in-law, our Babushka Katya, and Masha wasn’t even on the horizon yet.
Varvara and Evdokia were playing on the playground, while Tonya was crawling on all fours toward the trampolines. She was a late walker—she didn’t take her first steps until she was eighteen months old—but boy, could she crawl! She could zip across just about any surface, even rough asphalt covered with sharp little stones. Nothing slowed her down.
It couldn’t have been more than seven minutes. But that was all it took for our three-year-old Evdokia to disappear without a trace
I asked Varya to keep an eye on Dunyasha and hurried after Antonina, who had already crawled off. I left her with some friends of mine who ran the trampolines, then went back to fetch the stroller and the older girls. I was gone for seven minutes at most. And in those seven minutes, our three-year-old Evdokia had vanished into thin air.
Varya was in tears and couldn’t explain what had happened. One moment, Dunya had been playing in the sandbox. The next, she was gone. Varvara and I ran frantically around the park, searching everywhere and calling Dunya’s name. By then, we were both sobbing.
And there was something that made the whole situation even more terrifying: a lake right beside the playground. I was already imagining the worst, ready to jump into the water and search the bottom for my little girl.
Just then, a couple came up to me. “Wait! Don’t jump in! Was your little girl wearing a striped dress?”
“Yes!”
“We handed her over to a military patrol.”
This was Ukraine in 2015, and military patrols were already making their rounds through the town.
“Where did they take her?”
“To the police station.”
I begged my friends at the trampolines to watch both Tonya and Varya, then took off running toward the police station. When I burst through the door, I was greeted by a cheerful bunch of drunks who’d been hauled in for disorderly conduct and were barely able to stand. “Oh, so you’re the mom whose kid got picked up by the patrol! Well, I’ll be! Some mother you are!” they chimed in, each eager to add his two cents.
There was just one problem: Dunya wasn’t there anymore.
Apparently, she’d had enough of sitting around with such unsavory company and had decided to show the patrolmen where she lived. So off they’d all gone together, only to get lost and eventually return to the station. By this point, my daughter had made fast friends with the police officers and the military patrolmen—who, incidentally, would salute us whenever we ran into them on the street afterward. She’d also told them absolutely everything about our family: who we were, what we did, and where we came from.
Including the fact that we were from Russia. That last detail, I thought at the time, was a bit much.
With political tensions running so high, I half expected them to say, “Aha! Russians! Well, that explains everything. See? That’s why we had the Maidan!”
But nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, they couldn’t have been kinder. They reassured me, calmed me down, and immediately brought my daughter over. They had just one question for her: “Sweetheart, is this your mommy?” They didn’t even ask to see my passport. They simply advised me not to lose her again and sent us on our way.
When I told Babushka Katya what had happened, the shock was so great that her foot went numb for several days. But apart from that, everything ended well
As it turned out, Dunya had lost sight of Varya and me and decided to go looking for us herself. Instead, she’d been spotted by that alert couple, who handed her over to the military patrol. And thank goodness they did!
Well, almost. When I told Babushka Katya the whole story, she was so shaken that her foot went numb for several days. But otherwise, everything turned out fine.
“A bullet-riddled dody slowly crumples to the ground”
Of course, stories about children who somehow survived their childhood aren’t limited to getting lost.
For instance, when an acquaintance of mine was little, a crow pecked her right in the forehead. There she was, walking along peacefully, minding her very important little-girl business. And there was the crow, presumably minding its own very important crow business. Then their paths crossed. The result? The girl suffered a concussion. The crow died.
I never had a concussion as a child, but I did have an extraordinary talent for getting myself into trouble, usually headfirst. Come to think of it, that pretty much sums up my approach to life ever since.
Take the scar above my right eye, for example. I was about five when we went to Gelendzhik for a seaside vacation. One day, I went for a walk with my mother and my grandmother Lipa. Yes, my maternal grandmother really did have the rather unusual name Olympias. At least, I’ve always thought it was unusual.
Anyway, Mom was holding one of my hands, and Grandma the other. I was bursting with happiness, skipping along between them, gazing up at the blue sky and the sunshine, smiling at passersby and looking forward to a bright and glorious future. Such a sweet, innocent little angel. La-la-la!
And then, without interrupting their conversation, Mom and Grandma decided to walk around opposite sides of a lamppost. Still holding both my hands…
One split eyebrow, blood everywhere, tears, wailing, and a bullet-riddled body slowly crumpling to the ground. Meanwhile, everyone around me—including certain close relatives, whom I shall be gracious enough not to name—couldn’t quite decide whether to laugh or cry. I’ve had a little dark mark above my eye ever since.
And that’s just the beginning. I could tell stories about my childhood mishaps all day long.
There was the time I was sitting at the table, peacefully eating lunch. Nothing unusual about that, of course. Except that on this particular day, my father decided to sneak up behind me and affectionately stroke my hair.
Not expecting anyone to touch me, I jumped—and plunged face-first into my bowl of hot chicken noodle soup. It wasn’t enough that several noodles were now dangling elegantly from my curly bangs. I also nearly choked to death. Let me tell you, inhaling hot chicken soup through your nose is an experience I wouldn’t recommend.
Then there was the time my hair caught fire.
Every summer, I used to visit my grandparents in Krasnodar. They had a gas stove, which, to a child from Moscow, seemed like a strange and fascinating contraption. Naturally, I wanted to investigate. So one day, I leaned in for a closer look. A moment later, I began wondering why my head was getting so hot—and where that delicious smell of something roasting was coming from. I was even more puzzled when Babushka Lipa suddenly started whacking me over the head with a towel, while Dedushka Tolya poured three liters of kombucha over me. The stuff came slithering down my face, complete with its slimy, jellyfish-like culture. Quite an unforgettable experience.
“The squad did not notice the loss of a fighter”
Interestingly enough, or, rather not interestingly, our Masha’s head has also once caught fire. Well, it was a small fire. Masha’s godmother has an oil lamp on her nightstand. I never saw it being lit before. It is most likely lit, as is typical, at the time of prayer. But this time around, it was burning. So, it was lit and that’s it. Who could have ever assumed that Masha would come up there and start praying and bowing down before it. Bowing down lower and lower, to the point of setting herself alight… Thank God, her godmother darted at her like a lioness. And everything was quickly and safely resolved. I don’t think my daughter even understood what happened.
What other things happened to me… Okay, so there was Greece, where my father was sent on a business trip and where my parents slammed the car door with my fingers locked inside. The lock snapped shut, I grew numb from pain, but my mom and dad continued their sweet chatter while walking away from me. “The squad did not notice the loss of a fighter.” I began to wriggle and jump in an attempt to pull my fingers free.
“Lena, what are you dancing there for?” My mom passingly wondered over her shoulder.
“Ooh…ow…”
“Alright, if you don’t want to come with us, just wait for us there,” she said. Mom couldn’t even imagine how much I wanted to come with them…
As soon as my parents finally realized what had happened, my mom’s blood pressure level spiked. And as a memory of that day, the phalanges on my three fingers have been slightly misshapen.
And here is my all-time favorite. I once did a “cannonball’ dive into a waterless pool. Well, I simply assumed there was water there. But everything could have ended quite tragically, if not for a man who was peacefully cleaning the pool’s floor right at that moment and never expected any trick from the universe. I landed right on top of him. Thank God, he acted quite stoically and only uttered a single short word, but quite wholeheartedly. I am not going to repeat it here.
“Now, Don’t You Worry!”
Believe it or not, as far as I can remember, I’ve never broken a bone in my life. Or at least that’s what I thought until recently.
After we all came down with the Hong Kong flu, I suddenly developed a terrible pain in my lower back. I had an X-ray, and lo and behold! There it was—a fracture of some bony projection or other. Don’t ask me which one, or when on earth I managed to break it. Apparently, it had healed on its own, though not quite the way it should have. And after the flu, something in that area must have become inflamed.
My Tonya, on the other hand, broke her collarbone falling out of bed.
Varya was playing a game of tag with a friend during her school’s aftercare program. It was one of those games where, once you catch someone, you have to cling to them. Well, her friend caught her and clung on so enthusiastically that Varya fell and broke her arm.
Then there was Sonya. One day, she was out skateboarding when my phone rang.
“Mom, now don’t you worry, but I fell, and I think I broke my finger.” When I took a look, it was obvious she’d broken two fingers. And when we got to the emergency room, we discovered she’d actually broken three.
“Now, don’t you worry”—the most terrifying words a mother can hear
“Now, don’t you worry.” Is there anything more terrifying for a mother to hear?
Thank God, Dunya hasn’t broken any bones yet. But one day, the director of her kindergarten called me and said, “Now, please, don’t you worry…” I nearly had a heart attack on the spot.
It turned out that another little girl had pushed Dunya, causing her to fall and gash her forehead just a millimeter from her temple. There had been screams, blood everywhere, and general pandemonium. The kindergarten director herself had rushed Dunya to the emergency room to have the wound stitched up. Another scar to remember her childhood by.
So yes, we’ve been through quite a lot over the years. The things I’ve seen while raising my five daughters…
A scream from the underworld
Our friends have plenty of stories like these, too. Take one friend of mine, for example. When she was little, her mother had to go away on a business trip. That morning, she dropped her daughter off at kindergarten, and the girl's father was supposed to pick her up that evening. He solemnly promised he would. And then promptly forgot. He didn’t remember until late that night, when his daughter appeared at the apartment door, accompanied by her kindergarten teacher.
He was a wonderful father, mind you. He just happened to be a Doctor of Philosophy. And now my friend’s own children seem determined to carry on the family tradition.
One of her daughters once decided to lick a metal swing in the middle of winter. Naturally, her tongue froze to it. Her grandmother—the very same one who had once gone away on that business trip—could think of no better solution than to pour hot tea from a thermos over the frozen tongue to free it.
Another daughter was having a wonderful time jumping off a hill into a snowdrift with her friends. But on one jump, she somehow flipped over in midair and landed headfirst in the snow. All that could be seen of her were two little felt boots sticking out of the snowdrift.
This same remarkable young lady once broke two toes in a fit of temper. She had stubbed her foot against a chair leg and, furious at the offending piece of furniture, decided to give it a good kick. The chair won.
And then there was the time her own father managed to lose her while pulling her home on a sled. He’d become so lost in thought that he didn't notice anything was wrong until he reached home and discovered that the sled was empty.
He raced back along his route and found his daughter lying just around the corner, peacefully gazing up at the clouds.
Come to think of it, her father had been quite an adventurous child himself. Once, while exploring the grounds around our church—which was still abandoned in those days—he managed to fall into a grave. Some passersby eventually pulled him out, though they were nearly frightened out of their wits when they heard a pitiful little voice crying out from somewhere beneath the earth.
What a blessing it is to have God, the Mother of God, the angels, and the saints! Without them, none of these children would have survived—even by sheer luck. And the grown-ups probably wouldn’t have either
Well, there you have it. I hardly know how to bring all these stories to a close.
Perhaps the best thing I can say is how blessed we are to have God, the Mother of God, the angels, and the saints watching over us. Without their protection, I doubt any of these children would have made it through childhood in one piece. Not even by sheer luck. And the adults probably wouldn't have survived either.
There’s something else I’d like to say, too. Strange as it may sound, all of this is perfectly normal.
Children have always gotten themselves into scrapes, and they always will. That doesn’t mean we’re bad parents or that we don’t care enough. It’s simply part of life. Our restless, curious little ones are busy discovering the world, and sometimes their discoveries turn out to be rather more exciting than anyone bargained for. Which is why we have prayer to fall back on.
And when some self-appointed Mother of the Year starts telling you that nothing of the sort has ever happened to her, that she’s never once lost sight of a child, and that she always has everything perfectly under control—don’t believe a word of it. And certainly don’t lose any sleep over it. She’s simply very good at talking nonsense with a straight face.
