Top TextMom, please don’t be offended. It’s just that there will be people there, and I wouldn’t want to have to explain why my mother looks… well, so simple.”
Nina Sergeyevna glanced at the bag of buckwheat lying on the table. Outside the window, the rain rustled steadily—fine and persistent, the kind that only seemed to fall at the end of August.
“And one more thing,” Alina continued. “It would probably be better if you didn’t go near the microphone. And maybe don’t take part in the family photo session. And don’t sit at the main table either—Maxim’s parents and his colleagues will be there…”
Nina listened while staring at the stove. The pot of water had already begun to bubble.
“If you can,” Alina’s voice dropped slightly, “just stay somewhere in the background. So everything looks beautiful.”
Nina Sergeyevna remained silent.
For the first time, she wasn’t thinking about what she should say.
She was thinking about the fact that her daughter had not merely grown up and moved away.
Her daughter had started to feel embarrassed by the woman who had given birth to her and raised her.
Nina Sergeyevna did not consider herself unhappy.
That was important—she truly did not think of herself that way. She didn’t have to convince herself of it every morning or repeat it like a mantra.
She simply lived her life without asking unnecessary questions.
She knew the store on Lugovaya Street by heart: which shelf creaked, where the draft came through in winter, which regular customers had sore legs, and who needed her to bring their purchases to the checkout herself.
For her elderly neighbor, Klavdia Ivanovna, she would set aside laundry soap and washing powder because the woman often couldn’t make it to the store in time.
Sometimes Nina brought home unsold bread rolls if the manager allowed the staff to take the leftovers.
Her apartment was small, with two rooms and windows facing the courtyard.
In the kitchen stood jars of grains labeled in marker: “rice,” “buckwheat,” “millet.”
The old refrigerator hummed at night, but she had grown used to it, the way one gets used to a neighbor behind the wall.
There was only one good coat in her wardrobe—a gray herringbone one that she had already worn for five seasons.
“Nina, are you bringing home those buns again?” Tamara would laugh over the phone.
“Better than letting good food go to waste,” Nina would answer calmly.
Alina had been her late and only child.
Her father left when the girl turned six. He left quietly, without arguments or scandal. He simply stopped coming home.
Nina did not try to hold him back.
She took extra shifts, sold seedlings and cucumbers from her summer cottage at the market during the summer, and economized on herself so habitually that she barely noticed it anymore.
When Alina was accepted into a university in St. Petersburg, Nina sold a gold chain she had inherited from her mother and added the money she had saved from the cottage.
Without saying much, she packed her daughter’s belongings, put her on the train, and waved goodbye from the platform.
For the first three years, Alina called often.
She talked about her studies, her friends, and the city.
Then the calls became less frequent.
Eventually, they became rare.
Nina first saw Maxim during a video call.
He was neat, polite, and spoke with careful diction.
He said that he would definitely come to meet her in person.
But he never did.
There was always a business trip, renovations, or something else.
When Alina announced that she was getting married, Nina was genuinely delighted.
One hundred and twenty guests, a countryside restaurant, a photographer, fresh flowers—Nina listened and smiled.
That same week, she went to the market and chose a dress.
Dark blue and elegant.
She bought inexpensive shoes too and made an appointment with a hairdresser.
For several evenings, she tried the dress on in front of the mirror.
“You look good,” said her neighbor Zoya Pavlovna, who had stopped by to borrow some salt. “Wear those pearl earrings with it.”
Nina smiled.
She had been putting aside money from her salary for an envelope.
For her, it was a considerable amount.
She wanted the newlyweds to have enough for something important.
She wanted to look beautiful.
For her daughter.
Alina arrived on Friday around lunchtime.
That morning, Nina had baked a cabbage pie because she knew her daughter loved it.
She put the kettle on and took out their favorite cups with blue rims.
The first hour passed easily.
Alina showed her pictures of the wedding dress on her phone—lace, a long train—and talked about the restaurant and the florists who would decorate the hall.
“Beautiful,” Nina said, nodding. “Very beautiful.”
But then something changed.
Alina put down her cup and looked toward the window.
“Mom, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Go ahead.”
“You understand that the wedding is… well, a serious event. There will be people there who are accustomed to a certain standard.”
Nina listened silently, and with every sentence something inside her slowly tightened.
It turned out that she should not make a toast.
She should not approach the microphone.
She should not participate in the family photo session.
She should not sit at the main table.
She should not communicate “too actively” with Maxim’s relatives.
And preferably, she should leave early.
“Alina.” Nina said her name quietly. “Are you ashamed of me?”
Her daughter was silent for longer than necessary.
“Mom, it’s not about being ashamed. It’s just that you’re not used to that kind of society. You understand yourself—you have your life, and we have ours.”
Nina looked at her daughter.
At the unfamiliar haircut, the neat manicure, the pale blazer she had not even removed while sitting at the table.
A strange, well-mannered woman was sitting in front of her.
“Would you like to take some pie with you?” Nina asked.
“No, thank you. I’m dieting before the wedding.”
Alina left at three o’clock.
Nina washed the cups and wiped the table.
Then she opened the wardrobe and took out the blue dress.
She held it in her hands for a long time before carefully folding it and placing it into a bag.
At the bottom of the wardrobe, behind the winter sweaters, there was an old photograph.
Little Alina at her school graduation, and Nina beside her wearing that same gray coat.
Her daughter was looking directly into the camera and smiling.
“So now all of this is something that has to be hidden?”
Nina placed the photograph on the windowsill.
Tamara answered the phone after the second ring.
“Go on, tell me,” she said. “I can hear from your voice that something happened.”
Nina told her everything calmly, without tears.
Only toward the end did her voice grow slightly hoarse.
Tamara listened in silence, occasionally saying, “Wait,” or, “What do you mean?”
“Well, look,” she began cautiously. “A wedding is just one day. For your daughter’s sake, maybe you could…”
“Tamara.” Nina interrupted her gently but firmly. “Why should a mother have to sit separately? Why can’t she congratulate her own daughter? Why has the way I look suddenly become a problem?”
Tamara fell silent.
“You know,” she said slowly, “something similar happened to me once. Remember Lena’s company party about three years ago? She also asked me not to come. She said I ‘wouldn’t fit in.’ I laughed it off at the time and forgot about it. But now I think… God, that was humiliating.”
“Exactly.”
“Listen, Nina. I probably wouldn’t go either.”
She said it simply, without drama.
And perhaps that was why the words struck so precisely.
The next day, Nina ran into Valentina Petrovna outside the store.
She lived in the neighboring building and still remembered Alina as a schoolgirl.
“So, are you getting ready for the wedding?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” Nina replied.
Without quite knowing why, she told her everything.
Valentina Petrovna listened, adjusted the shopping bag hanging from her arm, and said plainly:
“You don’t have to prove that you’re worthy of being your own daughter’s mother.”
Nina walked home repeating that sentence to herself.
That evening, she called Alina.
“I’m not coming,” she said calmly.
“Mom, don’t be offended. I already explained…”
“Alina, you asked me to be invisible.” Nina paused for a second. “I’m not going to be invisible. I simply won’t come.”
There was silence on the other end.
Nina did not try to fill it.
Alina called again the next morning.
Then once more at lunchtime.
Then again in the evening.
“Mom, you misunderstood everything. That’s not what I meant.”
“I understood exactly what you said,” Nina replied evenly.
“You’re making everything about yourself!” Alina’s voice broke. “You want to ruin my wedding! Why can’t you just do what I ask for one day?”
Nina was silent for a moment.
Outside the window, the neighbor’s cat sat on the opposite windowsill, squinting in the sunlight.
An ordinary day.
An ordinary life.
“Alina,” she began quietly, “do you remember when I didn’t take a vacation for three years in a row? The manager offered to pay me instead, and I agreed because we needed to pay for your second year at university.”
“Mom, what does that have to do with…”
“Do you remember the winter when the Niva broke down? I walked to the store for two months so I wouldn’t have to spend money on the bus. I was saving because you wrote that you wanted to take language courses.”
Alina remained silent.
“Do you remember when I packed your things before you moved? You were in a hurry and nervous. I ironed every piece of your clothing and folded everything so it wouldn’t wrinkle. Then I sat beside the phone all night, waiting for you to write that you had arrived safely.”
There was silence on the line.
“I’m not asking for gratitude,” Nina said. “I just don’t want to be hidden away as though you should be ashamed that I’m your mother.”
“I just wanted the perfect wedding,” Alina said quietly, sounding suddenly helpless, almost like a child.
“A perfect wedding shouldn’t begin by making someone feel unwanted.”
Nina added nothing more.
An hour later, she took the envelope from the drawer and counted the money inside.
On it, she wrote:
“For your first purchase as a family. With love, Mom.”
She asked her neighbor Zoya Pavlovna to send it to St. Petersburg when she had the opportunity.
There was no other note.
On the day of the wedding, Nina woke at half past five, before her alarm, as she always did on anxious days.
For several minutes, she lay there staring at the ceiling.
Then she got up, walked into the hallway, and took the bag containing her shoes from the hook.
She put it away in the wardrobe.
Instead of going to the restaurant, she went to her summer cottage.
August had been dry, and the tomatoes needed watering.
She worked for a long time, methodically, one garden bed after another.
She cut dill, picked cucumbers, and repaired the loose door of an old cabinet in the shed.
The hinge had needed a new screw for a long time, but she had never gotten around to fixing it.
She sent Alina one short message:
“I wish you happiness. I won’t bother you today.”
Alina did not reply.
Judging from the photographs that appeared in the family group chat that evening, the wedding had been beautiful.
A white hall.
Fresh peonies.
Alina in a lace dress—a real bride.
Maxim was smiling.
Guests raised their glasses.
Nina looked through the photographs for a long time, without anger.
Her daughter was beautiful.
That was true.
And that truth did not hurt her.
Only one photograph made her pause longer than the others.
A group portrait—the groom, the bride, and Maxim’s parents.
Four people.
There was an empty space beside Alina.
It had simply happened that way in the photograph.
Later, Tamara told Nina that during the photo session the photographer had asked:
“Where is the bride’s mother?”
Alina had replied:
“She couldn’t come.”
Not that she was ill.
Not that she was delayed.
She simply “couldn’t come.”
A vague phrase that explained nothing and demanded nothing.
Nina thought that perhaps something inside her daughter had shifted at that very moment.
She went to bed early that evening with a book.
As she fell asleep, she thought that the tomatoes had grown especially well that year.
Alina arrived without calling first on Thursday, ten days after the wedding.
She was carrying a bag with a cake and a small box tied with a ribbon.
Nina opened the door and silently stepped aside.
Come in.
There was a basin of cherries in the kitchen.
A neighbor had brought them from her summer cottage, and Nina needed to sort through them.
Nina was wearing a housecoat with the sleeves rolled up.
A newspaper covered with cherry pits lay on the table.
Alina looked around.
The old refrigerator.
The jars of grain.
The photograph on the windowsill.
Everything was exactly as it had always been.
“Sit down,” Nina said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Alina sat.
For a long time, she stared at her hands.
“Mom. When the photographer asked where you were…” She hesitated. “I didn’t know what to say. I said you couldn’t come. And suddenly I realized how it sounded. That I was the one who had asked you…”
Nina silently took a pie out of the refrigerator and sliced it.
“I thought I wanted the perfect picture. But it turned out that I erased you from it.”
“Eat some pie,” Nina said. “It’s apple.”
Alina raised her eyes.
Nina did not hug her.
She did not cry or lecture her.
She simply placed the cups on the table.
Familiar movements she had performed thousands of times before.
They talked for a long time.
At first cautiously.
Then more naturally.
About the summer cottage.
About preserves.
About the fact that Maxim, as it turned out, knew how to repair faucets.
Nina listened and thought that forgiving someone did not mean forgetting.
But she was not going to hold on to resentment forever either.
It was simply that something had changed.
Quietly.
And forever.
