Where We Begin

Every story needs a place to start, and ours starts in Kharkiv.

Tetiana and Eugene found each other there, but it was Montenegro — the sea air, the summer of 2007 — where they finally said the thing they'd both been carrying. They married soon after, and Eugene did something quietly extraordinary: he took Tetiana's children from her first marriage and made them, without hesitation or condition, his own. Not long after, Yasya arrived, and the family had its shape.

Nastia's teenage years were harder than most. Looking back now, it reads as the first quiet signal of neurodivergency — something it would take until she was thirty-two, in 2025, to finally name and understand. School was a struggle in ways no one had language for yet. University came easier, and she graduated with a degree in cultural studies, already more herself.

Then came Maidan, and the years after it grew colder and more uncertain one by one. Mom took work in Turkey. Dad took work in Poland. Tima left for Poland to study — seven years there before Canada eventually called him further west. Nastia, meanwhile, was chasing something else entirely: the elusive remote desk job she'd wanted for so long. COVID made the chase brutal. She got there in the end, but the win was short-lived — she burned out in 2022, the same year the family fled a bombed Kharkiv for Poland. She started therapy again, trying to put herself back together.

And then she met Shahin — already, by that point, a localization and translation freelancer in her own right, having built that path alone. She'd spent years with her attention fixed on the war, ever since Maidan, unable to look away. But something about the distance from Kharkiv's eastern edge, even with bombs somewhere over Poland too, let her breathe enough to let someone in.

There is a sadder thread in this story, and it deserves to be told honestly. When the invasion reached the family directly, three cats were lost in the chaos of one terrible day — windows shattered by a blast nearby, and Margadon and Ginger ran and never came back. Only Nora was found again, and she found a new home with someone else. Out of that loss came two quiet resolutions: replace the cat carriers that had vanished with everything else, and when the time came to adopt again, look first to Ukrainian-owned shelters and Ukrainian hands. Perlyna came home in 2022. Then Anfisa. Then Meowy, adopted together by Nastia and Shahin in 2023. Then Marek. Four cats, four small acts of rebuilding.

Nastia and Shahin got engaged in 2023, and it was during a trip to Egypt that they first let themselves imagine a child. That's how this particular gang of ours came together.

Every so often, the whole family returns to Janowice, near Tarnów — the first place in Poland that took them in for the long haul, not just as visitors passing through. It's become a tradition now, a countryside pause: a local winery, a jazz festival that shows up every year like an old friend, and a landscape that never fails to earn its reputation. The people there are warm in a way that stays with you.

And now, the family gang is waiting again — this time for someone new to arrive, and soon.

This blog is where we'll keep telling that story, one ordinary and extraordinary day at a time.

The photos: our countryside days in Janowice, Perlyna on the day she came home, Meowy's portrait painted by Nastia, Yasya's 18th birthday, and Nastia and Shahin at their favourite Japanese spot.