Taisiia and Ulyana had a plan to deliver surrogate babies, and use the money to build new lives for their own families. Then the war came.
In the early hours of the 21st day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Taisiia Zyma gripped the edges of her hospital bed in Lviv, her pink gel nails digging into her palms. She is blond and blue-eyed, and her dark, tattooed eyebrows were knit together in concentration and pain. With a black T-shirt and colorful blankets bunched around her, black plastic covering the windows behind her to hide the hospital’s lights, she heaved her way through her final moments of labor. Five nurses and a doctor encouraged her, told her to breathe, to keep pushing another person’s child into the world.
More than three hundred miles away, in Kyiv, the capital of her country, Russian troops were attacking harder and more ruthlessly each day. They hit a civilian apartment block while Taisiia was in labor, killing five residents. In the southern port city of Mariupol, hundreds of thousands of civilians were trapped, under siege by Russian forces, with limited food and water. Corpses—including those of children and babies—lay in the street and on the cold floor of a makeshift morgue in a hospital basement there. The city of Kharkiv was heavily damaged by the Russian army, and the city of Kherson occupied. As Taisiia pushed mightily, willing new life into the world, the lives of hundreds of children had already been lost.
Taisiia is a surrogate mother, one of an estimated 1,000 Ukrainian surrogates who were pregnant when Russia instigated the war. In the days leading up to her birth, Taisiia had thought often of the baby’s biological parents, whose sperm and egg made the fetus inside of her. They lived in the United States, a place she’d never seen. She’d thought of Emiliia, her own daughter, 8 years old now, tall and with her father’s dark eyes. Taisiia and Artem, her partner, had decided he would stay in their village of Pereschepyne, in Dnipropetrovsk, the region in central Ukraine where they live, with Emiliia while Taisiia traveled to Kyiv to birth the child she was being paid to carry.
All her plans—to return to Pereschepyne to fix up her family’s small home, to one day use the money from the surrogacy to move to Europe with Artem and Emiliia—were made before the war. And yet now, all she could hope was that the war wouldn’t creep so close to Dnipropetrovsk that Emiliia would see it.
It was ironic, she thought: Couples from all over the world have, for years, hired surrogate mothers in Ukraine because it’s one of the few countries that allow foreigners to do so. And yet now, with Russian troops closing in on the capital and many parts of the country under attack, Ukraine felt like the last place on earth in which anyone would want to have a child.
When would this baby be able to meet his parents?
The doctor’s voice, firm and growing louder, implored her to keep pushing. The nurses stood, their eyes intent over their face masks, ready. Taisiia pushed, drawing three breaths, every ounce of strength in her body focused on that baby boy. Her nails dug into her palms until she thought they might bleed.
A few nights before Russia invaded Ukraine, Dr. Halyna Strelko, the cofounder and lead reproduction specialist of the IVMed Family Clinic, where Taisiia carried out her surrogacy, attended a classical music concert in Kyiv. One of her son’s friend’s parents was in the orchestra, and after the performance, they gathered outside. Strelko had sent her 16-year-old son to England to live with her brother a few days prior, while her older son stayed in the western part of the country; he is of fighting age. Her friends chided her—there will never be a war, they said. They told her she was paranoid.
In the earliest hours of the following morning, Strelko heard an explosion. She called IVMed’s director of embryology laboratory, biologist Birol Aydin, who was already awake and on his way to the clinic. One intended family described him as an embryologist “like no other,” who spent six hours poring over their biological samples to find a single viable sperm cell. He’s also the kind of person who always has a backup plan. He couldn’t let anything happen to the 36,400 embryos stored in cryogenic containers in the clinic, and he knew what to do with them.
Strelko lived near the sites of explosions and was stuck in the standstill traffic of thousands trying to flee the city. At the clinic, Aydin stared in the morning light at the rows of nitrogen-filled cryogenic containers holding tens of thousands of embryos from all over the world. Each container weighs over 60 kilograms, nearly impossible for one person to lift. Plus, the clinic was next to a military building, and movement on the street was already being tightly monitored. Removing the tanks would be risky—they could be wrongly shot at by Ukrainian security forces, or the tanks could be damaged—but Aydin thought the Russians wouldn’t give up until they’d taken the capital. For weeks he had been preparing to escape, a go-bag ready by his front door.
Another embryologist arrived just before 8 a.m., and the two biologists, using strength neither knew they possessed, carried four cryogenic jars to his Volvo SUV, each containing up to 1,300 embryos. By the time Strelko arrived at 10 a.m., Aydin was already on his way to the Polish border.
Taisiia, who is 29, spoke with Artem on the phone nearly every day. She had grown up in Pereschepyne, the same village where they were raising Emiliia, more than 600 miles from Lviv; Taisiia’s childhood home was surrounded by fields, gardens, and small farms filled with cows, chickens, and pigs. She liked that she and Artem were raising Emiliia in the same village, but Taisiia dreamed of moving to the European Union.
For the time being, their home was safe, Artem told her on their calls. The bombing had not reached Dnipropetrovsk. Emiliia was continuing remote learning, and sometimes she would get on the phone with Taisiia for help with math homework.
Her whole life, Taisiia had made plans. We all make plans. The house we’re going to buy, the country we’re going to move to, the person we’re going to marry, the baby we’re going to have—or not. Surrogacy is a complicated plan, one that entangles the lives of three people absent other options, but it is a plan nonetheless. And it can be lucrative for the surrogate: Taisiia was to be paid 14,000 euros, or around $14,770, for carrying the baby—nearly four times the average per capita income in Ukraine. Once the decision is made, the clinic consulted, and the pregnancy begins, there is—barring tragedy—an expected outcome. A baby. A payment. A new life for both the parents and the surrogate mother.
Plans change, of course, and we, as humans, adapt. Pregnancies end or babies get sick. But few plan for a nuclear superpower to invade its neighbor in the midst of a pregnancy involving people on opposite sides of the world. How, as a surrogate mother, do you navigate the birth of another family’s baby amid war?
How do you adapt to that?
Taisiia was raised by her grandmother and never had a deep connection with her mother. Maybe because of that, she lives for her own daughter. Whenever she talks about Emiliia, Taisiia pulls up pictures on her phone: Emiliia in the snow; Emiliia smiling in a sundress; Emiliia, Artem, and Taisiia at a skating rink. Their little family is her whole world, and in her glances—at her phone, after she hangs up a video call, or sadly down at her hands when talking about her—she betrays the pain of being separated from them. Leaving Emiliia to come to Kyiv for her third trimester—a contractual obligation of surrogacy, war or not—was one of the hardest things she has ever done.
The thing is, she became a surrogate for them. For Emiliia and Artem—and herself. Taisiia decided to carry other people’s children not only to help other people create families but also to build a better life for her own. Just as she had left Pereschepyne when Emiliia was 3 to work in a factory in Poland to earn money for her family, so, too, would she be away from them for the last three months of her surrogate pregnancy to earn enough money to better their lives. But as she sat in the sterile hospital room nearly a thousand miles from her daughter, she knew her plans had been catastrophically disrupted.
In Ukraine, surrogacy is an industry. Like other industries, it is governed by rules and regulations. Surrogacy was legalized in Ukraine in 2002, codified in the country’s legal Family Code. Unlike in most of the world, the biological parents of an embryo implanted in a surrogate are recognized from “transfer,” or implantation, as parents—if and only if they are heterosexually married. Gay and unmarried parents are banned from surrogacy in Ukraine.
The industry was further regulated by Order 787, issued by the Ministry of Health in September 2013. This outlined not only further qualifications, such as a documented failure to get pregnant and the necessity of a heterosexual marriage license, required to employ a surrogate, but also regulated and licensed the clinics that were allowed to carry out surrogacy procedures. Before this, the system for carrying out a surrogacy had been vague, almost ad hoc. Now there was a framework for establishing a regulated, potentially profitable private surrogacy clinic.
The private surrogacy industry in Ukraine boomed.
Halyna Strelko founded IVMed in Kyiv the year Order 787 was passed. In its first year of operation, IVMed made just a few dozen embryo transfers. In 2020, that number was up to 1,415. In 2021, they implanted 1,897 embryos in surrogate mothers, a record for the clinic. Even today, when looking at the PowerPoint she presented to her staffers on February 23, 2022, she gets emotional.
Normally, “intended parents”—parents who want to have a child via a surrogate—reach out to the agency via social media or Google. Order 787 stipulated that those eligible to work with a surrogacy clinic in Ukraine must have tried to have children by all other means, or must be physically unable to. “These are people who have lost hope. For many, this is their last chance,” Strelko says.
When an egg is fertilized, the clinic places it in a cryogenic storage container. From there, once a suitable surrogate is found—who, legally and per IVMed’s practice, is under 36, has at least one child already, and does not have substance-abuse disorders—the clinic transfers the embryo into the woman’s uterus using a catheter-like tube. If the first transfer does not take, they try again after the surrogate mother’s next menstrual cycle. Taisiia became pregnant shortly after her first transfer.
Once they’re pregnant, women working with IVMed follow the Ministry of Health instructions and get ultrasounds every month in most cases. They receive a monthly stipend for living expenses—350 euros (about $369), in Taisiia’s case, sent by the intended parents. If all goes well and the babies are healthy, mothers remain in their own homes until near the beginning of their third trimester. At that point, they move into apartments rented by the clinic in Kyiv, where they wait to give birth.
Taisiia moved into her apartment in early December 2021. The war began on February 24. The last time she saw her family was when they visited her around New Year’s Eve.
Intended parents generally fly to Kyiv shortly before the birth and are often in the room when their babies are born. Then, because they are there and because Ukrainian law recognizes intended parents, they sign the baby’s birth certificate. The surrogate mother relinquishes legal rights to the child, the parents take the baby home, and the surrogate returns to her own family.
It took Aydin more than 27 hours to drive the 340 miles to Lviv, just a few hours from the Polish border. He didn’t sleep. He then waited over 30 hours at the border near Przemysl, moving just three-quarters of a mile. As he and another biologist sat in his car, the nitrogen keeping the embryos alive was depleting. They decided to try another checkpoint, where they waited for another 22 hours. By the time they arrived at a Slovakian border checkpoint and were able to pass using a medical exemption, they had been traveling with little food or sleep for nearly three days. Between Aydin’s car and the car of another embryologist, eight of the clinic’s 25 barrels made it across the border on this trip. But this was only one of multiple trips; in the end, all 36,400 embryos from the clinic were saved.
For the next two weeks, Aydin, Strelko, and their team transported tens of thousands of embryos from Kyiv to Lviv, then from Lviv to Bratislava. Drives that normally would have taken half a day took multiple days and nights. Clinic staff and partners from cryogenic companies drove the embryos through the night, through a countrywide curfew, on roads that had been stripped of lights and street signs, an attempt to thwart Russian troop advancement. At one point, she thinks due to the stress of the war and the embryo evacuation, Strelko partially lost her eyesight.
The last batch of embryos was hurried out of the country, from Lviv to Bratislava, in the darkest hours of the night of March 13, less than three weeks into the war.
As Strelko and Aydin scrambled to evacuate embryos from the country, Taisiia sat alone in her prefab, clinic-paid apartment in northwest Kyiv. She didn’t hear sirens before the first missiles hit. She thought the explosions might be a fluke, or her imagination, and went back to sleep. But when she woke up again, she had dozens of messages from friends and family, checking if she was all right. She called Artem and Emiliia. Taisiia’s apartment was on the southwestern outskirts of the city. Explosions of at least two surface-to-air missiles were reported over the city, and Ukraine’s foreign minister said it was the largest attack on the city since Nazis attacked it in 1941. Taisiia called the clinic, and they told her to stay where she was.
Instead, Taisiia walked downstairs to the building’s car park, where people were sheltering. It was cold and damp and full of crying children and maskless adults. Shivering and nearly 40 weeks pregnant, she decided she was safer in her apartment. She trudged the four flights back upstairs, and there she stayed for a week, without leaving.
Taisiia had some of her things in the apartment, but it wasn’t her home. She kept busy on her phone and with her knitting. She looked out the window a lot, and the people on the ground below looked like ants. When the sirens went off, or when there was the sound of an explosion, they would scatter. She knit a fluffy green blanket for the unborn child and hoped to give it to his parents after his birth. The violence edged ever closer to where she sat.
On February 28, the Adonis maternity hospital, just 20 miles from Taisiia’s apartment, was hit by a missile. The women there—some pregnant, some with newborns—spent days sheltering in the damaged building and then escaped to a nearby kindergarten, with barely any food or water for themselves or the babies.
Taisiia realized she wanted to go home to her little house in Pereschepnye—to her daughter and her husband and her life and her little kitchen where she made thin pancakes filled with jam. The realization made her weep. For years, all she’d wanted was to leave Ukraine and go to the European Union for better opportunities for Emiliia. And yet now, when the countries she dreamed of living in were taking in Ukrainians visa-free, she would have given anything just to return to their small, beautiful life.
On March 1, a Viber message from the clinic popped up on Taisiia’s phone. Strelko’s husband, Sergey Moskalenko, would drive a group of surrogates from Kyiv, which was growing increasingly dangerous, to the relative safety of Lviv, in the west, the following day. The conflict was edging closer to the capital; a 65-kilometer-long Russian convoy was amassing on the outskirts of Kyiv, and a television tower had been struck in the center of the city. Attacks on civilian targets were increasing.
Taisiia hastily packed a backpack, leaving most of her things behind. She was told there would be seven women in the car and little room for luggage. She called her family, told them she was leaving Kyiv, and slept one last night alone.
The apartment she had been living in was near Kyiv’s Sikorsky International Airport and government facilities, and the road leading to it had been blocked for days. Taisiia, who was now just a week before her due date, walked down the four flights of stairs and over a mile to the outer edge of her neighborhood. There, she met Sergey and another surrogate, Ulyana Zryahintseva, 25, pregnant with twins from surrogate parents. Taisiia settled into the front seat next to Sergey; Ulyana and her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Anastasia, sat in the back. None of the other mothers showed up.
They left Kyiv at 10 a.m. and inched through hordes of cars snaking their way out of the city, thousands of people desperate to flee the war biting at their city’s edges. They saw evidence of the war everywhere, evidence Taisiia hadn’t been able to see from the window of her apartment: destroyed buildings, missile-hit apartment blocks, a fuel depot on fire. Taisiia and Ulyana tried to distract Anastasia from seeing the otherworldly destruction.
It took four hours to get out of the city. Sergey decided to drive south, avoiding the Kyiv-Zhytomyr highway, which at the time was the site of intense fighting. The route brought them through small towns and extended a normally six-hour drive to two days.
The scariest part was when it got dark. They drove the unmarked, unlit country roads for hours under a sliver of a new moon, until suddenly a Ukrainian checkpoint would appear, almost floating in the darkness. A hut, a barricade, a torch, a man with a gun.
They stayed quiet while the local forces checked their car at one checkpoint after another. Even after the 10 p.m. curfew, they kept on, steady. Anastasia was restless, screaming or babbling and squirming in the back seat.
Near midnight they arrived at Medzhybizh, a traditionally Jewish enclave where a family friend of Sergey’s parents had an apartment. The next morning, after breakfast, they kept driving. They arrived in Lviv at 3 p.m. on March 3.
Sergey showed Taisiia, Ulyana, and Anastasia to a small apartment they’d found through a friend of Strelko’s in Lviv. On the news they got through the messaging and social media app Telegram, they read that there were hundreds of thousands of other displaced Ukrainians in the city, too, people like them arriving from all across the country, desperate to escape the Russian assault. They were lucky to find a place to sleep. Soon, in the apartment with its small, sunlit kitchen, they became a temporary family and built a makeshift life, two pregnant women brought together by the children of others. They made pancakes with jam and sugar.
Taisiia’s due date came and passed in Lviv. She felt the baby moving up her abdomen, not down, the way it should. On March 12, as she sat in the kitchen waiting and drinking tea and chatting with Ulyana, the baby’s hands and feet were visible through her pink sweater, kicking and pushing—up, up, up. Taisiia laughed. “He knows what’s going on,” she said.
Ulyana didn’t have a strong relationship with her mother or her father—she was raised by a grandmother, who could be spiteful. She was happy now in the love Taisiia showed her and Anastasia. Taisiia was only four years older than her, but Ulyana soon came to see her as the mother she never had.
Taisiia cared for Anastasia, and even scolded her sometimes, while Ulyana cooked for them both: chicken, stews, and sometimes the women ordered desserts. In the morning, they woke up and stripped their couch beds, then set about the day together. Walking hand in hand with Anastasia, one pregnant woman on each side, they walked to the market, to the pharmacy, to the small playground near the apartment complex.
One morning, the three of them were standing in line at the pharmacy when a message on Viber—a messaging app that allows simultaneous translation—lit up Taisiia’s phone. It was from her baby’s intended parents. They would not be able to pick up the baby at birth, after all, it read. They didn’t have the proper visas, and embassies in Ukraine were closed. They would do their best to get their child as soon as possible, but they asked Taisiia to stay with the baby until they could. A change of plans.
She read the message again, in disbelief, and then, standing amid the vitamins and hair conditioner and rows of toothbrushes, she began to cry, hot tears she had been holding back for weeks. Ulyana enveloped her, as Anastasia puttered loudly around the store with a child-sized shopping cart.
Taisiia had never wanted anything in her life as badly as she wanted Emiliia at that moment. And never before had it been so uncertain when she would see her daughter next.
Doctors told Taisiia she needed to come to 1st City Clinical Maternity Hospital in Lviv on March 14, six days after her due date. She packed a small bag with clothes, food, perfume, and makeup. She also packed a plastic bag with sheets, a blanket, a mug, and cutlery—in Ukraine, this is required in public maternity hospitals.
Ulyana sat by, hands in her lap, her eyes following Taisiia’s movements. Anastasia ran around the apartment. When Taisiia was dressed and ready to leave, Ulyana began to cry. Taisiia held her close. The two women embraced for a few minutes, while Anastasia clung to Taisiia’s leg. When Taisiia walked down to the elevator, she could hear Anastasia screaming her name—“Tas-ya!”—from behind the door.
The doctors induced her. The first labor pains came as Taisiia was sitting alone in her maternity room, blankets from home crumpled around her. The pains weren’t bad at first, but her palms grew moist. She knew they would get worse.
Through nearly 16 hours of induced labor, Taisiia remained calm and quiet. Occasionally she spoke, reminiscing aloud on her birth of Emiliia—far worse, no epidural—and on her family. She talked about eating sushi after the baby was born. She laughed with the doctors and nurses as they came in every half hour to check the baby’s heartbeat and her labor’s progress. At one point, Emiliia called and Taisiia helped her with her homework. In the evening, as she tried to rest before the labor pains grew worse, her phone lit up. “Hello, dear,” she said, using a diminutive of Emiliia’s name. “Yes, I know, Daddy isn’t very good at math.” She laughed.
Just before 10 p.m., an air raid siren sounded. By now, Taisiia’s legs were numb from the epidural and she couldn’t stand or walk. Doctors brought her in a wheelchair to the basement of the hospital, where she and several other mothers continued going through labor as sirens wailed outside. Babies, too, were brought downstairs in the arms of nurses and held until the sirens stopped.
Near midnight, as Taisiia’s breathing grew labored and her chatter lessened, the doctors told her it was time. Her cervix was dilated to nearly 10 centimeters, her contractions coming every two to three minutes. Near 1 a.m., her doctor entered the room and stood over her in a green shirt and jeans. He told her to push—she did. His demeanor, breezy at first, grew more focused as the birth grew closer. He told Taisiia to push harder—she did.
With those breaths, she pushed the baby boy into the arms of a waiting doctor. He weighed seven pounds, three ounces, and he cried a healthy cry.
Taisiia only had time to put a finger to his cheek and hold him on her chest for a few seconds. She then lay on the bed next to him as nurses cleaned him and the doctor stitched closed her birthing wounds. Then they whisked him away. Absent his cries, the room was silent.
After four days in the hospital, Taisiia was discharged. Some surrogate mothers, including Taisiia’s roommate in the hospital, left the babies with medical staff. Taisiia complied with his parent’s requests to take him with her. She swaddled the boy, gathered her things, and walked down to the street, holding him close. She smiled slightly and climbed carefully into a taxi.
When she arrived back at the small apartment, her and Ulyana’s temporary home, two older women stood outside chatting. As Taisiia emerged from the taxi, they oohed and aahed over the newborn.
“Where are you from?” one asked.
“Dnipro,” Taisiia replied, hoping there wouldn’t be too many questions—surrogacy was a lot to explain—but also enjoying the grandmotherly attention.
“And you came to our city to have your baby!” the woman said.
Yes, said Taisiia, with a slight, amused smirk—if they only knew why she had had this baby in their city.
“A baby of war! Born in our city!”
Again, Taisiia stifled a smile. The women were so proud of her. Would they still be proud if she told them it wasn’t hers?
“What is his father’s name?” the woman asked. Taisiia paused.
“Artem,” she said, and walked up the stairs.
In the apartment, Ulyana and Anastasia were waiting with freshly cooked lentil soup. Taisiia carefully placed the baby in Ulyana’s arms, and she held him, resting him on her swollen belly. When he cried, they both cooed. Anastasia gently touched his arm, his face. “My baby,” she said.
Taisiia had always believed that whatever a child was born into—the uncertainty of daily life, the tricky logistics of surrogacy, the horror of war—was not of their doing, and they deserved to be cared for. For the first week of the baby’s life, Taisiia and Ulyana cared for him in tandem. When he cried, one of them would feed him or change his diaper while the other looked after Anastasia or took care of the house. Like a couple who’d just brought home a new baby, they settled into a quick routine as if by instinct, one always filling in where the other left off.
In the surrogacy industry, measures are taken to ensure that surrogate mothers do not bond with the children they birth. They are given medication to stop lactation, they are counseled before birth, and the time they spend with the baby after it is born is limited. The babies are supposed to immediately be given to their biological parents, to bond with them as one would a birth parent. This is essential, and everyone knows it going in.
Like so much else, this fragile system has been destroyed by the Russian invasion. Some babies have been left for weeks with nurses in clinics or hiding in basement bomb shelters. Others have been shuttled across the border by embassy staff and handed off to their biological parents at the Ukrainian border. More still have been left in the care of their surrogates, women like Taisiia, whom these babies will never know as their mothers.
When the baby was ready, Taisiia began taking him for daily walks outside. She took pictures of him, his face growing fuller each day. After each walk, she bottle-fed him and put him down for a nap on the balcony, in the fresh air. Every half hour or so, she would peek in, touch his cheek, and make sure he was okay. She sent his intended parents videos and photos as his face filled out, as he grew. Sometimes they spoke on video chat, or she would send them videos of him sleeping. They told her they would try their best to come as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, every day she spent in Lviv with the surrogate baby was another day the war inched closer to her own daughter, Emiliia. Daily, she contacted the clinic and her coordinator to find out when she could go home. And daily, she was told to wait. Finally, on April 5, after nearly a month with the newborn and over five months away from her own family, the baby’s intended parents were granted visas to come to Europe from the United States. On April 23, after weeks of paperwork gathering, Taisiia collected the baby’s few things—a pram provided by the clinic, a stuffed animal, and the blanket she’d knitted him—and was driven to the Polish border to give him to the two people who would raise him.
Ulyana’s contractions started long before her due date. She rushed to the maternity hospital and was told she needed to stay there until her due date—June 8—or until she gave birth. The doctors stopped the contractions, but a return to normal life amid war could trigger them again, they said.
Taisiia stayed in the apartment caring for both the baby and Anastasia—a woman just a few weeks past her second delivery and a girl just a few years old, bathing and feeding a surrogate baby, watching him grow by the day.
Plans had been changed and replaced with new plans, which were themselves replaced with new plans, and somehow it was working—and yet none of this was tenable. Taisiia was supposed to return to her own family after she gave the baby to his intended parents. But how could she leave Anastasia? She conferred with Ulyana, and then with Artem. Ulyana spoke with the baby’s intended family in Ireland and explained that she had been put on bed rest away from her daughter. After all they’d been through together, there seemed only one solution: Taisiia, who was now like a second mother to Anastasia, would stay with her while Ulyana was in the hospital. The intended parents would pay her for childcare. Ulyana would be allowed to come to the apartment—carefully—on weekends or when Taisiia couldn’t watch Anastasia. But this meant that Taisiia would not be going home to Dnipropetreovsk, to Emiliia, to Artem, as Russia’s eastern offensive inched slowly toward their home.
On April 21, Taisiia finally got the call: The parents were waiting in Poland at the Ukrainian border. She bundled the baby in the fluffy green blanket she had knit for him in Kyiv and tucked him in his pram. They were driven the 47 miles to a meeting point at the border, where Taisiia handed over her “little prince.” They posed for a photo—Taisiia and the boy’s parents, the baby in his pram—and they all smiled. Taisiia was at once saddened and relieved. The apartment would be so much quieter without the baby.
But she had something more exciting to look forward to. When she agreed to watch Anastasia, she spoke to Artem and her best friend, Lena. After months of pregnancy and weeks of being a mother to a baby who wasn’t hers to keep, she desperately needed Emiliia there with her—no more changes of plans, no more adapting, no more doing the best we can. Just Emiliia.
After weeks of discussions and plan making, it was decided: Lena would bring Emiliia from Pereschepyne to Lviv, where she would continue her schooling online. Once Ulyana gave birth, Taisiia and her daughter would return home to their village and to Artem, who stayed behind to work.
Taisiia and her daughter were reunited on Orthodox Easter, April 24, in the apartment on the outskirts of Lviv. Ulyana was home for a visit from the hospital, and she and Taisiia watched over the girls—Emiliia played dress-up, Anastasia, too, the two moms and their two girls rejoicing in simply being together. They cooked a simple dinner, and Emiliia did her homework. Anastasia, still too young for school, looked over her shoulder and said she wanted to learn, too. Two months into the war, after months of carrying the precious children of other people, Taisiia and Ulyana could simply sit, enjoying their own daughters and enjoying each other, safe for now, and together.
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