Because of poverty, I wanted to give up my own child, until I received a letter from my late great-aunt who left me her entire inheritance – but with a strange condition… 

I was on my way to the hospital to give up the child. To be honest, I had always dreamed of having a baby, but at that moment we simply could not afford to raise one.

Poverty and endless debts, a rented apartment in a terrible neighborhood, surviving from paycheck to paycheck – and a lazy husband who constantly promised that he would soon find a job.

On the way there, I was thinking about all of this when I suddenly realized I had forgotten my documents at home. Without them, the procedure was impossible.

I turned the car around, not knowing that this small mistake would change my life forever.

When I returned home, I found a letter in front of the door. Strange – who even writes letters nowadays? Then I noticed the stamp of a law firm on the envelope.

Sender – Alice Schneider, my great-aunt whom I hadn’t seen in almost thirty years and had nearly forgotten about, since she had spent most of her life abroad.

I slowly opened the envelope and began to read.

It turned out that my great-aunt had passed away a month earlier and had left me all her possessions – an apartment in the city center, a country house, and all her savings.

But along with the official papers, there was also her personal letter. In it, she wrote that she knew about my situation, that she knew about my child. She said she wanted to help me – but she had set a very strange condition…  To be continued in the first comment 

She wanted my child, after birth, to carry her last name and the first name she had already chosen. What’s more – the child was never supposed to know that I was his mother.

For him, I was only meant to be “a relative who raised him.” In his mind, my late great-aunt was to remain the true mother.

She herself had never been able to build a family or have children – after her, there had to be an heir, her “own child through me.”

And it was precisely this child – not me – who was meant to inherit everything after my death.

I sat there with the letter in my hands, barely able to breathe. Two paths lay before me, both filled with pain.

To accept her conditions meant giving up the right to be called mother by my own child, voluntarily surrendering a part of myself, hiding the truth, living in constant lies.

For him, I would remain just a distant aunt, a stranger who cared for him, but without carrying the most sacred title – that of mother.

But refusing the inheritance also meant refusing the child, whom I had already decided not to bring into the world because poverty had extinguished all hope. Then he would never be born.

I would save myself from the pain of living a lie, but I would destroy a life that had already begun to grow inside me.

I stood in the yard with that letter in my hand, and my heart was torn apart. What should I choose?