

If you're doing your imagining as I told you, you might feel a tremendous debt to your mother, and a very deep desire to ensure that you achieve something on par with the sacrifices she made for you. Your mother, having completed her mission, promptly dies. Petersburg, to the school where your father had graduated as a scientist, and as luck, or extreme, insane, undeniably Russian persistence, would have it, they accept you, and your saddle-worn butt, as a pupil. So together, you ride another 400 miles to St. There, on your behalf, she pleads earnestly and effectively, and they reject you. So, with your siblings out of the house and on their own, she packs up your belongings, straps them to a horse, and with you in tow, rides 1200 miles through the Ural Mountains on horseback to a university in Moscow. But your mom, she sees your potential she knows that you have a keen scientific mind and will not see that squandered. Your mom, to support the family, has re-opened an abandoned glassmaking factory in the small town where you live, largely because she wants to make enough money to send you to school someday. And your father, who was a professor but had gone blind, leaving your family of more than ten brothers and sisters destitute, has just died.
