⚠️ Content note: This story contains references to domestic abuse and trauma. Please take care while reading.
Zlata: A Lioness Protecting Her Cub
From an impulsive love story to nights of fear, Zlata shares how she rebuilt life with her daughter after leaving abuse.
Field notes
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5-8 mins
When you walk into Zlata’s home today, what you notice first isn’t silence, but movement. A little girl in a wide red hat gallops on a wooden rocking horse, socks flashing yellow against the floorboards. The mirror catches a blur of her grin. It feels playful, ordinary — and it sits on the far side of an extraordinary escape Zlata describes: a Christmas night, a bright kitchen light she says hurt her eyes, a sister-in-law with a knife raised and a voice raised higher, and a door that, according to Zlata, was not allowed to close.
This entry is part of my ongoing Motherhood series, where I listen to mothers at different stages and try to understand what their journeys reveal about strength, sacrifice, and the relationships that shape us.
The Boiling Water
Zlata’s path to London began with impulse: a couch-surfing connection, a whirlwind romance, pregnancy within weeks, marriage within months. What felt like a leap of faith soured when the balance shifted. “As soon as I got pregnant and couldn’t work, it changed,” she says. The criticism, the silence, the pressure. She was told she was “crazy,” “mental,” in need of medication.
A GP named it. Instead of prescribing pills, the doctor handed her a domestic-abuse helpline and mapped the pattern Zlata couldn’t yet see. Zlata explains it with a brutal image: the frog in cool water that never jumps as the heat rises.
Zlata also recounts an earlier incident two years before Christmas night. She alleges he grabbed her by the neck, pinned her against a wall and the sink, and refused to let go. It never became a police case at the time, but it shaped her fear later.
Christmas Night
By the time Margo was born, the abuse had escalated. He shouted in front of her. He told the toddler he wished she had a different mother. “She was two years old, standing in the kitchen saying, ‘Daddy, stop yelling at mommy.’ Can you imagine?”
Christmas 2020 broke it. His sister was staying in the house. Tensions rose. He threatened Zlata, blocked the door, refused to let her leave. She called the police. “They had to escort us out. Me and my daughter, on Christmas night, walking away with nothing. We stayed with friends in Reading for two months. Then I found this place, moved all my machines, started over.”
Now her home feels different. Calm. Low voices. No slammed doors. “I never raise my voice with her. Never touch her in anger. Fear is not parenting. There are other ways. Sometimes I put her in the corner when she really pushes it. She cries, then she comes back and hugs me. That’s it. I studied child psychology, I wanted to do this differently.”
Margo is proof. Once jumpy and withdrawn, she’s now loud, affectionate, bossy in the way only kids can be. “The other day she told me, ‘Mama, I need my personal space.’ She’s five! But she knows. She knows she can speak.”
Teeth of a Lioness
After leaving, the picture filled out. Zlata alleges financial control: she says he changed the locks even though she was on the lease, and that he pressured her to take a £10k COVID-relief loan under her company and transfer it to him. “I’m still repaying it,” she says.
There were safeguarding flags during early contact: Zlata says her daughter sometimes came home dirty and had vomited after visits; the child also disclosed shouting and being hit “on the butt.” Contact is now supervised at a centre, once a week. Zlata notes he pays for those sessions and has “been nicer” there; she’s pushing for a perpetrator programme as part of the court process.
She worked with a psychologist two to three times a week at first and took antidepressants for a few months. “I woke up in Reading to heavy snow — beautiful — and felt like I was about to die,” she says. “That’s how panic sits in the body.”
Life now has a steadier rhythm: work, nursery runs, bikes and birthdays. She’s in a new relationship her daughter loves. Maybe the Channel Islands, maybe Devon, maybe London — “anything is better than before,” she says. The court process continues (a fact-finding hearing is scheduled, with further dates likely), and she’s drafting a YouTube series to help others navigate domestic abuse in the UK, especially those on visas. “So many things I learned too late. I don’t want anyone else that unprepared.”
She looks at her child mid-jump, grinning in a blur of colour. “I wouldn’t do it again. Not like that. But I can’t regret it — because I have her.”
Zlata’s story is brutal and brave — a reminder that some mothers carry not only the weight of raising a child, but the weight of surviving and protecting them against impossible odds. Listening to her makes me think about my own mother differently: the quiet strength she carried, the choices she made, the battles I didn’t always see. This project is about that hidden resilience. Zlata’s voice makes it visible.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, support is available. In the UK, you can contact Refuge’s National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 (free, 24/7) or visit nationaldahelpline.org.uk. And if you’d like to share your own story as part of this journal, I’d love to hear from you. Just reach out — your voice matters.
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