My mother was then vice-president of a political party opposed to Serbia’s hardline president, Slobodan Milosevic, and I went along to the interview to keep her company. After further training in New York, I was destined to follow in the footsteps of my medic parents and specialise in gynaecology.Ī twist of fate set me on a new course when Brent interviewed my mother, Gordana Anicic, for CNN, where he worked as a top international correspondent. I was already fluent in English and had studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris. I’ll be honest, when I first met the boys in Beirut, where they were then living with Tess, I hadn’t a clue about parenting.Īged 26, I wasn’t long out of medical school in Belgrade, where I’d qualified as a doctor. And stepmothers have long had a bad reputation. A child’s mother has a rightfully sacred position, after all. Let me say here: I know only too well that being a step-parent is a tricky role. And in my mind, they have become as much my boys as they are Brent’s - a very important part of my life ever since I first met them in 1999 when they were young children, aged five and two.īut what mother wouldn’t want her ex-husband’s new wife to care profoundly for her stepchildren? Surely the alternative is far worse? What is true is, yes, I adore Henry and Matthew. None of this, needless to say, is accurate.
She said she feared I would try to steal them from her, that I somehow sought to replace her in their affections, and even said I’d rubbed my relationship with her sons in her face with incendiary text messages claiming they were ‘my boys’. Tess accused me of everything from giving Henry and Matthew terrible haircuts to outright negligence when caring for them. Pictured from left to right: Matthew, Henry, Jelena and Brent Sadler in Belgrade, Serbia in 2018 for Jelena's birthday In a piece written in these pages, one of my husband’s ex-wives and the mother of his two sons, Tess Stimson, 54, had launched yet another attack on us, this time targeting me for the ‘crime’ of being a stepmum - a badge I wear with pride. Just a week later, I was hit by an altogether different kind of blast. They had twice come to stay last year and, had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic, might well have been in Lebanon for a summer break instead of in the U.S., where they have lived for most of their lives. So when his two sons - Henry, 25, and Matthew, 23 - sent frantic messages and called to check if we were all right, I cried with relief that they weren’t in Beirut with us. My mother and I were catapulted into the living room from our terrace, clinging to our small dogs, as the 440lb sliding metal doors flew through the air, missing my husband Brent’s head by inches. In that millisecond, hundreds of thousands of people didn’t know if they would live or die.
Master a living boardgame where every stage of the adventure is drawn from a deck of legendary encounters chosen by you! Choose wisely - your opponent, the enigmatic Dealer, will pull no punches as he shapes you into the instrument of his revenge. Hand of Fate 2 is a dungeon crawler set in a world of dark fantasy.
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