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Rifca Stanescu gave birth to her daughter Maria when she was only 13! And now at 12, Maria is a mother to a 2-year-old boy.

Despite Rifca Stanescu‘s pleas for her daughter Maria to stay in school, the 11-year-old girl ran away, got married and got pregnant with her husband’s baby. That’s right, she was only 11! But the thing is, Rifca, a gypsy from Investi, Romania, was in a similar situation at age 13 when she became pregnant with Maria. History repeats itself.

At the age of 11, Rifca ran away with her now husband Ionel, who was only 13 at the time. The pair got married and concieved Maria, who is now a young mother herself to 2-year-old, Ion. “I am happy to be a grandmother but I wished something else for Maria – and something else for me.,” Rifca tells the The Sun. “Ion is a good boy – and he is already engaged to a girl aged 8. Boys are always good to have – they don’t have to suffer as much girls I think.’

Already engaged? Seems weird right, but in Romanian gypsy culture that’s normal. Rifca was promised to be married to someone else at the age of two, but once she met Ionel, she denied her family’s wishes and ran away with him. “I wanted to marry him, so I agreed, and of course after we had spent the night together then there was no way anyone could separate us,” Rifca explains.

In gypsy culture, virginity is greatly prized and girls marry young so that their new husbands are assured they are virgins. If a woman loses her virginity before marriage, the deal is off. After Maria’s birth, Ionel’s family paid Rifca’s father a dowry and so that everything could be settled.

So when Maria decided at the age of 11 to get married, Rifca couldn’t really do anything about it. “I did not try to stop my daughter getting married because this is the tradition,” she says, “it’s what happens.”

What do you think of all this, HollyMoms? Interesting, right?

–Leigh Blickley

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