A Mother's Confession by Kelly Rimmer

Author:Kelly Rimmer [Rimmer, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78681-064-9
Publisher: Bookouture

Twenty-Three

Olivia

I’m still sitting in the chair in Natasha’s room, but reeling from the realisation that ‘my’ decision to forgo my postgrad course was actually David’s doing.

‘If you asked me to pinpoint the moment when things between us began to darken, that wouldn’t have been it,’ I say to her, shaking my head. ‘No, that decision felt like mine.’

‘He manipulated you, Olivia,’ Natasha surmises, and I pause. I’m racing through memories of that time, other decisions I made… that perhaps David made for me.

‘He kept showing up in the middle of the night and he’d be so affectionate and logical and if I tried to express any alternate point of view, we’d end up arguing and I’d feel so guilty about upsetting him.’

‘So you came back to Milton Falls.’

‘Yes. I mean, I got a job at the clinic here, but we lived at Bathurst at first because David didn’t want to commute.’

‘So you wore the entire time-burden of the commute because he wouldn’t?’

‘Well, I mean – he was so busy and—’ I break off, and now I’m scowling. Goddamnit. ‘Yes. I commuted because he wouldn’t.’

‘Did that feel unfair?’

‘Of course it didn’t. Isn’t that what good girlfriends do, Natasha?’ I ask, a little bitterly. ‘Aren’t good women supposed to be selfless? To stand behind their man?’

I thought of Ivy – the ultimate martyr, the dux of her school who abandoned all plans for a career and even further study the day she found out she was pregnant. Even my own mother – she maintained her career, but before she had Lulu and I, she’d been a nursing unit manager. Then she had kids, and she went back to working on the ward because she needed part-time work and that meant giving up the management role she’d so loved.

For me, femininity and sacrifice are so entwined I don’t even know how to separate them, even now. All I know is that I made a decision to follow David back here to the country because I believed that was what we needed – what he needed – and I didn’t spare a single thought to what I actually wanted for myself.

Natasha is silent, but I feel this ball of tension building inside of me as I think about those days. I thought I was happy, but I shouldn’t have even been here. I should have been doing that masters degree. I was going to do a bovine research project; I’d even planned my study area with a supervisor. Now I feel cheated, and ashamed.

How did I let him manipulate me? How did I even miss the fact that he was doing it? He bent me to his will as if I was nothing – a spineless shadow of a woman – and he made me feel like I was making a noble sacrifice in the process. How?

‘Trust, Olivia,’ Natasha murmurs, answering my unspoken question. ‘You trusted him. You didn’t see his need for control yet, so you thought he wanted the best for you and you trusted him to help you figure out what that was.

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