Consume or be consumed.
When I was born, Bella Cabot—fresh off just giving birth and still looking immaculate thanks to a full makeup and hair team—posed for pictures with me in the hospital room. The photo later appeared in The Boston Globe's Sunday lifestyle spread. The headline read:Miss Massachusetts Gives Birth to a Precious Baby Girl!
"This is my most cherished title—mommy," Bella cooed to me, making sure that I was covering her still protruding belly. Making sure that her head was tiltedjust soto catch her good angle.
When the reporters were gone, she promptly shoved me into one of the nurses' arms.
My father was too busy to notice at this point, smoking cigars with old friends who congratulated him on the birth of his girl, but then joked that the next time they hoped he would finally get his boy,a true heir.
Even on the day of my birth, I couldn't help but disappointthem.
Unfortunately, my mother underestimated how awful childbirth is. She swore she would never do it again. She had done her duty. She had tied herself irrevocably to my father and was done pretending she wanted to be with him. She was a success, and now she could focus on becoming immortal through me.
"You are my grand prize, Elise," my mother would coo to me when I was a child, and I would sit in it, basking in those tender, loving words, binging on them like I was starving. Well, I was.
The only warmth I would ever find in my life was through a series of revolving door au pairs—it's how I learned to speak Spanish, Italian, and German.
I received attention, gifts, and compliments about my looks and how sweet I was from my parents' circle, while they smiled proudly. My father would lovingly brush my blonde curls with his hand. My mother would drone on about how I was the light of their life. I would smile on cue, and my mother would pinch my elbow when it would slip. I had one perpetual bruise there for months at seven years old.
When I was two years old, that's when my mother's friends started asking her when she was going to put me in my first pageant.
That was the green light, and into the land of pageantry I went.
And Idominated.
From the time I was two to sixteen, I had accumulated fifty-four crowns from pageants. Our house has a room just for them—glass cases, velvet shelves, spotlights trained on every rhinestone and trophy and winning gown. I would find my mother in there, gazing at them sometimes, a particular look inher eye that always unsettled me. It looked like jealousy, but the energy felt like a slow boil. Anger. Rage.
When I saw her like that, I'd back away silently and lock myself in the gym downstairs, sprinting on the treadmill until I threw up.
She demanded perfection from me and always gave me words of encouragement.
"Don't slouch, Elise, it shows the pooch in your stomach."
"For God's sake, smile, Elise, you look dead inside!"
"I could've gone all the way if I'd had half the chances you do."
"I made you into something worth looking at. Don't forget that."
She demanded perfection from me because sheknewI could deliver. I loved having her as my mother, and I was the envy of my classmates at my private school. My friends were daughters of powerful men and women, but they would always comment on howelegantmy mother was, howbeautiful, howpoised, and how they wanted to be just like her when they grew up. I just sat there, smug, because she wasmymother. I had her DNA.
If anyone would be like her when they grew up,it would be me.
So, I trained harder in the gym and in dance class. I ate less and less, I perfected my makeup and hair routine, I shaved my entire body every single day, I studied and studied so I could answer the judge's questions to perfection, telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.
I molded myself into dazzling perfection for my mother, surviving on a thousand calories and any free compliment my mother would throw me. I would be perfect, better than she had ever been. I would make her proud. She would tell me she was proud of me. She would.
I didn't even realize the resentment, the hatred, had started there, like a small seed you didn't even have to tend to, and it stillbloomed uncontrollably anyway.
My father, on the other hand, was growing more and more miserable each day.
When I was a child, I remember him being happy, playing with me, and giving me gifts. I can remember holidays and vacations, and him carrying me in his arms and telling me that he loved me.
Then I would be taken from his arms by my mother, placed with the au pair, my dance teacher, or a trainer, and told to go practice. My father never fought against this, never raised a single word of defense against my mother for me.
I remember snooping in his home office, as most children do when they're told not to, and opening a drawer in his desk. He had pictures—hundreds of them—of this pretty redhead. Pale skin, bright green eyes, freckles across her nose and cheeks, and a glowing smile.
Some photos were of her alone—on a beach in a sundress, grinning beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat. Standing in front of a tall, glimmering Christmas tree. Kneeling in a lush garden, dirt on her knees, smiling up at the camera like whoever was behind it meant the world to her.
