I didn’t realize that I was crying until Dr. Rootham grabbed a tissue and held it out to me. The tears were the silent type, they trailed down my cheeks on their own accord. She encouraged me to go on with a gentlesmile.
“He wooed me with fancy words and rides on the back of his bike. I fell hard and fast for him. I didn’t question how he made his money, how he was able to stay home all the time and still afford his apartment and his bike, and when I finally did ask him—I believed him when he told me he lived off the inheritance his dad had lefthim.”
“Why do you think you so readily believedhim?”
“I should have known better, but at the time…it hadn’t seemed that farfetched to me because I had an inheritance. I had a slice of land on the lake that had belonged to my paternal grandfather that I was set to inherit on my 21stbirthday,” Ishrugged.
My paternal family had owned the majority of land around a small lake in the outskirts of Parry Sound for centuries. Heritage land, untouchable by the government. Apart from giving us life, the land was the only other good thing to have come from our father, and technically—it’d come from ourgrandfather.
I closed my eyes for a moment, knowing that the hard part was coming up soon. I just had to get through it, and then I could press it all back, deep down inside where itbelonged.
“Things with Richie were great at first, exciting even. He took me on all kinds of adventures on the back of his bike. The honeymoon stage of our relationship was short lived. I got pregnant a few weeks after we started seeing each other,” I said, looking past Dr. Rootham and out the large window behind her desk. Her view overlooked the eastern shore of the sound. I tried to detach from the story I wastelling.
“The pregnancy came as a shock to me. I’d thought we were being safe, we used condoms every single time, but condoms are effective 98% of the time. We must have landed in the 2%. I was too ashamed to tell my family, and I tried to keep it a secret. I had a falling out with my mom a week after I found out, and I used that as an excuse to move in with Richie. I figured it would be easier to hide the pregnancy until we had a solid game plan. I knew that then, I wouldn’t feel so ashamed ofmyself.”
“Why were you ashamed of yourself?” Dr. Rootham inquired gently, stirring me back to thepresent.
“Because I made the same mistake my mother did, I got pregnant young,” I shrugged, smiling without humour. “Richie didn’t want the baby, he wanted me to ‘take care of it’, but I couldn’t do that. I dropped out of high school and took a correspondence course to get my GED while I worked at the grocery store. I thought that Richie just needed time to adjust to the idea of fatherhood, that he’d love the baby as much as I did when he held it in hisarms.”
I drew in air slowly, trying to strengthen my resolve. Revisiting these memories was hard, so I usually tried to avoid thinking about the past. It was too painful, too jagged. That wasn’t to say that I had completely gotten over it—far from it. The scars of my past affected me even now, four years later. It seeped into my mornings, my afternoons, and any time I tried to get close to someoneromantically.
Granted, I hadn’t reallytriedto get close to anyone romantically. At least, not until TravisChanning.
Memories of the night that I’d spent with him two weeks ago washed over me, and I swallowed hard. I hadn’t been prepared for the heady rush of emotions being with Travis would pull out of me. His gentle touches had been a stark contrast to the type of touch I was usedto.
In that moment, he had made me want more, and that wasdangerous.
The fear I’d felt that fateful night in that hotel room propelled me to dive deeper into my personal bank of horrors. I had to sift through the complicated mess of emotions somehow, had to make sense of my feelings, and that’s what Dr. Rootham was therefor.
I couldn’t talk about this stuff to anyone else; my brothers definitely didn’t want to hear about my intimacy issues, and with Mom gone, I’d never felt so alone. This loneliness prompted me to talk more than I ever had in any session before, and I know my therapist was pleased with thischange.
“Richie lost his temper on occasion, but he’d mostly just rant and rave and break things. He’d always apologize afterwards, telling me that he didn’t know how to handle his anger and he didn’t mean it. I told myself he was just worried and stressed about the baby coming. Deep down, I knew that I shouldleave.”
An ominous cloud had lingered over my head, but I was afraid. I was too stubborn to returnhome.
“Word had gotten back to my mom that I was pregnant, and I told her haughtily that we had everything sorted out and to not worry about us. I told her that Richie was ecstatic about the baby. I didn’t want to admit that we didn’t have anything figured out, that Richie hadn’t even started looking for a real job, or that he resented the baby and me…” I swallowed, trailing off as I lost all myconfidence.
“Why did you lie to yourmother?”
“I was angry with her,” I admitted, tears falling freely down my face now. “I didn’t want to admit that I was just like her—too much of a coward to leave someone who was hurting me.” I felt guilty for those feelings now that she was gone forgood.
Dr. Rootham leaned forward, catching my eyes with her warm brown ones. “You were not a coward, Becky. You were sixteen andscared.”
I drew in a shaky breath, nodding. I didn’t believe her, not really. Fear and age weren’t good enough excuses for me. I couldn’t look at her while I spoke, so I stared back out at the sound, watching the waves and the boats in the lake her officeoverlooked.
“The abuse didn’t start until I was in my third trimester. There were signs before then, the resentment and the anger, but I ignored them because I was afraid to admit what they meant. Then he started calling me fat, telling me I was going to be a horrible mother. That’s also when I noticed the drugs—streaks of cocaine on the coffee table, the shady people I would find hanging out with him in the apartment when I returned home from my shift at the grocery store. I discovered that Richiedidn’thave an inheritance at all; he scammed the welfare system and solddrugs.”
“We started fighting more, with me trying to tell him to stop doing and selling drugs and stop inviting those kinds of people into our home. He’d tell me “this is my home, not yours. You’re lucky I even let you stay here, you nagging bitch.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Sorry, doctor,” I sighed, flushing. I hated swearing, but sometimes I got caught up in the memories; locked withinthem.
“It’s alright,” Dr. Rootham smiled with understanding, still pleased as punch about all I was revealing. “Did you ever try to leave,Becky?”
“Yes. I tried to leave a few times. I’d pack my bags and go to leave and he’d grab my arm, tears streaking down his face, and beg me to stay. He told me he wanted to stop doing drugs. He told me that it wasn’t him when he was screaming and yelling, it was the cocaine. He said he needed my help, and that he wanted to be a part of the baby’s life. He promised to do better. I bought those lies two times. The third time, I told him nothing he could say would change mymind.”
“What happenedthen?”
“I went to leave, for good this time,” I answered, forcing myself to pull my eyes away from the picturesque window and the breathtaking autumn colours. This story was far too bleak for such beauty. I’d finally reached the point where crawling back to my mom was preferable to staying withhim.
I’d finally opened my eyes and realized that I had itgoodwith her and Braden, and I’d been punishing her for years for a situation that I’d found myself in; I was tethered to an abusiveuser.
