15-05-2021-052358It-Ends-with-Us

I feel that was a very light punishment for what she endured.
When I decided I wanted to write this story, I first asked my mother
for permission. I told her I wanted to write it for women like her. I
also wanted to write it for all the people who didn’t quite understand
women like her.
I was one of those people.
The mother I know is not weak. She was not someone I could
envision forgiving a man for mistreating her on multiple occasions.
But while writing this book and getting into the mind-set of Lily, I
quickly realized that it’s not as black and white as it seems from the
outside.
On more than one occasion while writing this, I wanted to change
the plotline. I didn’t want Ryle to be who he was going to be because I
had fallen in love with him in those first several chapters, just as Lily
had fallen in love with him. Just as my mother fell in love with my
father.
The first incident between Ryle and Lily in the kitchen is what
happened the first time my father ever hit my mother. She was
cooking a casserole and he had been drinking. He pulled the
casserole out of the oven without using a pot holder. She thought it
was funny and she laughed. The next thing she knew, he had hit her
so hard she flew across the kitchen floor.
She chose to forgive him for that one incident, because his apology
and regret were believable. Or at least believable enough that giving
him a second chance hurt less than leaving with a broken heart would
have.
Over time, the incidents that followed were similar to the first. My
father would repeatedly show remorse and promise to never do it
again. It finally got to a point where she knew his promises were
empty, but she was a mother of two daughters by then and had no
money to leave. And unlike Lily, my mother didn’t have a lot of
support. There were no local women’s shelters. There was very little
government support back then. To leave meant risking not having a
roof over our heads, but to her it was better than the alternative.
My father passed away several years ago, when I was twenty-five
years old. He wasn’t the best father. He certainly wasn’t the best
husband. But thanks to my mother, I was able to have a very close