For a long time Mellie was a hard character to like for me, but then something happned that usually makes me change my mind about characters: her backstory was shown. It is a backstory which I am not too unfamiliar with, and I no longer perceiving her as a slightly deranged and cold character, but one with incredible depth, I feel so much for her character.
I don't think this piece does her character justice, but it's my take on what motivates her.
It all had to be worth it. His heavy body, his grunting, his attack, it all had to be worth it. Her silence, had to be worth it.
How could she let everything be in vain, her sacrifice of holding a child whom she did not know if he was the son or the brother of her husband, craddling that baby, holding him to her breast as he screamed to be fed? When she did not have her period on the day she usually got it, it felt as if the world shifted slightly, it was the moment where your chair tipped, and you were not sure if you were about to fall, or catch yourself.
If she had to go through that, why didn't she deserve more?
Her oldest son's birth was a nighmare birth, the one people don't talk about afterwards. It was not hard for her to imagine that the devil himself was trying to tear himself out of her uterus. A child uncoperative, turned the wrong way, who got stuck. He was pulled out of her, a screaming boy swollen with rage.
When Fitz held him she wondered if he was holding his brother, or his son, and when his father came to see the boy, she once again swallowed the scream at the back of her throat and smiled. There are sacrifices to be made, it needed to be worth it. Fitz was going to be president, she was going to be First Lady, and this type of scandal needed to be buried, buried deep.
Everytime Fitz touched her body, his fingers reaching the same spots that had been brushed that night, when he was on top of her, panic rose inside of her. With all of her she wanted to trash, she wanted to fight him, fight her husband off of her. Each part of her body was tainted, and with his hands he managed to uncover more dirt, leave a layer of sticky mud across her skin. One day it would show.
Smile Mellie, smile.
Her body was different, curved in a way it had not been before, as if constantly reminiscent of the child it had bore. It was easy, the excuse slipped over her lips, a lie well practiced in the mirror for days as Jerry Jr was gaurded over by a nanny. After giving birth her sexuality had been removed from her body, floated into space as the baby inside of her had been pulled out by force. No longer was her body a sensual being, it was a vessel, a body which had been violated by hospital staff in a way which made it no longer sacred.
It was easier than to admit the dirt, the sin of her silence and the depth of betrayal.
A president, a family mad, could not have one child. For her sacrifice, for it to be worth it, she prayed that Fitz could start to erase the traces that had been left of her body, draw over them, repaint them into something pretty.
A child, a daughter, most definitely his and someone to be guarded from her grandfather. Someone innocent.
It all had to be worth it. Fitz felt like a ghost of his father, a constant prescence in the bed next to her. Each passing day she vowed herself to be happier, to fight against the memory and to overcome it. Then her son would walk into the room, he would open his mouth, he would be there as a reminder, and all she could do was smile.
Smile Mellie, smile.
Every cell in her body vibrated with the need to have a purpose, for her suffering to have had a purpose. There had to be a reason why things happened, and if there was not a reason then she needed to create one. Fitz loosing the election was one of those events which would mean that it had all happened for nothing, her pain, her lies would have been poured out of her mouth for nothing. The way Fitz looked at her, as if she was an alien which had taken over her own body, it would have been for nothing.
Marrying Fitz, starting a family with him, it would have been for nothing.
It was easy, agreeing to the rigging, the logistics of it were simple enough. If she had given up her life for him, he needed to reach the goal they had set. He needed to win.
When Fitz could decide to ruin it, when his irresponsible, reckless and juvenile love affair with Olivia Pope shook the very ground on which she walked on, threathened to leave her life in ruins after everything that she had done for this man. She gave up her right to sleep well at night for him, and he looked at her as if she was Satan incarnated, and she could not understand what karma she had because all of these things could not be what she deserved. Her humanity felt like shatters across the ground, there was no piecing them together again, each time she thought they were all collected, they shattered all over again.
What she knew is that she deserved better, but she had given that up for him, and as he found out she expected the walls to crumble against her. Every cell of her screamed, trashed within her in a final uproar despairing that it should have been worth it. When he accepted it, when he stood by her, she wondered when this dream would collapse, how she could have come to this end of the nightmare with some part of her still intact. She wondered how she had managed to keep standing when she for the first time felt as if she could remove the burden and walk as a free woman, no longer chained, no longer with skin soiled with the dirt that had been smeared against her insides fifteen years ago.
When her child she wondered if satan gave her turned out to be her gift from God she could barely breathe, could not feel anything but shame for how she had been unable to love him like he deserved. She vowed herself a do-over, a recomittment to their family, to her children. A life without Big Jim's ghost looming over them and haunting every potentially happy moment.
That, of course, was when her Jerry Jr, fifteen years old, died.
That is when the world crumbles. The last pieces of in the corner of the world which remained intact collapsed into itself, it tore itself loose from everything good, and fell like bricks.
Which was when Mellie decided that purpose was overrated, acheivments were abstract targets which would not be realised, never truly realised. What if she had decided that she did not want to be the governor and the president's wife? What if when Cyrus had looked at her and laid it out to her she had turned away. Jerry would have been born a pink baby boy, and she would have smiled at him. Jerry would have had a normal life, a life that he got to live until adulthood.
No, she concluded, it was not worth it. And no, she did not want to smile anymore.