I do not own Twilight.
Sorry I've been a bit MIA. This weekend has been pretty hectic with graduations and everything. I'm hoping to have a chance to write a bit later tonight, so hopefully I'll have a couple more updates for tonight and tomorrow.
"I don't understand where all of this is coming from."
My mother pulls a wet clump of hair away from my eye, pushing it back behind my shoulder. Charlie left five minutes ago to his own great relief. He's not good with the whole feelings-crying bit.
"I thought you understood this was best for you. I thought you were over him."
"Are you over dad?" I snap, the words spewing like molten lava. The dam is down; there's no point to concealing the way I've felt for years. I can tell by her sharp intake of breath that I've crossed a line.
"Your father died, Isabella. That's a bit different than being sent to jail."
I pull away from her semi-embrace, letting myself lean towards the far end of the table. I glare at her, wishing she would just leave already. If she's not going to say anything to make me feel better, I'd rather not speak to her at all.
"Exactly," I hiss. "Dad died. You had no choice but to move on." In the moment, the anger is too fresh, but I know I will be eternally grateful that Charlie is not around to hear this, because I know my mother loves him deeply, as I do.
"I had a choice. And it's harder than you'd think," I say.
She stands and leans on the table, her hands splayed out on the surface, her head tilted down. She stares at imaginary figures in the woodwork for what feels like an eternity.
"It would have been easier if you had tried harder," she says finally.
I shake my head and stare at the ceiling because she just doesn't get it. Things have always come easily to my mom, naturally. To her, the world is black and white. There's no crossing, no fluidity. Everything is all or nothing, win or fail. There's no "try harder next time" because if you have need a next time, you've already failed.
"What more could I have done, mom?" I demand, refusing to look anywhere but the ceiling. But she's still looking at the table, so it hardly matters anyway. "Do you know how hard it is to avoid someone who knows your entire life? Do you know how hard it was to not make contact all of those summers I came home from college?" I look down at the table now, too. "But I did it because I thought it would be better for him…better for me. Better for everyone."
I can see her head snapping to me, her eyes boring into the side of my head.
"Better for him?" she asks, confusion leaking through her tone.
"I don't understand, Bella," she says after a few seconds.
I sigh, not wanting to explain this again because I feel like it's beating a dead horse at this point. I've thought this to myself so often, spoken of this to Edward, to Alice, to Rosalie…
"He wasn't happy," I say shortly. "He put me above himself after his mom left."
"He controlled you," she says quickly.
I nod and sink lower into my chair, my cheek resting against the table. The surface is cold against my heated, wet skin.
"He was afraid I'd leave him like his mom," I say. It's exactly what he had said to me. "He didn't know how else to keep me other than to try and control what I do."
A sob chokes in my throat and I finally look up at my mom. Her eyes are deep and light in their coloring, her cheeks tinged with the slight frustration, exasperation. I imagine it's how I looked in that room with him. I imagine it's how I looked during our last year together. Frustrated. Exasperated. At a loss.
"I feel like everyone tries to control me," I whisper. "You with school, Edward with everything else. It's like I don't even know how to be myself, because I'm so used to looking out for everyone else. I'm so used to making sure whatever I'm doing isn't going to upset anyone else."
I think, maybe, I've gotten through to her a little because her brow furrows. It's a tell I've rarely seen, because she rarely admits to wrongdoing. In my childhood and teen years, she was the parent, I was the child. There was no middle ground, even when she was wrong.
She stares at me for another minute, watches the fresh tears form in my eyes before slumping into the dining room chair beside me, dropping her head in her hands.
"I'm such a terrible mother," she whispers more to herself than to me and I'm frozen with her words because I've never heard her speak like this before. There's a part of me that wants to pat her on the hand, tell her that she isn't a terrible mother, but there's another part, a bigger part that tells me to stay quiet. There's something about her vulnerability that makes me feel resilient.
She grips her hair and, just as I'm about to try to say something—anything—to release the tense moment, she glances over at me. There are tears in her eyes now. "Is that really how you feel?" she asks sadly. I'm at a loss, no longer following the conversation.
"That you don't know who you are," she explains when I don't answer.
Again, I say nothing because it's better than the truth at this point. My mom shakes her head, her normally styled hair awry. She looks how I feel.
"Bella," she whispers softly, turning to look at me. I watch cautiously, knowing I'm easily swayed. "It's my job as a mother to teach you who you are. It's my job to help you find out who you are, and if you're telling me I've failed in that…" she trails off, her eyes watery. In this moment, she looks ten years older than she is.
"It wasn't just you," I say slowly, eventually. "It was…everything. I went through a lot, mom." My words are short. Fractioned.
"I know, baby, I know," she says quietly, quickly like she's trying her hardest not to dispose of this fact, and then, "Did I make it worse?"
"What?" I ask, my voice off kilter, strangled.
"Everything between you and Edward," she says. "Just you in general, did I make it worse for you?"
I suck in a breath because what am I supposed to say? That everything was bad for me? That my life was so screwed up in the last few months of high school that I can't pinpoint exactly who to blame? That I'm becoming more and more afraid that I was the main culprit?
She sighs heavily, like the words are leaking from the depths of her. "When I apologized for declining your applications…I was being honest, Bella. It broke my heart to do what I did. It wasn't me. I was just…" she sighs again and it's a broken sound. "I was a heartbroken mother trying to keep her only child within reach. I was trying to keep you from the mistakes that I had made when I was your age."
"Like what?" I ask quietly. Her words stagger in my mind.
"Marrying before twenty," she says. "Staying with someone I wasn't sure I wanted to be with forever."
She smiles sadly at the shocked look on my face.
"Your dad was a great man, Bella, but I was settling with him." She laughs, a humorless sound. "It's kind of ridiculous to say you settled for a man when you were only nineteen, but it's the truth."
She shakes her head and looks towards the ceiling as though giving some sort of silent praise and I sit, staring at her, wide-eyed, discomforted. I don't know what to say, but I don't think she expects me to say anything.
"And I saw you and Edward going in the same direction and I just… I couldn't let that happen to you. Especially with how unhappy he made you towards the end." I look away quickly, not wanting to get back into that, but she continues, oblivious to my small reactions in her memory.
"So, I became what I never wanted to be—exactly what my mother was." She shakes her head, disgusted, looks at me incredulously, "When I was pregnant with you, I had promised myself I'd never be the way she was. Controlling, aggressive, thought she knew what was best for me. It's why I ran away with your father, I think."
Her eyes take on a strange gleam, like she's only just realizing the truth of her words as she speaks. "But you were a much better daughter than I had ever been. You put up with me. I suffocated you, but you never left."
She looks away from me and I'm left reeling from her heavy words, her lengthy explanations. In a sense, it makes sense, but I'm now terrified of treating any future children I have as she has dealt with me, and her mother, her.
"Edward and I are cut from the same cloth," she says suddenly. "We were both pulling you in opposite directions, but pulling no less. We thought we knew what was best for you, but…"
She glances at me, the look in her eyes nothing but sadly apologetic.
"We ruined you in the process," she says.