Chapter 7 - Corinne Had Been Trying to Build a “Simpler” Family for Years
My mother’s explanation came slowly.
At first, she denied intention.
“It was an emergency.”
Then:
“Jonah is younger.”
Then:
“Maren has always been more capable.”
All of those explanations failed against the six-month-old evacuation plan.
Finally, in a family assessment, someone asked Corinne:
“When did you first begin thinking of Maren as separate from Bennett and Jonah?”
Mom started crying.
That was the first time the question was phrased correctly.
She talked about my biological father.
Evan.
How he left.
How humiliated she felt.
How hard those first years had been.
Then Bennett came along.
Stable.
Successful.
Wanted children.
Wanted what Corinne called “a normal family.”
When Jonah was born, Mom finally felt she had one.
She never said she stopped loving me.
I believe that part.
What she did was more complicated.
She started treating me like evidence of the life she wanted to forget.
Every time Bennett became frustrated with raising another man’s child, she asked me to be easier.
Every time he favored Jonah, she told herself biology naturally created a different bond.
Every time I noticed, she told me I was jealous.
Protecting her marriage became more important than protecting my place inside it.
She kept telling herself:
Maren is strong.
Maren understands.
Maren will be fine.
Eventually those sentences became permission.
Permission to give Jonah more.
Permission to give me less.
Until one night she slapped me beside a burning hallway and said out loud what the family had been practicing quietly for years:
May you like
“We can only choose one to save.”
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