Chapter 11 - The Other Side of Beatrice
My mother had a reason.
Not a good enough one.
A real one.
When I was nine, my father died.
Heart attack.
Forty-two.
Sudden.
I remember very little of the year after.
Except my mother removing photographs.
At first I had forgotten that.
Miriam asked:
“How did your family handle grief?”
Then memory returned.
Our hallway photos changed.
My father’s coat disappeared.
His study became a guest room within six months.
No one mentioned him at dinner unless I did.
If I cried, Beatrice said:
“We remember him by living well.”
For years I thought that was strength.
It was her survival strategy.
Motion.
Order.
No shrine.
No chaos.
When Celia died, my mother applied the same system.
She told me later:
“You survived because I did not let death become the center of our house.”
Maybe I survived.
I also barely remembered my father’s voice.
I asked:
“Did anyone ask me if I wanted his pictures gone?”
“You were nine.”
“That is not an answer.”
She looked away.
Then:
“I could not breathe in that house.”
There.
My father’s belongings hurt her.
She removed them.
Then transformed her need into parenting philosophy.
Decades later:
Lowri crying near Celia’s photograph.
Beatrice saw little Alwyn.
And herself.
She decided:
Remove triggers.
Restore living.
Move forward.
Then Thomasin appeared.
A possible future.
My mother did not sit down and design:
Replace Celia.
She did something subtler.
She valued anything representing future over anything representing grief.
Thomasin benefited.
Celia disappeared.
Lowri noticed.
That was enough.
Then before Celia died?
Harder.
Why tell Lowri Thomasin might become her mother?
Beatrice cried when asked.
“I was terrified you would collapse.”
“I was alive.”
“You barely slept.”
“So?”
“Celia was dying. Lowri was three. I needed to know there would be women around her.”
“You had Erin.”
My mother’s jaw tightened.
“I didn’t trust Erin.”
“Why?”
“She was twenty-nine and unstable.”
“Unstable how?”
“She changed jobs twice.”
I laughed from disbelief.
Class judgment.
Control.
Then:
“So you selected Thomasin.”
“I thought she was dependable.”
“You were planning my next wife while mine was alive.”
“No.”
But the sentence landed because emotionally it was close.
Beatrice had planned a maternal role.
Not necessarily marriage.
Then when romance happened, it confirmed her imagined order.
She embraced it too quickly.
May you like
And Lowri paid.
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