#[ Honestly? Soph gets VERY emotional when she finally holds her child for the first time. Or they call her mum/mama. ]

[madamhatter]

With a life of misfortune and no destiny to be found, it is Sophie’s perception that anything that derives from her desires is selfish - and by extension - harmful. If she is to bring woe because of her decisions, it spreads and overtakes because of a mistake that’ll turn fatal. 

The idea that she harms people in any way shakes up Sophie. Nothing in her is geared towards violence or mindless bludgeoning. If anything, she recoils at the thought and makes her go cold, thinking that her own decisions can affect and ruin someone else. Her own childhood and how her parents treated her were to always be at her best, never step out of line, and always keep to what she had to do. 

Stepping out of line can lead to dire consequences - disappointment, strife, pain, humiliation, and more - and even worse, it can reach others. Why would a no one like her put someone through that? Why would she be so lowly to be so cruel to someone for her own gain? Her selfishness is poisonous. 

She knows she shouldn’t, but she still wants a life.

And that starts with a little dream snubbed out quickly: having a family.

It isn’t about motherhood. It is about wanting to belong so that she can make it and provide for others that aren’t controlled by someone else. She loves settling and having peace because what she tastes of ‘peace’ is not true peace; it is scrapping by and resigning to being secondary in life and feeling listless and unfulfilled that she’s forced to take as rewarding.

Something in her enjoys the thought of drooling and rowdy children pulling at her skirt, loud giggling and soft cooing sleeping against her shoulder, looking at such a fresh face and imagining a world for them. It is about giving them something that she cannot have. Salvaging hope in the face of adversity because she is genuinely optimistic about the world. 

Having a child - adopting, fostering, birthing - was something she always wanted to do. Being with or without a partner was not crucial in having a family. But there was that foreboding dread of what she could bring to a child. So hopeful, so bright, so smart, so uncontrolled, so vulnerable, all these thoughts swarmed her at any chance she even contemplated a ‘what-if’ she could never have. 

( Not to mention the lingering fear of repeating what parents have done before, of becoming how they were, of continuing a vicious cycle. The last person she ever wanted to be like was her father. She refuses to lie and gaslight a child through everything being well, grooming them to be exposed and understanding of horrific conditions, exploiting a too loving and too kind heart.) 

Carrying a child to full-term is already complicated. She has fertility issues, and her family already has a history of birth complications. Her own birth mother passed away after giving birth to Lettie some months after. Sophie isn’t that far off; given how she treats herself, she overstresses herself and may lose a potential child in the early weeks. It is challenging and not something she learns right away and learns with time. 

She finds herself too much of a risk to have that dream. She finds that there are more consequences to breaking from the made path. She is afraid of perpetuating all these terrors that, at her age, she has to come to understand and process. It is a disorienting and piercing wake-up call of trauma that unravels and breaks the foundation she was raised on. 

Oh, she simply wants to live. 

But she is afraid to live.