Selkie is unaware of that meeting. She knows Andi as “Miss Amanda’s Mom”, and the only name that Selkie is aware that Andi knows her as, is Fish-Face. https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie619/
Yeah, the extra pages are kind of broke until I can figure out why I can’t make an FTP account work. Basically I am trying to get the stuff uploaded en masse instead of one-by-one reuploading all the fanart and thumbnails and ancillary art and etc.
And Selkie tells Todd everything that just happened. And Todd puts together the pieces on his own. Amanda has made no secret that her REAL Mom came back to get her. If Selkie tells Todd that bit of information… yeah, I’ll just be down here… in my bunker.
If Selkie tells Todd that Amanda’s real mother came and got her, it should not matter much to him. He does not know that Andi is Amanda’s real mother. Heck, for all he knows, the teacher, or the principal’s secretary, or Lilian could be Amanda’s real mother.
Now, if she was to DESCRIBE Amanda’s real mother – with the pointed haircut and the colored bangs, that might get his attention. But just “Amanda’s real mother adopted her”?
Except I don’t think that Selkie actually KNOWS that Andi is Amanda’s real mom. When she got to the lunch table, the gang told her that Amanda was adopted. They didn’t say by who (unless you count Georgie’s theory), and Amanda just said ‘my mommy’ when talking about the shopping trip and how awesome she was. There was no mention I saw that implied Andi was any different from any other potential parent that walked through those doors.
I think there’s at least a half-decent chance that Todd saw Andi and recognized her, so he’ll ask Selkie what that was about, then she’ll tell him her nemesis just got a new mommy… I seriously doubt his first assumption with Andi having a kid is going to be ‘WTF THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!!!’ I think Todd might see Andi’s ‘sudden change of heart’ as a ploy to win him back, or some immature impulse to try to prove she was mature. There’s still a shitstorm coming, just not the one we were expecting.
It may be more clear once I get the colors properly completed (at least I hope it will be), but that’s not the pregnancy moment. Young Todd is holding an urn.
I don’t know how I missed this before. This really drives the point home exactly how elaborately hurtful this lie was. Urns aren’t cheap. To follow through on this she would have had to purchase an urn that cost her several hundred dollars to continue to perpetuate this lie. Small wonder Andi is terrified to confront Todd with the truth now.
Just a thought, has Andi been given permission to take Amanda from the school grounds. If this is the first time Andi has come to the school, that little detail might have been overlooked. If that is the case, the two of them might not get too far.
Her action in this scene is not wrong. She has not had time to process all of this, but the general assessment would be “if my child finds out the truth in this manner, it will most likely be really hard on her; there are better ways to do this, and I should take time to think about them rather than winging it and accepting whatever fallout there might be — especially since my child has already suffered enough trauma in her young life.”
Will this delayed meeting harm her child? Probably less than if she stuck around and let it happen.
Will this delayed meeting harm Todd? If he simply isn’t aware of any specifics, then likely not — since a total unawareness doesn’t get worse with an additional day or three. If he learns some of the specifics from Selkie, he might not put two and two together, so still not a problem. If he *does* put two and two together, they’ll most likely discuss this over the phone — and Todd will have more of a chance to broach the subject *with Selkie*, in private, in a sensitive manner based on how well he can predict her reactions by now.
So no, Andi fleeing does not prove that she is a bad person. And while an undignified exit may not be ideal, I do think it is the lesser of two evils at this point. Both children should benefit from handling this with a little more tact than “IS THAT MY DAUGHTER? YOU TOLD ME SHE WAS DEAD, ANDI! IT’S BEEN EIGHT YEARS, YOU ABSOLUTE (pictogram of adult female dog)!”
I sympathize with you on this, seriously. Andi has absolutely botched everything about this situation – with the recent exception of her decision to attempt to do the right thing by her daughter. Jury is still out on her motive for that.
Think for a moment, though, what will happen if this does “blow up in her face.” Todd would never let Amanda go back to the orphanage once he knew his daughter was still alive. It’s going to devastate him beyond words when he realizes the truth, but can you really see Selkie and Amanda living in the same house? Worse, unless I’m misremembering the layout of Todd’s apartment – sharing the same bedroom?
When this hits the fan, all four of them are getting heavily splattered.
There’s no way Andi can come back from this level of betrayal. Todd wanted the baby so badly, and she didn’t give him a choice at all in the end, she lied and broke his heart in one of the most profound ways it can be broken by telling him his daughter was dead. Then not coming clean when she knew he was looking to adopt… He’s going to be destroyed by guilt, especially when he finds out what happened to Amanda. Then he walked by her and adopted someone else. He loves Selkie to pieces, but this is going to be a massive punch to the gut. He’d probably be justified in suing for custody at this point on the grounds that Andi denied him his parental rights. AFAIK she would have had to lie to the hospital that either Todd had consented to the adoption or she didn’t know who the father was. I can only imagine the incredible whammy this is going to put on Amanda too, given her abandonment issues.
Andi has ONE saving grace here… She was convinced by her mother, who may or may not have filled her mind with ‘Todd didn’t show up, he probably ran away. even if he WAS excited by the idea, he’s not here NOW and therefore ran away. you can’t support this child on your own.’ and It Was Too Late, Andi had given Amanda Marie over to the adoption agency when Todd did show up with the reason why he wasn’t there the moment Amanda Marie was born… So she came up with a lie to soften the blow of never seeing his child, because as he was NOT the father of note, he has NO rights as far as the law is concerned.
She regretted this, and she WAS planning on telling him, eventually, especially since she might now feel like she’s rescued Amanda Marie from a bad situation, what with the results she’s now heard from the Lillian… But she can’t tell Todd like this, with Amanda around to hear the fallout if Todd goes on a roaring rampage over the deceit and the pain those actions visited upon him. She is going to strive to minimize pain, and that means getting the [wish i could put a comic-style censor image here] outta there, right now.
Seems like Andi didn’t have much a choice herself (though she made a huge mistake in hiding what really happened). We didn’t have a dialog for the flashback, but her mom seemed *really* pushy in the present. Unless you have given birth yourself, it is *very* hard to understand how super vulnerable a woman is when and right after she has a baby. All the more so if she was given any meds to speed up the labor or painkillers. It is very easy for a woman to be pressured and violated into doing things she isn’t comfortable with and/or are not in the best interest for the baby (speaking from experience). All the more so if the new mother is a child herself.
This is why there is a strong advocacy for birth rights right now, and all girls/women should have access to doulas.
i agree with the thought that her mom seemed to have a rather “selective” memory about what really happened eight years ago. and was probably VERY insistent that she give her up for adoption. I’ll bet that Andi was, i hesitate to say: “brainwashed”, but I’ll bet that she wasn’t given very much freedoms to do squat on her own, and that everything had to be approved by her mom… to say the least, a boyfriend and getting pregnant was NOT approved of, and her mom probably cracked the whip over this, and made her obey… (i have a post further on, that describes that a bit more…)
I’m still leaning very heavily towards the MOM being the “bad guy” in this plot-line and Andi just went with it, because”that’s what mom wants me to do” and it wasn’t until recently that she’s been out of her control for long enough that the mental conditioning is wearing off.
detective selkie was quite sharp to pick that up. yet another hit-the-fan branchpoint: selkie has heard the voice of “amanda’s moms”. andi will quite likely call todd to arrange a meeting. if he lets it go to voicemail as usual, selkie might well recognize the voice.
Andi thinks very fast on her feet make the right decisions for her daughter. I totally respect that. Hope she comes clean with Todd (and the girls) quickly before they all find out another way.
tl;dr – Andi’s inability to deal with conflict or confrontation led to her current situation: why can’t she deal with conflict?
I empathize with Andi, and her distress makes me sad. However, she undeniably dug her own grave: her main problem is that her coping strategy for the last nine years has been avoiding rather than dealing with conflict.
When Andi was pregnant, she did not want to be a mother, but Todd wanted to be a father. Andi avoided this conflict by being silent and suppressing her own desires, but she could no longer do so after giving birth. I think that she gave Amanda up for adoption because she was afraid of being a mother, and her fear was so strong that it overrode her desire to make Todd happy. However, Todd arrived (You were working Todd? Your girlfriend is in labor with your child: take some time off!) and Andi needed to tell him something: she made up a lie that deflected responsibility from herself and avoided conflict with Todd.
Afterwards, Andi felt guilty. However, relieving her feelings of guilt would require her to tell Todd the truth, which would create conflict between the two of them. Andi could not bring herself to initiate this confrontation: time passed, and her feelings of guilt slowly destroyed her relationship with Todd (among other potential but undisclosed interactions). Even now that they are broken up, Andi still cannot overcome her own fear of conflict to tell Todd the truth and put her guilt to rest. Now, however, the consequences for telling Todd about Amanda have grown VERY significant, for Andi, Todd, and their children.
If teenage Andi had just told Todd that she was afraid of being a mother, the conflict would have been far less serious. Why does Andi have a hard time dealing with conflict? Is it low self-esteem, fear of rejection or abandonment, or something else? (wall of text, sorry)
I know the internal conflict of “I should’ve done this a long time ago, but the longer it gets the more impossible it becomes so even though I should pick up the phone or send the email today (as the earliest I could possibly undo the situation) it is easier to just try to ignore it, maybe until it’s too late.”
Same reason things sit in my fridge until they mold, because it’s easier to throw away a moldy thing than to throw away a thing I might possibly eat. Don Aslett says you can tell a lot about someone by their fridge or the interior of their car.
Anyway. As far as Todd’s job, if he’s about to have a baby to care for and they haven’t gotten much in the way of savings, he’s going to want to have enough money to care for the kid (and the mom). If the boss made it a choice between staying there or getting fired, the boss would be an ass, but more importantly Todd would not choose to stand on principle because it would directly impact his ability to get money to care for his little family.
Kilyle has it right about the job vs work thing… females get “maternity leave” (no problems there) BUT, unless you have an unusually “nice” job, one that actually CARES about its employees, i have never heard of a MALE getting “Paternity leave”. what always happens, is that if a guy wants to be there AT the birth, then he has to specifically take a day off of work, be that a sick day, a vacation day, or just plain ol’ not bothering to show up, is irrelevant for this discussion, but he may not have been in a job that ALLOWED him sick days, or vacation days UNTIL he’s been with them for xyz number of days/weeks/months (different companies have different policies) and as stated, the boss may have been an ass as well, possibly to the point that if he DID try a no-call/no-show, then he would have been fired, thus he stayed there and kept his job.
ALSO, MAYBE her MOM brought her to the hospital EARLY in order to make SURE that he was not there. ie, OR maybe the hospital said to her the appointment was for oh, say, Monday at 10am, but she told Todd it was for Tuesday at 4pm thus that is when he told his boss he needed off. and instead while he was at work on Monday they were AT the hospital, and Todd somehow got told about it (mutual friend? Andi got him on the phone while mom was in the bathroom? who knows?), and he couldn’t get off because of the job/boss, etc… then of course there was the traffic jam, etc… by the time he gets there it’s all done and over with.
as for her taking off right NOW… i admit it’s a kinda dick move on her part, BUT, i also accept that she hasn’t gotten all her ducks in a row, either… delaying the reveal a day or two won’t be such a big thing compared to her coming clean about Amanda NOT BEING DEAD in the first place, and this small incident will soon be forgotten in the wake of such a disastrous scenario as we have brewing right here right now (and for the last EIGHT YEARS!)…
Family and Medical Leave Act, US Department of Labor, 1993. Gives parents up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a family member. Specifically provides for maternity/paternity leave (makes no distinction between father and/or mother). Used it myself in the birth of both of my children, who are both older than Selkie and Amanda.
and immediately after i hit “post comment”, of course my brain kicks out another idea… what if he WAS planning on being there, but she went into labor EARLY and had to be rushed to the hospital while he was out and couldn’t be contacted? it’d be NOBODIES fault at that point, well, nobody except the MOM for strong-arming her daughter into signing the adoption papers…
someone asked in another post about WHY Andi would go along with it… well, a very simple answer is that she was so used to OBEYING her mom, that there was literally no second thoughts about it until AFTER Todd got there (i know that people can fall into that type of mental state… same kind of stuff happened to me growing up until i got out on my own and into the real world… it wasn’t bad or abusive, or anything like that, but obedience and not asking questions was very much a deeply ingrained mental program in me) . I’ll ALSO bet that her mom was in the room the entire time that he was there, carefully “consoling her distraught daughter in these trying times” making sure she told him the lies SHE wanted him to hear, until he took the lies to heart and left for the night. by that time it was too late, the damage was done, and it took until now for Andi to break out of her brainwashed conditioning…
The day after my parents got married, my dad was at work when my grandma showed up at the house to take my mom in to get it annulled “now that you’ve gotten *that* out of your system.” And my mom ended up at the courthouse, in tears, and I still don’t have it straight in my head how she wasn’t strong-armed into a divorce. It’s God’s grace that I have the parents I have.
I still remember that same grandma, when I was a teen spending the summer at her house, chasing off some girls who went door-to-door selling things (like Girl Scouts but not), and I wanted to buy potpourri in my favorite scent (mulberry) with my own money that I had earned at my own job, but she physically prevented me from doing so, first by causing a fuss and then by following us out to the road as I went with them to try to complete the sale until I finally said something like “She’s really going to keep following us, isn’t she? Sorry” and, seething, watched them leave.
What the hell made her think she had the right to determine how I spent my hard-earned money? The same thing that made her try to override my mom’s decision about staying married, or my mom’s decision to nurse my brother when he was two years old (when we were briefly living at my grandma’s house)… I don’t recall what all else she did, but she clearly had that basic idea in her head that because she Knew what was Right, if people didn’t follow her advice she had the right to force them to do it anyway. That’s supervillain mindset right there — zero respect for personal volition.
Man, that sucks about your grandma. My grandmother was emotionally abusive, but nowhere near as bad. Her preferred tactic was trying to guilt people into or out of doing things, such as her attempts to convince my parents to raise me religiously (I think she always resented me for not being a devout churchgoer, and I couldn’t talk to her about it to the point that while I was a firm atheist for several years before she died, I was always scared to tell her and never did; frankly, the degree of her religion-related emotional abuse is one of the main reasons I have a major bible phobia and the only way anyone can manage to get me in a church is voting (stupid assigned polling places…)) or to talk me out of taking martial arts lessons. But what you and your mother went through seems so much worse…
Oh man… This has the potential to turn into an utterly hideous situation. What happens if Amanda puts two-and-two together and figures out that Todd is her father… Will she also find out that he doesn’t know she was his daughter? Or will she go off half-cocked like she always does?
I dunno if I missed something but the most likely explanation for Todd not being present at the birth is that he didn’t know it was happening. If nobody gave him a call to say Andi was giving birth how would he know? It’s not like most mothers go into labour on their due date. If nobody told him which hospital, or if Andi’s mother took her away somewhere he would have had to miss it. And what would he do if Andi asked him not to come in on the birthing because her mother was going to be there and the hospital had a policy of only one family member allowed in the delivery room? If Andi’s mom wanted her to give up the baby, she would probably have taken steps to isolate Andi from Todd, such as signing Andi up for prenatal classes with herself coming in as the birth coach.
Not to mention that yes, her mom might have bullied her into signing papers giving Amanda up BUT, and she had WEEKS if not months to change her mind. In most places people can assert their parental rights even after a competed adoption, never mind placing the child in an orphanage. After all she showed up eight years later and got Amanda back. Amanda wasn’t adopted until she was an older child.
How’ds you knows my names?; https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie164/
Selkie is unaware of that meeting. She knows Andi as “Miss Amanda’s Mom”, and the only name that Selkie is aware that Andi knows her as, is Fish-Face. https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie619/
Doesn’t really seem like it’d take a smart kid to figure out that Amanda probably mentioned Selkie by name at least once.
“Yeah, we have this weird fish girl in our class named Selkie.”
Cool:) Run, you chicken…
Also, Dave, your Ancillary Art page is kinda busted a bit.
Yeah, the extra pages are kind of broke until I can figure out why I can’t make an FTP account work. Basically I am trying to get the stuff uploaded en masse instead of one-by-one reuploading all the fanart and thumbnails and ancillary art and etc.
Right now I’m remembering Selkie’s “I should flee” moment in the toy store.
And after an archive dive I found it; https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie437/
I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed and I really wanted this to blow up. Just cause I enjoy drama.
Don’t worry, they’ll have to have the confrontation sooner or later, but the schoolyard is perhaps not the best place for it.
You’re right… The Aquarium is the PERFECT place… 😀
And Selkie tells Todd everything that just happened. And Todd puts together the pieces on his own. Amanda has made no secret that her REAL Mom came back to get her. If Selkie tells Todd that bit of information… yeah, I’ll just be down here… in my bunker.
I’ll wait up here – with the popcorn.
Don’t bother to pop it. The fallout from Todd should get the job done in record time. I’ll come back up when it’s done. 😉
If Selkie tells Todd that Amanda’s real mother came and got her, it should not matter much to him. He does not know that Andi is Amanda’s real mother. Heck, for all he knows, the teacher, or the principal’s secretary, or Lilian could be Amanda’s real mother.
Now, if she was to DESCRIBE Amanda’s real mother – with the pointed haircut and the colored bangs, that might get his attention. But just “Amanda’s real mother adopted her”?
True, but my assumption – since Selkie was calling to him – was that he was close enough to see the people standing there.
Except I don’t think that Selkie actually KNOWS that Andi is Amanda’s real mom. When she got to the lunch table, the gang told her that Amanda was adopted. They didn’t say by who (unless you count Georgie’s theory), and Amanda just said ‘my mommy’ when talking about the shopping trip and how awesome she was. There was no mention I saw that implied Andi was any different from any other potential parent that walked through those doors.
I think there’s at least a half-decent chance that Todd saw Andi and recognized her, so he’ll ask Selkie what that was about, then she’ll tell him her nemesis just got a new mommy… I seriously doubt his first assumption with Andi having a kid is going to be ‘WTF THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!!!’ I think Todd might see Andi’s ‘sudden change of heart’ as a ploy to win him back, or some immature impulse to try to prove she was mature. There’s still a shitstorm coming, just not the one we were expecting.
Or, even better, Shitstorm I, Shitstorm II, Shitstorm III, and Shitstorm: The Stormening.
Called it! XD
I like Andi’s memory of not being able to tell Todd she’s pregnant (which I assume is what’s going on in her “I don’t know” memory bubble).
It may be more clear once I get the colors properly completed (at least I hope it will be), but that’s not the pregnancy moment. Young Todd is holding an urn.
I thought that looked like an urn… but I wasn’t sure.
Ah, that makes sense as well, in a completely different way.
So wait if that’s an urn, supposedly for the baby’s ashes…WHAT’S IN IT?
Placenta ashes? Grandparent ashes? Cat/dog ashes?
I misread cat/dog as ‘catalogue ashes’. Deceive a loved one with genune mail-order ashes!
I don’t know how I missed this before. This really drives the point home exactly how elaborately hurtful this lie was. Urns aren’t cheap. To follow through on this she would have had to purchase an urn that cost her several hundred dollars to continue to perpetuate this lie. Small wonder Andi is terrified to confront Todd with the truth now.
Just a thought, has Andi been given permission to take Amanda from the school grounds. If this is the first time Andi has come to the school, that little detail might have been overlooked. If that is the case, the two of them might not get too far.
I’d be pretty damn shocked if the orphanage didn’t inform the school.
I’d figure that bit of bureaucracy got handled off-screen. It’s pretty boring.
Andi does have knowledge and consent of the school to take Amanda home.
Yes, but if somebody had dropped the ball, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Andi continues to prove she is just a bad person.
What kind of person keeps a child from its father? (Excluding the obvious abuse cases)
There is absolutely no excuse for her behavior, and I hope to hell it blows up in her face.
Her action in this scene is not wrong. She has not had time to process all of this, but the general assessment would be “if my child finds out the truth in this manner, it will most likely be really hard on her; there are better ways to do this, and I should take time to think about them rather than winging it and accepting whatever fallout there might be — especially since my child has already suffered enough trauma in her young life.”
Will this delayed meeting harm her child? Probably less than if she stuck around and let it happen.
Will this delayed meeting harm Todd? If he simply isn’t aware of any specifics, then likely not — since a total unawareness doesn’t get worse with an additional day or three. If he learns some of the specifics from Selkie, he might not put two and two together, so still not a problem. If he *does* put two and two together, they’ll most likely discuss this over the phone — and Todd will have more of a chance to broach the subject *with Selkie*, in private, in a sensitive manner based on how well he can predict her reactions by now.
So no, Andi fleeing does not prove that she is a bad person. And while an undignified exit may not be ideal, I do think it is the lesser of two evils at this point. Both children should benefit from handling this with a little more tact than “IS THAT MY DAUGHTER? YOU TOLD ME SHE WAS DEAD, ANDI! IT’S BEEN EIGHT YEARS, YOU ABSOLUTE (pictogram of adult female dog)!”
Except there’s nothing to suggest she’s leaving to protect Amanda and ALL the evidence to suggest she’s running simply because she’s afraid.
Face it, she’s a coward who hardly deserves to be a parent.
Haters be hatin’. 🙂
I sympathize with you on this, seriously. Andi has absolutely botched everything about this situation – with the recent exception of her decision to attempt to do the right thing by her daughter. Jury is still out on her motive for that.
Think for a moment, though, what will happen if this does “blow up in her face.” Todd would never let Amanda go back to the orphanage once he knew his daughter was still alive. It’s going to devastate him beyond words when he realizes the truth, but can you really see Selkie and Amanda living in the same house? Worse, unless I’m misremembering the layout of Todd’s apartment – sharing the same bedroom?
When this hits the fan, all four of them are getting heavily splattered.
There’s no way Andi can come back from this level of betrayal. Todd wanted the baby so badly, and she didn’t give him a choice at all in the end, she lied and broke his heart in one of the most profound ways it can be broken by telling him his daughter was dead. Then not coming clean when she knew he was looking to adopt… He’s going to be destroyed by guilt, especially when he finds out what happened to Amanda. Then he walked by her and adopted someone else. He loves Selkie to pieces, but this is going to be a massive punch to the gut. He’d probably be justified in suing for custody at this point on the grounds that Andi denied him his parental rights. AFAIK she would have had to lie to the hospital that either Todd had consented to the adoption or she didn’t know who the father was. I can only imagine the incredible whammy this is going to put on Amanda too, given her abandonment issues.
Andi has ONE saving grace here… She was convinced by her mother, who may or may not have filled her mind with ‘Todd didn’t show up, he probably ran away. even if he WAS excited by the idea, he’s not here NOW and therefore ran away. you can’t support this child on your own.’ and It Was Too Late, Andi had given Amanda Marie over to the adoption agency when Todd did show up with the reason why he wasn’t there the moment Amanda Marie was born… So she came up with a lie to soften the blow of never seeing his child, because as he was NOT the father of note, he has NO rights as far as the law is concerned.
She regretted this, and she WAS planning on telling him, eventually, especially since she might now feel like she’s rescued Amanda Marie from a bad situation, what with the results she’s now heard from the Lillian… But she can’t tell Todd like this, with Amanda around to hear the fallout if Todd goes on a roaring rampage over the deceit and the pain those actions visited upon him. She is going to strive to minimize pain, and that means getting the [wish i could put a comic-style censor image here] outta there, right now.
Except that’s not why she’s doing it. She’s doing it because she’s afraid. Amanda is not even a thought in her head. She’s a coward.
Seems like Andi didn’t have much a choice herself (though she made a huge mistake in hiding what really happened). We didn’t have a dialog for the flashback, but her mom seemed *really* pushy in the present. Unless you have given birth yourself, it is *very* hard to understand how super vulnerable a woman is when and right after she has a baby. All the more so if she was given any meds to speed up the labor or painkillers. It is very easy for a woman to be pressured and violated into doing things she isn’t comfortable with and/or are not in the best interest for the baby (speaking from experience). All the more so if the new mother is a child herself.
This is why there is a strong advocacy for birth rights right now, and all girls/women should have access to doulas.
I wish there were a littel upvote thingy on this site.
And a little typo-correction thingy.
i agree with the thought that her mom seemed to have a rather “selective” memory about what really happened eight years ago. and was probably VERY insistent that she give her up for adoption. I’ll bet that Andi was, i hesitate to say: “brainwashed”, but I’ll bet that she wasn’t given very much freedoms to do squat on her own, and that everything had to be approved by her mom… to say the least, a boyfriend and getting pregnant was NOT approved of, and her mom probably cracked the whip over this, and made her obey… (i have a post further on, that describes that a bit more…)
I’m still leaning very heavily towards the MOM being the “bad guy” in this plot-line and Andi just went with it, because”that’s what mom wants me to do” and it wasn’t until recently that she’s been out of her control for long enough that the mental conditioning is wearing off.
Yup. Called it.
*sigh* … On to the next round!
W-what’s in the urn?
I believe it was stated: fireplace ashes.
Thanks, Fellow Forumite.
Wow, that’s horrible…
detective selkie was quite sharp to pick that up. yet another hit-the-fan branchpoint: selkie has heard the voice of “amanda’s moms”. andi will quite likely call todd to arrange a meeting. if he lets it go to voicemail as usual, selkie might well recognize the voice.
Andi thinks very fast on her feet make the right decisions for her daughter. I totally respect that. Hope she comes clean with Todd (and the girls) quickly before they all find out another way.
He hasty retreat, of course, is dependent on Todd not seeing her in the schoolyard as he pulled up….
But that would spoil the surprise to him =p
Looks like we will have to wait bit longer for Todd to discover the truth.
Unless he saw Andi himself. Selkie is calling to him so he may be looking that way.
ALERT LEVEL 9001! INITIATE FULL PANIC MODE! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!
It begins…
tl;dr – Andi’s inability to deal with conflict or confrontation led to her current situation: why can’t she deal with conflict?
I empathize with Andi, and her distress makes me sad. However, she undeniably dug her own grave: her main problem is that her coping strategy for the last nine years has been avoiding rather than dealing with conflict.
When Andi was pregnant, she did not want to be a mother, but Todd wanted to be a father. Andi avoided this conflict by being silent and suppressing her own desires, but she could no longer do so after giving birth. I think that she gave Amanda up for adoption because she was afraid of being a mother, and her fear was so strong that it overrode her desire to make Todd happy. However, Todd arrived (You were working Todd? Your girlfriend is in labor with your child: take some time off!) and Andi needed to tell him something: she made up a lie that deflected responsibility from herself and avoided conflict with Todd.
Afterwards, Andi felt guilty. However, relieving her feelings of guilt would require her to tell Todd the truth, which would create conflict between the two of them. Andi could not bring herself to initiate this confrontation: time passed, and her feelings of guilt slowly destroyed her relationship with Todd (among other potential but undisclosed interactions). Even now that they are broken up, Andi still cannot overcome her own fear of conflict to tell Todd the truth and put her guilt to rest. Now, however, the consequences for telling Todd about Amanda have grown VERY significant, for Andi, Todd, and their children.
If teenage Andi had just told Todd that she was afraid of being a mother, the conflict would have been far less serious. Why does Andi have a hard time dealing with conflict? Is it low self-esteem, fear of rejection or abandonment, or something else? (wall of text, sorry)
I know the internal conflict of “I should’ve done this a long time ago, but the longer it gets the more impossible it becomes so even though I should pick up the phone or send the email today (as the earliest I could possibly undo the situation) it is easier to just try to ignore it, maybe until it’s too late.”
Same reason things sit in my fridge until they mold, because it’s easier to throw away a moldy thing than to throw away a thing I might possibly eat. Don Aslett says you can tell a lot about someone by their fridge or the interior of their car.
Anyway. As far as Todd’s job, if he’s about to have a baby to care for and they haven’t gotten much in the way of savings, he’s going to want to have enough money to care for the kid (and the mom). If the boss made it a choice between staying there or getting fired, the boss would be an ass, but more importantly Todd would not choose to stand on principle because it would directly impact his ability to get money to care for his little family.
Kilyle has it right about the job vs work thing… females get “maternity leave” (no problems there) BUT, unless you have an unusually “nice” job, one that actually CARES about its employees, i have never heard of a MALE getting “Paternity leave”. what always happens, is that if a guy wants to be there AT the birth, then he has to specifically take a day off of work, be that a sick day, a vacation day, or just plain ol’ not bothering to show up, is irrelevant for this discussion, but he may not have been in a job that ALLOWED him sick days, or vacation days UNTIL he’s been with them for xyz number of days/weeks/months (different companies have different policies) and as stated, the boss may have been an ass as well, possibly to the point that if he DID try a no-call/no-show, then he would have been fired, thus he stayed there and kept his job.
ALSO, MAYBE her MOM brought her to the hospital EARLY in order to make SURE that he was not there. ie, OR maybe the hospital said to her the appointment was for oh, say, Monday at 10am, but she told Todd it was for Tuesday at 4pm thus that is when he told his boss he needed off. and instead while he was at work on Monday they were AT the hospital, and Todd somehow got told about it (mutual friend? Andi got him on the phone while mom was in the bathroom? who knows?), and he couldn’t get off because of the job/boss, etc… then of course there was the traffic jam, etc… by the time he gets there it’s all done and over with.
as for her taking off right NOW… i admit it’s a kinda dick move on her part, BUT, i also accept that she hasn’t gotten all her ducks in a row, either… delaying the reveal a day or two won’t be such a big thing compared to her coming clean about Amanda NOT BEING DEAD in the first place, and this small incident will soon be forgotten in the wake of such a disastrous scenario as we have brewing right here right now (and for the last EIGHT YEARS!)…
Family and Medical Leave Act, US Department of Labor, 1993. Gives parents up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a family member. Specifically provides for maternity/paternity leave (makes no distinction between father and/or mother). Used it myself in the birth of both of my children, who are both older than Selkie and Amanda.
…and forgot to mention I’m the DAD.
and immediately after i hit “post comment”, of course my brain kicks out another idea… what if he WAS planning on being there, but she went into labor EARLY and had to be rushed to the hospital while he was out and couldn’t be contacted? it’d be NOBODIES fault at that point, well, nobody except the MOM for strong-arming her daughter into signing the adoption papers…
someone asked in another post about WHY Andi would go along with it… well, a very simple answer is that she was so used to OBEYING her mom, that there was literally no second thoughts about it until AFTER Todd got there (i know that people can fall into that type of mental state… same kind of stuff happened to me growing up until i got out on my own and into the real world… it wasn’t bad or abusive, or anything like that, but obedience and not asking questions was very much a deeply ingrained mental program in me) . I’ll ALSO bet that her mom was in the room the entire time that he was there, carefully “consoling her distraught daughter in these trying times” making sure she told him the lies SHE wanted him to hear, until he took the lies to heart and left for the night. by that time it was too late, the damage was done, and it took until now for Andi to break out of her brainwashed conditioning…
The day after my parents got married, my dad was at work when my grandma showed up at the house to take my mom in to get it annulled “now that you’ve gotten *that* out of your system.” And my mom ended up at the courthouse, in tears, and I still don’t have it straight in my head how she wasn’t strong-armed into a divorce. It’s God’s grace that I have the parents I have.
I still remember that same grandma, when I was a teen spending the summer at her house, chasing off some girls who went door-to-door selling things (like Girl Scouts but not), and I wanted to buy potpourri in my favorite scent (mulberry) with my own money that I had earned at my own job, but she physically prevented me from doing so, first by causing a fuss and then by following us out to the road as I went with them to try to complete the sale until I finally said something like “She’s really going to keep following us, isn’t she? Sorry” and, seething, watched them leave.
What the hell made her think she had the right to determine how I spent my hard-earned money? The same thing that made her try to override my mom’s decision about staying married, or my mom’s decision to nurse my brother when he was two years old (when we were briefly living at my grandma’s house)… I don’t recall what all else she did, but she clearly had that basic idea in her head that because she Knew what was Right, if people didn’t follow her advice she had the right to force them to do it anyway. That’s supervillain mindset right there — zero respect for personal volition.
Man, that sucks about your grandma. My grandmother was emotionally abusive, but nowhere near as bad. Her preferred tactic was trying to guilt people into or out of doing things, such as her attempts to convince my parents to raise me religiously (I think she always resented me for not being a devout churchgoer, and I couldn’t talk to her about it to the point that while I was a firm atheist for several years before she died, I was always scared to tell her and never did; frankly, the degree of her religion-related emotional abuse is one of the main reasons I have a major bible phobia and the only way anyone can manage to get me in a church is voting (stupid assigned polling places…)) or to talk me out of taking martial arts lessons. But what you and your mother went through seems so much worse…
Oh man… This has the potential to turn into an utterly hideous situation. What happens if Amanda puts two-and-two together and figures out that Todd is her father… Will she also find out that he doesn’t know she was his daughter? Or will she go off half-cocked like she always does?
And when she does go off… Holy hell, the fallout!
I dunno if I missed something but the most likely explanation for Todd not being present at the birth is that he didn’t know it was happening. If nobody gave him a call to say Andi was giving birth how would he know? It’s not like most mothers go into labour on their due date. If nobody told him which hospital, or if Andi’s mother took her away somewhere he would have had to miss it. And what would he do if Andi asked him not to come in on the birthing because her mother was going to be there and the hospital had a policy of only one family member allowed in the delivery room? If Andi’s mom wanted her to give up the baby, she would probably have taken steps to isolate Andi from Todd, such as signing Andi up for prenatal classes with herself coming in as the birth coach.
Not to mention that yes, her mom might have bullied her into signing papers giving Amanda up BUT, and she had WEEKS if not months to change her mind. In most places people can assert their parental rights even after a competed adoption, never mind placing the child in an orphanage. After all she showed up eight years later and got Amanda back. Amanda wasn’t adopted until she was an older child.
ABSCOND