Bad Boy (An Indecent Proposal) - J.C. Reed Page 0,67

many questions. There’s a great deal of information in this letter. Do not feel you have to understand everything at once. Some of what I will reveal will be hard to believe. Maybe you’ll be angry. Please ignore everything that you’re not ready to accept until you feel the right time has come. Understand, too, that I’m a human being. I made mistakes. I didn’t always know what’s right and what’s wrong.

My biggest fear is that, some of the things in this letter will make you judge me. Again, please know that I only want you to understand who I am, what happened to me, what I had to do. The truth is, much of what I’ve done was a mistake. I had no friends to help me see the truth. I had no one I could confide in. There was no one to teach me faith. I didn’t know better.

One of the reasons I sent you to boarding school was that I hoped you’d never be alone. I wanted you to discover the blessing of friendship. I wanted you to learn the earthy, practical things in life rather than be homeschooled, and at the constant mercy of others. I couldn’t let you make the same mistakes I made, and most of all, I couldn’t let you witness my gradual mental decline.

Clint has without a doubt told you that I was insane. It’s a lie we concocted together…a means to hide the fact that my illness takes away my memories and makes everyday tasks impossible. My illness has started to transform me into someone I’m not. I’ve become someone I no longer recognize. Sometimes I think of the loss of my memory as a blessing, but then I remember that I’m also losing myself, that I forget how to be a mother to you, that all the good things will be erased, too, and I realize just how much of a loss I’m about to suffer.

In the beginning, we were hopeful, thinking the medication I was prescribed would take care of my little problem, but now we know my illness cannot be cured. The doctors have told me that it’s only a matter of time until I lose my memory, the ability to breathe, eat, and I’ll die. They tell me I have months left, but I don’t feel like I have months. I feel like it can happen any time now, which is why I’ve been up for thirty-six hours to draw up my Last Will and the letters.

So, please forgive me if the words seem jumbled or hard to understand. It’s not my intention. I’m just trying not to sleep and forget. If I fall asleep, I’ve no idea in what state I’ll be when I wake up, and days, even weeks could pass before I remember what I was about to do before my memory failed me.

I want to start from the beginning, what I deem the most important events first.

My name is Eleanor Hanson and I’m your mother. I was born Eleanor Stonefield to John Stonefield and Annette Fiddling. Your father is Richard Walker. Moving on from him was hard. Indeed, it took me a few years, but you were the one thing that kept me sane. You were a gorgeous baby, my love, my joy. Everything was easier with you. But living so close to your grandparents wasn’t. I’m not proud of who my parents are. I’m not proud of what they’ve done to me.

My father was a hard and strict man. My mother was very religious. You will know very little about them. That’s because I made sure you wouldn’t get to know them.

I wouldn’t say that my parents were evil, but they were cruel people. Every parent who harms a child should not be called a parent but a monster.

I cannot explain the pain I went through whenever they punished me as a child, each in their own way. Though I’m sure my parents loved me, they both turned a blind eye, abandoned me when I needed them the most. My mother knew what was happening to me. I confided in her early on. Yet, she proclaimed that it was all in my head. My father had this tendency to sweep everything under the rug to keep the family name untarnished.

The truth is, I didn’t know that being sexually abused by your uncle is wrong, until I got much older and had you. As a child, I assumed I had no choice and