The Forgetting

by Hannah Beckerman

‘My parents always warned me: be careful who you have kids with. Mortgages, joint bank accounts, marriages – you can extricate yourself from all of it. But have a child with someone and you’re linked to them for the rest of your life.’

Each twisted preference designed to destabilise my sense of identity, to shape me into the wife he wanted me to be: compliant and isolated, uncertain and dependent. A wife who mirrored his interests, as though he were Pygmalion and I Galatea, carved from ivory, every sweep of my desires a product of his creation.