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Here she goes again. Covering up what she doesn’t want to see. Taking blame that isn’t even hers to take.
As the victim of abuse, some of Lily’s mother’s most consistent behaviors are denial and self-blame. These are coping mechanisms that have allowed Lily’s mother to live much of her adult life in an abusive marriage. By denying the extent and severity of the abuse, Lily’s mother maintains a facade of control over her life. Additionally, by taking the blame for her husband’s actions, she attempts to convince herself and others that her husband’s behavior is explicable, rather than an unreasonable show of dominance and an unimaginable betrayal of her trust. With this quote in Chapter Two, Lily notes that her mother takes the blame even when Lily is the one who’s caused public embarrassment rather than her father, as her mother has learned over the years to make excuses for the behavior of others.
She didn’t have the financial stability that I have. She didn’t have the resources to leave and give me what she thought was a decent shelter. She didn’t want to take me away from my father when I was used to living with both parents.
As Lily experiences her own abusive marriage, she understands more clearly why her mother was never able to leave her father. While Lily notes in Chapter Twenty-Five that victims like her and her mother often continue to love their abuser, and that this can be a reason why the victim stays, she also explains that there are many practical barriers that keep victims from leaving. While Lily is financially stable enough to leave Ryle, that wasn’t the case for her mother, who may not have had the money or support to do the same. Lily’s mother may have felt that she would rather endure abuse from her husband and keep her daughter in a financially stable, two-parent household than end the abuse but lead herself and her daughter into poverty.
Every incident chips away at your limit. Every time you choose to stay, it makes the next time that much harder to leave. Eventually, you lose sight of your limit altogether.
When Lily tells her mother that Ryle is abusive, her mother imparts a profound lesson: the longer you stay in an abusive relationship, the more normalized the abuse becomes, making it increasingly difficult to leave. In Chapter Thirty-Two, Lily’s mother explains that when her husband began abusing her, she had a “limit” as to what she would tolerate before leaving. However, by the time that limit was broken, and she had given her husband a second chance, the new limit was increasingly raised. That was how she found herself in a marriage where she experienced severe physical abuse such as strangulation. She cautions that if Lily decides to go back to Ryle, the abuse may become more and more extreme as Lily loses sight of her initial limit.
