Please note that just as all sexual acts are reluctantly consensual, all characters in this story are over 18-years-old. With Olga, 35-years-old, her son, Karl, 20-years-old, and her daughter, Rachel, 18-years-old, there are no underage characters in this story.
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A Woman Without Rights Living in a Man's World in 1860 Germany.
"No! Stop! Don't! Please, I beg you," cried Olga while pulling against her ties.
Frozen in fear and unable to move from her bed, Rachel hugged her pillow in resigned horror while listening to her mother beg for mercy in the barn. Being sensitive to such things anyway, perhaps sensing something by picking up on her father's foul mood and her brother's horniness, Rachel just had this very conversation with her mother last night. With them drunk again, with her father angry at everything and everybody again, and with Karl horny again, she had a feeling that this would happen again. Before she climbed in bed, she pushed her chest of drawers against her bedroom door.
It had been a while since her father and brother took her mother out to the barn for discipline and here she was being disciplined again. Only discipline had nothing to do with the unspeakable things they did to her mother. Feeling guilty as the one responsible for bringing home that women's right's flyer and, no doubt, her father's justified reason to discipline her mother, as if her father needed a reason to beat his wife and allow his son to sexually abuse his mother, she only hoped they wouldn't take her next.
"Why Mama does Papa take you out to the barn to beat you and allow Karl to sexually molest you before whipping you? After all you do for them, I don't understand why they so abuse you," she looked at her mother with confusion and continued when her mother didn't respond. "Is this the life that I can expect to have when I marry a man?"
"These are troubled times for Germany Rachel. Your father has a lot on his mind. Not all men are as angry as your father is and your brother just does what his father tells him to do. Although you will never forget, I hope that when you give your heart to a young man, love will be enough to carry you the distance to forgive him for hurting you, beating you, and allowing his son to rape you, as I have done with my husband and my son."
It was obvious by her mother's words that the man Rachel married would undoubtedly hurt her, beat her, and allow her son to rape her, that is, if she was fortunate enough to have a son. That was how men treated women back then and, more than one-hundred-fifty-years later, that violent abuse against women still continues today in some households. Using a broad, black brushstroke, her mother had just painted a bleak picture of the horror that her daughter could expect in her near future. Bad enough she was forced to listen to the horror of her mother being so abused but to think that this may soon be her reality too, Rachel wanted no part of any of that.
"I don't understand Mama how you could love such a mean man," said Rachel about her father. "In the conceived, reincarnated monster of Papa, your son is no better," she said about her brother. "Why do they do this to you? Why must you suffer because of them? Why can't you make them stop?" She paused to look at her mother while waiting for her reply and watched her drop her head in silent shame before speaking.
"I have no control over what they do or don't do," said Olga nearly in a whisper.
"With a roof over our heads and plenty of food to eat, unlike so many others around us who have nothing and no one, we should have a problem. We should be a happier family instead of being such an abused and abusive one. I don't understand why Papa takes his anger and frustration out on you."
Olga looked up at her daughter to smile her love before touching Rachel's cheek. She brushed back her long, chestnut hair that fell in front of her green eyes, the same color hair and eyes as her mother.
"Because they can. As a woman, we have no rights. All we have is the hope that our love is enough for a man to respect us and not beat us."
"Love? What is love? Other than the love that I have for you, Papa, and Karl, I know nothing about love. I should know about such things Mama. I'm old enough now to know," said Rachel.
"Love just happens and you'll know when it does. Even in an arranged marriage when we don't chose our partners, love does. Thinking that our lives will be better than our mothers' lives and thinking that a man is the answer to all of our problems, we're blinded by love. Unable to think clearly, and with other women our worst enemies in filling our heads with their foolish delusions of love and handed-down expectations of how women must act when in love, women surrender who they are and all they could be for the sake of the men they love."
"I have a lot to learn about love, men, and marriage," said Rachel. "Instead of it being a silly game, it all sounds so complicated."
"Don't fret. Now that I know all the mistakes I made, I will teach you how not to make the same mistakes," said Olga. "Yet because of you and your brother, it wasn't a mistake to marry your father. My mistake was that I was so young. With your father so much older than me when we married, I allowed your father to control me in the way that a father controls his daughter instead of in the way that a husband loves his wife. Conforming to his wishes, catering to his whims, and sacrificing myself for him by spoiling him, I did too much to accommodate him."
"Thank you Mama for telling me this."
"Men on the other hand are the ones who don't change. Even though many women believe that they can change their man, men are incapable of changing their ways and correcting their bad habits. By hitching her wagon to his, a woman makes the mistake of setting her lovesick heart on a man and allowing him to fill that blank place that she was unable to fill herself and that has taken hold of her soul throughout her wretched life," said Olga. "Something that sometimes is so very elusive, hope is our only cure. Only abandoning us when we need hope the most that medicine always escapes us to leave us with despair."