Mixed Emotions Meaning

My mother claims my husband has cheated on me and pushes me to get a divorce. I want to collect evidence before proceeding with anything—if it's true, I have to uphold my rights. Yet she causes a scene at an art exhibition I've worked on for three years, humiliating me in public and making me sound like a gold digger. "How are you any different from a prostitute when you're holding this dumb exhibition with a man's money? I didn't raise you to be a gold digger! How can you be so revolting?" She slashes the million-dollar paintings in the exhibition, claiming that she's doing this for my good. She wants me to see the error of my ways and return to the right path. Meanwhile, I clutch my bloody hand, which she slashed with her blade. I say, "You say you want me to return to the right path, but is that what it really is? You want me to divorce my legally wedded husband, who's a CEO, without a penny to my name. "Then, you want me to marry a 45-year-old cheap man who has a child and no money? He even wants me to support him!"

At the peak of my career, my husband slapped me in public.  With a look of disgust, he said, “Tess, you’re pathetic. You made Grace fail the class because you’re jealous. Don’t you know she’s applying for a scholarship?” Caught off guard, I stumbled and fell to the ground, clutching my stomach as pain surged through me. I knelt there, begging him to take me to the hospital.  However, all he did was swat my hand away and sneer. “Quit the act! Aren’t you just a useless woman who can’t get pregnant?” At that moment, my heart felt like it had shattered into a million pieces. It wasn’t long before bystanders intervened, insisting on taking me to the hospital. Unfortunately, it was too late to save the baby. Once the surgery was over and the reality of what had happened sank in, I turned to him and demanded a divorce.

When I was seven years old, my younger brother went into anaphylactic shock after sneaking a handful of peanuts. Outside the emergency room, my mother slammed my head against the wall over and over, her face twisted with rage. "If you had been watching him like you were supposed to be, this never would have happened! You should be the one with a ruptured stomach, not him!" After that, whenever my brother so much as caught a cold, my mother forced me to eat spoiled leftovers as punishment. I once prepared an elaborate feast. She flipped the entire table and made me crawl on the floor to lick it clean. When I said I wanted to study culinary arts, she poured hot oil over my hands. My father wanted to send me to vocational school to learn a trade, but my mother clutched my brother to her chest and wailed. "She destroyed her brother's health! She owes him a lifetime of service!" When I was fifteen, my brother's gluttony cost my father an important business deal. I took the blame without even being asked, and the furious client forced me to drink more than half a gallon of hard liquor. By the time I was sent home with a bleeding stomach, my father had already scolded my brother. My mother took out her anger on me instead, slapping me so hard my ears rang and my vision went dark at the edges. "You useless thing! You should’ve choked to death at that table! I get sick just looking at you!" I coughed up black blood. From my pocket, I pulled out a piece of sour candy that had gone soft and sticky. It was the only treat my mother had ever given me with a smile, back before my brother's allergic reaction. I put the candy in my mouth and swallowed it down with the taste of stomach acid. The candy was so sour it made my throat burn. Whatever came next, I just hoped I would not have to be my family’s garbage disposal again.

I'm severely allergic to many things, so my husband buys a separate villa for me. It's supposed to be sort of a nursing home. When my future daughter-in-law learns about this, she thinks my son is cheating on her. She breaks my bones to vent her anger. When she finds out I'm her future mother-in-law, she caresses her belly and looks at me smugly. "I'm already pregnant with Shawn's child. Think about whether you want this child to make it into this world." What she doesn't know is that the Ziegler family's fortune belongs to me and that Shawn Ziegler is only my adoptive son.

When I was ten, Jonathan Cooper saved me and told me he would protect me for life. When I was 15, I met William Reed. He also told me he would protect me forever. Yet, the year I turned 23, the two men who swore to always keep me safe threw me into the ocean for the sake of their true love.

Late one night, as I scrolled through social media, I came across a relationship influencer with over a hundred thousand followers, teaching men how to "control" their wives. "She actually tried to talk to me about privacy?" he scoffed. "I ignored her for three days, and she handed over all her passwords, crying and begging me not to leave her." The comments exploded almost instantly. The chat went wild. [Take me under your wing, man!] I felt sick to my stomach. Then, without warning, he lifted his phone and pressed a kiss to the screen. A face appeared in the reflection. Mine. Smiling, he turned back to his audience of thousands. "See this? This is the perfect wife I spent three years training." A chill ran through me. I clicked into his profile and scrolled all the way back to his first post. The upload date was the same day we got married. He claimed he was filming prank videos and that it was all just for the livestream—no wonder he got increasingly out of hand. That was when it hit me: he had been lying to me all along. From the moment I stepped into that marriage, I had been nothing more than his experiment, his content, his source of money. Fine. If that was the case, then I would turn his livestream into his worst nightmare. I picked up my phone and sat directly beneath the camera he had installed, then sent a deliberately suggestive message to another man. Three seconds later, the bedroom door burst open. Matthias stormed in and snatched my phone. After reading the message, his lips pressed into a tight line. However, he did not explode. He did not even look at me. Instead, he turned, opened his livestream, and faced the camera. "Send something through, and I'll show you exactly how to put a cheating woman in her place."

My husband's sister was pregnant when she leapt from the building. Her final phone call wasn't to him. It was to me. When the police asked for clues, I said nothing. When my in-laws knelt and begged, I watched them coldly. Yet my husband never divorced me. If anything, he treated me even better than before. Then, after I became pregnant, my nightmare truly began. He tied me to the bed and summoned a group of vagrants, ordering them to take turns violating me. He said he wanted me to taste despair.

I was a child who was born in a vocational school's toilet. To my mom, I was a stain in her life that she was given birth to after having her cherry popped by a delinquent when she was still young. I knew that Mom had been trying to kill me. Unfortunately, she hadn't succeeded so far. The first time she tried to get rid of me was when she decided to give birth to me in the toilet. It was a cold, winter month, yet she didn't give me anything warm to wear. The second time she attempted murder was when she got into grad school, which was based in the north. No one was around to take care of me, so she turned on the gas while holding me in her arms and clutching her train ticket. The third and last time happened when Mom was about to marry the man she loved. On the night before her wedding, she had tears streaming down her cheeks as she told me, "You're nothing but a burden. You ruined my life! "Do you know that I can only forget about all the pain and suffering you caused me after you die? Only then can I start a brand new chapter in my life!" I wiped Mom's tears off her face with my tiny hand. So, her wish was for me to die. On my birthday, my fever hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit. That was when I finally received the first slice of birthday cake in my entire life. I didn't have the heart to eat it, so I made my wish solemnly. "I hope that I will die soon." I heard that birthday wishes often came true. That way, Mom would be very happy.

When I'm about to apply for medical insurance for my son, Connor Sawyer, who's about to start his first year in kindergarten, I'm told that I'm not his biological father at all. "Are you sure this is your son? The system shows that his father is an entirely different person." I don't respond at all. Instead, I secretly take a photo of the unfamiliar-looking address before tracking it down. It turns out that it's actually a residential area right by my own. The moment my wife, Giselle Lambert, sees me, she freezes momentarily. At the same time, she blocks the door subconsciously with her hand. "In the end, you still found out about the truth. But there's no use kicking up a fuss, you know. I never mistreated you in any way over the past three years, after all." When I notice the familiar figure standing behind Giselle, I feel my limbs going cold. That person is actually my younger brother, Vincent Sawyer, who has just graduated from college. Vincent hands Giselle a glass of water before smiling at me apologetically. "Don't blame me, Hayden. The doctor says that I'm severely depressed, so I can't handle hearing a child's cries at all. I'm really thankful to you for raising Connor on my behalf in the past few years." At that moment, Connor, who's supposed to be waiting for me in my car, rushes into the apartment. He runs into Vincent's arms happily before turning to look at me. "Don't cry, Uncle Hayden. Daddy says you're a good person, so he's asked you for help. Mommy tells me that if I call you 'daddy' in your home, I'll get to visit my real daddy during the weekends."

My mom gave birth to a pair of twins. While I lived with my grandma in the countryside since young, my younger sister, Katrina Coffey, got to live with our parents. I only got to live with my family after I got into a high school in the city. I thought I'd be able to experience what it feels like to be loved by my family. What I didn't know was that this would be the start of my nightmares. My family alienated me, treating me as though I were an outsider. My status was even lower than that of Katrina's dog. Later on, Katrina forcibly stuffed a piece of mango, which I was allergic to, into my mouth. Her excuse was that she wanted to help me get rid of my allergy. I tried to plead with my parents for help with great difficulty, but they merely glanced at me icily. "What's with the complaints? Are you saying that we can't have mangoes anymore because of you from now on?" "What allergy? All you have to do is eat more mangoes, and you'll be fine!" What they didn't know was that people actually die from severe allergies.