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When she was four, Olivia learned a lesson most people spent their whole lives denying:
Life isn’t fair.
And not in the regular way, from a parent throwing it at you in a moment’s frustration, after you’ve complained you couldn’t skip your bathtime tonight even though you swear you didn’t get yourself dirty.
Olivia learned it before she even knew what fairness was supposed to be.
No, her childhood wasn’t all terrible and her mother wasn’t a monster. She wouldn’t be who she was if she hadn’t had a good enough mother who’d cared for her. Because Serena did care, she loved her, even though Olivia still couldn’t quite grasp how that was at all possible.
Most days, back when Serena was alive, Olivia felt lucky to have a mother brave enough to have her rapist’s baby, and manage to love it on top of it all. But sometimes - because humans are flawed - at random infrequent intervals, her illness would get a hold of her and she’d become unrecognizable to her daughter.
The first time she remembers it happening, she was four and cold and alone, sitting outside her preschool looking at the darkening sky, hours after her classmates’ parents had picked them up and taken them home. If Olivia knew how much colder and more lonely life would get, she might have appreciated the teacher’s gentle reassurances more. But she was only four and everything seemed so much bigger and scarier in the dark, her teacher’s face had turned into a stranger’s.
When Serena finally arrived, red eyed and unsteady, Olivia held onto her legs and tried to shake off the feeling that she too seemed like a stranger that night.
Luckily, little kids have built in defense mechanisms that help blind them to their parent’s many flaws - natural selection in all its beauty. But Olivia was glad she’d instinctively learned not to rely too hard on others at such an early age, because it brought her fiercely independent spirit to life.
Life isn’t fair, little kids could be forgotten by their own mothers even if they did nothing wrong.
Life isn’t fair, some people have huge families with mothers and fathers and siblings and uncles…
Life isn’t fair, her puppy was lost merely a month after Santa had gifted it to her because her mom had a bad day and inadvertently left the back door open.
And the trend continues well into her adult life.
Life isn’t fair...
...her father is a rapist.
...her first love leaves, tells her she’s too young, too naive, not enough.
...her mother leaves because she’s too much.
...she can’t help all the victims
(the kids , there are so many kids no one wants, she can’t save them either).
Still, for a decade or so she gets comfortable. She lets her mind drift and her heart wander. Because the world isn’t fair, but there is fairness in it. She sees it everyday, it’s in the way Elliot brings her coffee in the morning after a bad case, in the way Munch and his theories lighten up the squadroom and the way Fin’s not her partner, but he’s got her back, too.
She figures that’s what families are supposed to do for you, bring you joy, and security and an artificial sense of fairness to a random, tumultuous world. But then Elliot leaves, and sucks it all out of her life along with him.
But because she’d learned that lesson from the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. She didn’t cry too much or think too hard.
She’d make do with the unjust world just fine, because life isn’t fair.
She’s glad she’d accepted it from the beginning and didn’t hold onto any illusions.
It’s not a lesson that can be taught, anyway.