Inspiration of Cherish

Let’s dive right in and say WOW, just WOW. The support Maddie and I have received over Cherish and Simon: The First Year is beyond anything we truly expected. We are continuously humbled, every single day, with how well it’s performing on GoodReads, Amazon, Facebook, the Twitter machine, and Instagram. Thank you. Really, we can’t say it enough.

NOW let me dive into my inspiration on Cherish Montgomery. This may be a short read, but whatever LOL.

Cherish Montgomery is a sweet, naïve, usually happy woman who has been wronged in many, many aspects of her short life. Which has caused her to rapidly grow and mature far beyond her physical years. The hell this woman has gone through, but still finds a way to smile is a like to my own mother. No, she’s not my mother, that would be weird, and I’d be weirded out writing her. My mother is a gentle, wholesome woman who I never, in my life, want to imagine having sex. Notice I said imagine, not see. (That’s another topic for another time, if ever, because if she reads this she will definitely kick my ass. Love you mom :*)

As I’ve glossed over before, I am a child victim of abuse as is my mother by my father’s hands. There are many avenues of this messy past that I don’t wish to divulge into, but I can say he’s estranged, but doing better for himself from afar. When my father finally walked out, he left my mother the same way he got her thirty years prior. Naïve, scared, and unable to process what to do on her own. (Without someone telling her what to do.) She didn’t even know how to pay a bill on the house or keep tabs of her money. My mother was also going through Radiation therapy for breast cancer at the time, and I had to drive her down to the clinic, twice a day, for weeks at sixteen. We’ve been through a lot together and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her. That woman is everything to me.

Back on track now that I’ve vomited all the love I’ve have summed up. Ew. Emotions.

Now, Cherish is a nineteen-year-old mother who is abandoned by her boyfriend and left to fend for herself. Throughout the book she goes through troubles and trials to get back on her feet, overcome her own mental block, and learn that the world is not as evil as she’d been taught. The difference with Cherish is, she smiles and is grateful, the whole time.

I personally would’ve given up the moment my boyfriend didn’t come back but Cherish is different. As I wrote out her reactions and what she did next, I thought my mother and how she’d smile. Smile to make her husband love her when he was physically incapable of. Smiled through painful radiation therapy, smiling no matter how bad her body aches from another bruise hidden under her clothes. If there is one thing I remember from my childhood, is that my mother smiled.

I channeled that into Cherish. No matter what happened, she would always find the silver lining, always be the shoulder for Simon, and teach her daughter a better life than she received. In my eyes, Cherish is one of the strongest characters I’ve ever created and it’s because I had a strong woman guiding me. My mother is not perfect, far from it, she could’ve left my father. She didn’t have to stay for thirty years, but she didn’t know about what he was doing to me. Classic “You tell your mother and I’ll kill her” method works on young children. That doesn’t excuse her staying, but the day in age she was raised in was “Stay with your spouse no matter what, because God frowns on divorce.”

She still believes that.

Hmm…maybe Cherish is my mother, after all. ……………..Oh god. O_O………WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

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