life off-camera: Riley & Chad

Previously with the Hathe family (time in sim-years): Chad started his first arcade (8 years ago), Riley's shelter that Chad never really liked (4 years ago), Chad's rad vest and Liza's first date (3 years ago),  that time Riley was a little bit snippy with Stephanie (3 years ago).

I have been sitting on a story for two weeks now, going back and forth, trying to decide what to do with a particular nugget of Riley and Chad's history. It's a problematic nugget because it happened three years ago, right about the time the LH blog ended, actually. It's over and done with now, but that doesn't mean it's not still part of their lives. Even so, it will only amount to about a line or two of their next chapter. So I wanted to put this out here, because I figure people might read it and be like, "What?!? When did that happen?" lol!

As sims, this is a true story. It's true for them as characters, too, because you know how we sometimes exit without saving because we don't want to commit something to their "real" story. Well, that's not what happened here. I committed this event to their story both as sims and as characters.

The last we heard from Chad and Riley, they were really doing pretty well. After struggling for so many years, so many fights and arguments, so many times when they were sure they wouldn't make it, finally they got a reprieve. Chad had his arcade to work on, and Riley had her animal shelter. Liza was old enough to babysit Shaun, and they were going on dates again and planning their future. They realized for the first time that they were actually pretty *lucky* to have had an early baby. Because now they were done and only thirty-four years old. Their children were independent, and they had a bit of their youth left to enjoy together. They had a whole lot more money than they had when they were nineteen, too.

There was such a feeling of triumph in their lives. Most couples who have a baby at nineteen wouldn't make it together, but they did. They stuck through all the hard times and triumphed. And it wasn't just that they stuck together, but that they were still in love with each other. Maybe even more in love now than they had ever been as teenagers.

But their happy reprieve wouldn't last for long.

She was pregnant, and it was not a happy accident. It would be the end of everything for them. All the freedom they looked forward to, the rest of their youth, was wiped clean away. They would be 52 years old by the time this baby had grown up. No matter how they tried to put it in a positive light, they were just devastated at the thought of having to start all over again after all of that. They had Liza at nineteen and Shaun at twenty-four. They devoted their entire youth to these kids, and they couldn't do it all over again.

It didn't take them long to decide that they wouldn't keep it. Which, of course, doesn't mean that it wasn't a hard decision to make.

They had both considered themselves "done" with children. She was on birth control. She was meticulous about it because she was so done. I can't remember if TS2 had permanent measures in the mods I was using, or whether I had meant to set her to 0% but just hadn't gotten around to it. Or whether she was part of my giant birth control mishap of that era. A lot of my girls had accidents around that time, some happy accidents, some not so happy, but I never wished for it to be Riley.

(On that note, I am so glad TS4 has permanent fertility options, which many of my sims have taken advantage of. Because I really don't enjoy writing "abortion stories," but I'm also not going to make them have babies they truly don't want.)

So that is something that happened to them and I don't want to pretend like it didn't happen. But it's also three years past now, so it won't be ever present in their minds as it would have been back then. Their upcoming story update is not exactly about this, although they do think about it from time to time.

I took these pictures way back in the day because I was going to include the story on the blog. But then I took the pictures back because I wanted to put them in a book. (I was especially paranoid back then of having blog versions of stories out—I don't care so much about that now that people do blog-to-book stories all the time). I would still like to do that story in book form, some day, but since it probably won't be soon, I wanted to let these characters keep living as sims for now.