Mattie was born and raised in Heartland, the youngest of two girls born to Richie Bloomwood and Marissa Hill. Her dad was a Heartland native, but her mom had just blown into town one day and decided to stick around upon falling in love with Richie.
Even though Mattie believed growing up that her parents were soulmates, in actuality they were never even married. Marissa was always incredibly flighty, unable to hold down a job, and incredibly reluctant to get married. In fact, Richie would later tell his daughters that the only reason Marissa stayed in Heartland was because she fell pregnant, and needed Richie’s support to raise the child.
When Mattie was twelve, and her older sister Emmeline was sixteen, their mother disappeared. She was simply there one day, gone the next. She took only a small handful of things and vanished into the ether, never to be seen or heard of again.
Marissa was Mattie’s hero. As a naive child, she was blind to all of her mother’s many flaws, instead simply seeing the bright, beautiful woman who always found time to put on lipstick, and was around far more than her father to play games with the girls and take them to the park, or on adventures in the car.
It was that hero worship of her mother that led Mattie to blame her father for her mother’s disappearance. Surely he must have done something to drive her off. He didn’t care about her enough, he fought with her too much, she didn’t know what it was, but her mother couldn’thave just left of her own volition.
This meant Mattie’s teen years were fraught with tension. She refused to listen to reason, to listen to her sister or her father, even when it came out that her mother had already been married when she met her father, that the reason she had never married Richie was because it would have been illegal… Mattie wouldn’t hear it.
She had decided on that day, at twelve years old, that come her eighteenth birthday, come high school graduation, she would leave Heartland and never look back, just as her mother had. She would look for her mom, and forge a new life for herself outside of this stuffy little town.
So that’s exactly what she did. The day after she graduated high school, Mattie packed her car - which she had worked long summers and after school shifts at the diner to buy - and, deaf to any attempt at persuasion, drove off into the sunset.
She didn’t have much of an idea of what she would do with her life, but she would figure it out. She would find what she was meant to do, where she was meant to be. She was a hopeless romantic, despite it all. She would find someone who was right for her, and everything would fall into place around her. Unfortunately, she would come to find out that life was far from being that easy.
Her first marriage was at age nineteen. He was older by a few years, an heir to a big business, and she was in love with him. She was certain he was the one, so they went to the courthouse and tied the knot. No big ceremony, no family and friends present, just the two of them - and his best friend, who was the witness. It was perfect… For eighteen months. After a year and a half, it became obvious that he wasn’t her soulmate. They weren’t perfect for each other. They were kids, kids who had different opinions, different outlooks on life, which meant they spent the vast majority of their time screaming at each other and then having intense make up sex. So they divorced, and Mattie once again packed up her car and left town without looking back.
Her second marriage came when she was 22. This time, she was sure. They were very similar, they liked all the same things, he was sweet, and tame, and hard working, climbing his way up the rungs of the corporate ladder, but… Once again, it didn’t take long for the spark to die. Mattie found herself just… bored. They might not have fought, but that meant they also didn’t have insanely good make up sex. There was no passion. So… She found the passion somewhere else. With his boss, who was eight years older than she was and kind of ridiculously hot.
Within six months of her divorce from her second husband - he’d walked in on her with his boss and immediately demanded a divorce - she was married again. It was her first big, white wedding. He was rich, and settled, and wanted to show her off a little. There were hundreds of people present, including, much to her surprise, Mattie’s father, sister and her sister’s husband and two kids. She’d only sent them invitations as a way to show off a little, to rub in their faces how well she was doing without them… But at the reception, they were able to reconnect a little. She didn’t tell them about her past two marriages, or much about her past, but they promised not to lose contact again, smoothing over some of their old wounds.
Her third marriage was the longest. They were married just after her 25th birthday, and she left just after their eight year anniversary. It had all been so perfect, at first. She had been content to be the happy housewife, to keep their - gorgeous, spacious, expensive - house clean, to have dinner on the table for him, to make friends with all the other housewives in their neighborhood. Over the years, however, things began to sour. It started off small. She had forgotten to pick up his suit from the dry cleaners, or she hadn’t remembered an important gala or dinner party that she had to be ready for… There were little fights. Little fight soon grew into bigger fights, over more and more minuscule things.
The first time he hit her, she went to one of her housewife friends, and was dismayed when she was given only a commiseratory rub on the back, and an offer to borrow some heavy duty concealer. She was told that if this was the life she wanted, sometimes she just had to pick herself up and get over it.
It didn’t take Mattie long after that to decide that this wasn’t the life she wanted. As picturesque as it seemed from the outside, it was far from it. After a particularly volatile fight, in which he had thrown a bottle that narrowly missed her head, she once again packed her things, and left.
This time, however, she didn’t head somewhere new. She headed for somewhere where she knew people. Where she knew no one would sit by and watch her get hurt. Where she would have the protection of people who truly loved her. She headed back to Heartland.
So, 15 years - almost to the day - later, Mathilda Grace Bloomwood arrived back in Heartland, ready to see what the next chapter of her life would hold.
2087
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