#liz bartlet

…to keep you looking at me

need to decide on my own timelines with this bcs on the face of things in the first season jed bartlet has a 17/18yo daughter and a 12yo grandaughter (deeply aware that shes mentioned in the pilot and afaik never again and pilots always have their own lore)

how old is liz?? did she marry very young, i maybe get the vibe that a little like ellie she might have got married because of a pregnancy? would explain her being with such a hapless man and she does come from a fairly devout catholic family that's also politically visible (i think bartlet was a congressman at that point?)

if she was 19 when she had annie then we're looking at her being 31 in s1. from what i understand medical school and early career research post would be about 5 years in america? which'd put s1 ellie at 23. that leaves an 8 year gap between liz and ellie and then another 5 years between ellie and zoey which are quite a big gaps, especially for said devout catholics

mallory o'brien/liz bartlet 100 words, pre-canon, new year's eve, first kiss

written for @twwpride day 27: single

What if instead of the way I usally suppose it to be, that Annie was and accident and Gus was on purpose, it was the other way around. It wasn't a surprise to Liz that she was pregnant with Annie, she planned that, and wanted that. She knew that everyone - her parents, her best friend, her teachers, her younger sister - had very high expectations for who they thought she should become. And if that person had seemed appealing before, she absolutely doesn't now. So it's not fully thought out, but Liz knows she wants to have kids, that's the kind of future she can see for herself.

What was a surprise on the other hand, was her parents absolute horror at their daughter getting pregnant on purpose at 18. And when Jed tells her to go fix it, abortion is out of the question so instead she does her second best and marries her boyfriend Doug.

Doug doesn't even have to be Annie's biological father, like he could just have always assumed so but he's not really. And to take this in a Amy/Liz direction, Amy is the only other person who will know this except eventually Annie.

And Gus could have easily been a accident. In @abigailbartletmd's Went Wrong AU, which I am consuming avidly, so far it's been hinted that Liz might have had Gus after an affair and Doug is not his father, which has stuck in my head. The partial relief, plus her guilt, but also she's having a second kid that she presumably didn't really plan for while her daughter (using the age provided in season 1 obviously, instead of season 6) is going on 16.

And again with a Liz/Amy direction. Amy doesn't really understand why Liz always says that she can't regret marrying her husband because she wouldn't have gotten her kids - the lights of her life - out of the deal, because technically Liz didn't need Doug at all to have Gus and/or Annie. And Liz doesn't get why Amy doesn't understand that she wouldn't have been in the circumstances that led her to be able to have/raise her kids if she hadn't married him.

And today it's pretty much a secret that Liz and her parents keep that Annie was something Liz planned, and (deranged hc warning) it's even possible it could go the other way, the other secret being that Liz was a bit of a accident.

We don't really know how far apart the Bartlet's are in age, but I usually go with Liz being 1968, because Annie is 12 in 1999, and I'm using the headcanon that Liz was 19 when Annie was born. (And Zoey is 1980, and Ellie is 1976.) Which would both make Liz significantly older than Ellie, but also put her birth only about a year after Jed and Abbey's marriage. I think it's quite possible the timeline just doesn't quite work there and nobody ever brings it up. (Except for C. J. to Liz during the campaign, but that gets shut down very swiftly.)