Willow & Nina Part 1 (2018-2019)
If you are new to General Hospital, you might look at Nina Reeves and Willow Tait today and just see a mother and daughter with a complicated relationship. But if you were watching in 2018 and 2019, you know these two had a genuinely ugly history long before they ever found out they were related. This week on Pier 54 - A General Hospital Fan Podcast, we went all the way back to where it started. Go listen at GeneralHospitalPodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts for the full breakdown.
Here is enough to get you started.
It started in a third grade classroom. Willow Tait arrived at Port Charles Elementary in October 2018 and pretty quickly noticed that one of her students, a sweet kid named Aiden Spencer, was withdrawing from the other kids and not wanting to come to school. When she dug into it she realized he was being bullied by another student. That student turned out to be Charlotte Cassadine, Valentin's daughter and Nina's stepdaughter. And to make it a little more layered, Aiden and Charlotte were actually cousins through the Spencer family.
When Willow brought it to the parents, Nina showed up to the meeting, decided Willow was the problem, and had to be asked to leave. Valentin stayed and apologized. Nina went home and googled Willow's name.
What made it more complicated was that Nina was not entirely wrong in thinking that Willow had developed strong feelings for Charlotte. At one point, Willow told Nina to her face that with Nina as a stepmother, Charlotte had no chance. She called her a failure as a parent. So neither of them was handling it well.
Things boiled over at the Nurses' Ball in May 2019. Nina made a cutting remark about Willow not being able to take care of her own child. What Nina did not know was that Willow had given up a baby for adoption under circumstances that were genuinely awful, and that Shiloh, the leader of the Dawn of Day cult, was standing nearby and heard every word. He cornered Willow in the hallway and forced her to confirm she had been pregnant when she left the cult. The fallout from that moment followed Willow for a long time.
Nina eventually figured out what she had done. She read about Willow's custody case in the paper and connected the dots back to the Nurses' Ball. She tracked Willow down at Aiden's birthday party and apologized. Willow told her not to blame herself, that it probably would have come out eventually anyway. Nina said maybe they were not so different after all. It was a brief moment of goodwill between two people who had spent months making each other's lives harder.
Then on October 8, 2019, at Valentin and Nina's wedding, Sasha Gilmore broke down and admitted she was not Nina's biological daughter and that the whole thing had been a fraud. Nina had believed she had finally found her child. In an instant, it was gone.
Across town at Kelly's, Willow was sitting with a little boy named Wiley, quietly telling him she wanted to be his mother again now that Shiloh was dead and the threat to him had passed.
The two women knew each other only as a fired teacher and an overbearing parent who had made each other's lives difficult for the better part of a school year.
That is where Part 1 ends. Go listen to this week's episode of Pier 54 for the full breakdown of everything that happened between these two women in 2018 and 2019. Find us at GeneralHospitalPodcast.com or search Pier 54 - A General Hospital Fan Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
On Monday, we are back with our recap of this week's General Hospital episodes, and next week, we return with Part 2 of the Nina and Willow story.
We'll meet you at the pier.
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