What We'll Do To Spite Our Mothers

Is it okay to do blog posts on TV shows as long as Ms.Robbins is in love with the show?

Note: The underlined blue words are links to videos of scenes I'm talking about (my form of textual evidence) and the time in parenthesis refers to what part of the video it happens in.

My inspiration to write a blog post on My So Called Life came from here; please read it, it's amazing.

‎"Lately i can't even look at my mother without wanting to stab her. Repeatedly." (5:00-5:10)

Every girl has felt this way before. Don't even try to deny it. And it doesn't mean that you're insane or sadistic or homicidal-- it just mean that you're a teenager. Mother/daughter relationships are so complicated and so confusing and next to impossible to ever explain. What I love about Angela Chase from My So Called Life is that she always can for us. And if she can't explain something, she'll explain just why she can't seem to explain it. From obsessive friendships to the kind of love where he doesn't even know you exist, Angela describes every moment of female adolescence perfectly-- and she doesn't leave out mothers.

I don't think that you can leave out mothers in a TV show about being a 15 year old girl, because no matter how awful or wonderful, present or absent, protective or lenient your mother is, she will affect your teenage years in a huge way. Hands down, flat out. Because she's your mother.

When I saw the first episode of My So Called Life, I felt like someone had read my diary and made it into a script. I was Angela Chase and Patty Chase was my mother. No question about it. Just like Angela, my friends would exclaim how nice she was and just like Angela, I'd mutter that it was only because they were there. Just like Angela, I'd refuse to clean my room or eat a balanced meal because I knew that it would give my mother too much satisfaction. Like there was some war going on between us that I had to win and she didn't know about it, and maybe I didn't either. And lately when I look at her, I feel like stabbing her. Repeatedly. And half the time I don't even know why.

Just like Angela.

But sometimes, I have that knot in my stomach, that urge to run to my moms room and crawl into bed next to her and cry and cry and cry and not have to explain anything and for her to just hold me and make everything better again like mothers do.

Just like Angela.

I don't think that anyone purely hates or loves every aspect of either of their parents- just like no person is fully good or bad- it hits somewhere in the middle. Angela creates that perfect balance of feelings that everyone can connect to. She hates her mother, she loves her mother. She's introducing her to Jordan, she's not talking to her. She's listening to her, she's disobeying her. She misses her, she can't even stand the sound of her voice. She's being a moody, indecisive teenager.

And that's why I'm Angela and my mom is her mom. That's why every girl who's ever watched this show has immediately declared that, they too, were Angela more than anyone else who claimed the same, and that her mom was their mom more so than each anyone who might've thought the same. Because they each have at least one quality that cannot go unseen in any mother or daughter. Because Patty Chase is the dedicated, loving mother that's only human, that makes a million mistakes because of it, and that cares all too much if her daughter stays out late. Because Angela is all of us, she is the perfect example of a flawed, angry, blissful and at times, lost teenage girl. Because she shows us we're not alone. Ever.

How We Deal With Grief

The last few weeks of my reading life have been an absolute dream as I started and finished two of my now favorite books of all time- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. My month has been a marathon of beautiful writing. Although these two books are very different from one another in terms of genre, character-type and writing style, they do share one common and dominant theme- grief. Oskar experiences grief when his father is killed in 9/11, and Joan when her husband of 40 years dies of heart failure.

What struck me so immediately about the character of Oskar Schell was his matter-of-fact attitude and way about everything. Even his fathers death. And watching a nine year old boy not only lose his dad, but address it in the same way that he would address the weather report was almost more painful than if he had sobbed nonstop throughout the story. Because that was his way of dealing with grief- keeping it inside, not dealing with it. Oskar makes sure that everything is clean and tidy on the outside for people to see by not letting out the messy inside thoughts and words and actions and feelings which, I know from experience, is so much more painful. And you have to think about it- was Oskar making this concious decision? Was he choosing to keep it in for the sake of, say, his mom or grandma? No- he's nine years old, his dad just died- he doesn't know what to do or think or who to turn to. He's polite and smart and just not the kind of person who can lash out or break down or show people what he's really going through. He doesn't keep his father's last voicemail's a secret to spare his mother any more pain, he does it because he's terrified and confused and guilty. Because so much responsibility and so much agony has been placed on his tiny shoulders and he's only nine and the only way he knows to deal with grief is what automatically happens- and that's nothing. Because nothing happens if we don't make it happen, and Oskar, not knowing what to make happen, does nothing.

And so it stays inside.

And that's how he deals with grief.

And he's only nine.

And that breaks my heart.

Then there's Joan Didion, whose story is equally heartbreaking in a completely different way. Before I read this book, my theory was that grief was easier as you got older, as you came to expect and anticipate the deaths of friends and spouses who were, like you, nearing the ends of their lives. But this isn't true at all because as Joan says, when you're so in love, you don't see yourself as growing older,

"For Forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger".

She had spent two thirds of her life with this man, and just because he had to die, didn't make him actually dying any easier. When you come to depend on someone for everything, when you come to realize them as a literal part of you, when not a single day goes by that you don't see this person, talk to this person, touch this person, hug this person in 40 years, how big is the hole they leave behind? And how impossible is it to fill?

But what stands out the most, to me, about her book is that it's a book. That she relived and re-experienced every moment of this event and every feeling that followed for years to make this book. That she published it, releasing to the world her innermost thoughts in the most raw, personal, heartbreaking and beautiful way possible. That this is her way of dealing with grief- the only way she knows- writing.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden, to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind"

"Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

"Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant"

-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

And Joan Didion is so right.

Because no one expects death or grief- not how it really turns out to be, at least. And no one knows how to handle it when it does come.

Not even the seemingly most clever and scholarly nine year old boy that ever lived.

Not even the 70 year old woman who's intelligent and experienced and put together.

No one.

Because our minds use logic to make an image of what we think something will be like or feel like or look like, and there is nothing logical about grief. Because as much as we may plan or organize or try to control how our lives will play out, what happens happens. And when faced with crisis, it's hard to stick to your plans.