You do NOT allow your children to feel responsible for your emotional welfare.
I'm canonically huge on the parent/child emotional separation (see my distaste for early Gilmore Girls and residual Veronica Mars issues), and I can't agree more.
Which brings me to another fictional thought. I do know IRL a mother who considers her teenaged son to be really friendly-I-know-his-secrets close, and it turns out he's got some of the
nastiest
legal secrets, and she has no idea. Does the precocious kid who's buds with mom and/or dad turn out to be male, often? I'm thinking of Jack and Bobby a little, but he's
not
her friend, even though he parents with her and interacts with her as a peer.
eta:
I remember the oldest daughter being angry about it until she meets her true love.
Okay, OW.
What's a false tabloid?. Cause I don't understand at all.
Yeah, but Gud, in the context of that post, it makes no sense at all.
I'm not shocked. She's taking a lot of abuse for anything and everything she says over at Salon, too, and it doesn't seem proportionate to what she's actually musing about.
It feels like a lot of what she's currently touching on are the things that pass through your mind late at night, but there's some sort of assumed compact not to speak of them out loud or even think about them too hard. Things that to me feel like musings, not many steps above idle thoughts, are clearly being taken as pronouncements. To me that seems connected to the MotherLoveCult stuff, and a general humorlessness that seems to surround a lot of touchy issues these days. I really feel for her regarding the drubbing she's taking - I was shocked at the reactions to her first couple of Salon columns.
fictional thought. I do know IRL [...] Does the precocious kid who's buds with mom and/or dad turn out to be male, often?
Wait, in real life or in fiction? Because for fiction, you've just cited Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, and in real life, I know that I, for example, am friends with my mom. So all I'm coming up with is girls. But I don't watch Jack and Bobby.
In Jack & Bobby, not only does he
co-parent his brother, he parents his mother.
It's royally dysfunctional, and he
knows and resents her for it, even as he
does it.
But I would not say he's buds with her.
Really? I don't get the vibe that he likes her. They don't share many close and upbeat moments, and if they do, they're likely to be shared parenting moments, not actual friendship.
No. I missed a not in there that I put in on edit.
I think he resents her more than he feels like, "hey! Friend!"
