#tuesday of the other june
Huh
Do you think the fact that we’ve had three movies, two of which are in years back to back that talk about unrealistic expectations placed upon the shoulders of children from their parents who also experienced it but come to terms with it in the end and learn to accept themselves and their children and deals with generational trauma says something?
That’s fine and all but what I DON’T like with movies like this is how the parent in question just CHANGES at the climax and everything is all better after that. That’s now how RL works. Toxic parents do NOT shed behaviors like this so easily. Many NEVER EVER admit that they were wrong in how they treated their children (how many Latinx people said NO Abuela they knew would ever admit being wrong like in Encanto? A LOT!)
I have a very fractious relationship with my mother. I don’t like hearing about Mothers Day. I prefer to be NC as much as possible, even though she has nothing but love for me and my siblings. But it was a love tainted by control, bullying and narcissism. For being a good mother, my mum expected nothing less than to be the center of her childrens’ worlds. That did not happen, for any of us.
Sometimes, no matter what their intention, parenting is done WRONG and has lifelong damaging effects. Animated movies make it seem like it can all be forgiven with one big event. And for those of us who HAVE toxic parents, it can. well, HURT to see these families on screen pop that big generational trauma zit and they all move forward happy and healing, knowing that we in the real world will NEVER know how that feels.
Because reality is a bitch, real parents WON”T change and trauma WON’T heal like cinema magic,
I hurt myself again and again and again, just hoping that one day my mother will turn around and see me–not the idea she has of me, but the actual me who lives and breathes and fights so hard to stay alive–and love me anyway.
And I know she never will.
But I keep trying.
I have a similar feeling in regards to my own father.
But my thought is this:
If the hope and ideal for those parents recognizing the harm they did to their families can’t be shown in a fantasy… if it can’t be modeled there…
Then where can it be?
This reminds me about how from the 1970s through the 1990s, almost all works of fiction about bullying, even those praised as highly realistic, had the bullying stop at the end of the book/episode. Either the adults find out and punish the bully or the target kid yells at the at the bully, and it stops. This is also not what happens in real life. I remember feeling like there was no solution But now we’re seeing some awareness that the solution is to encourage the target kid to fight back and to present a unified adult message that the bully is the one doing something wrong. Maybe one day we’ll see a solution to generational trauma and realize things only seemed impossible because we were trying to do it backwards.
