Adults, Parents and Children

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Title: Adults, Parents and Children
Major Warnings: Discussion of parental neglect, mention of parental abuse
Summary: Taking the Transactional Analysis framework established in my previous post and using it to take a look at the other Parental figures in Verona's life: Lucy and her mom. Spoilers up to Leaving a Mark 4.2

Alright, alright, alright! We finally have the dubious pleasure of Verona’s mom, and it sure is something! Plenty of words have already been spilled about her and her relationship with Verona, and I want to get in while the getting’s good.

Just like last time, when I talked about Verona’s Dad, I will be making use of the theory of Transactional Analysis [TA] to look into what happened with Verona’s mom.

Once again, I want to make it clear that I am not a licensed or accredited therapist, and I have not studied anything related to this subject. I am just an interested layman, and everything I have to say on the matter should be read with this taken into account. I get my information on TA from this video series made by TheraminTrees (who is, to my knowledge, an actual therapist), and I highly recommend watching the first five videos of that series.

If you don’t want to watch those, let me give you a recap of what we discussed last time:

Transactional Analysis suggests there are three ego states (Parent, Adult, and Child), each with their own characteristics. Interactions between different people are considered ‘transactions’ between the ego states of those people. Stable transactions are complimentary (Parent to Child, Adult to Adult, Child to Parent), and unstable transactions are crossed. Unstable transactions can be resolved by either an ego state Switch or by the transaction ending.

It is possible for more complex transactions to be happening on multiple levels, where the people involved are pretending to have one transaction on a surface level, while actually having another on a deeper level. See, as an example, Verona and her dad, where her dad is a whiny Child pretending to be a strict Parent, forcing Verona to be a responsible Parent pretending to be a lazy Child.

(To give a quick update on that situation, we saw in 3.1 that Verona refused to play responsible Parent any longer and ended up forcing herself to be a Child and just scream at him. We see in this chapter that she’s continuing this pattern, where she’s using the surface-level Child role to yell at her dad while setting Parent-style boundaries. This is forcing her dad into a more Parent-role, which he’s terrible at, and that’s why Verona can get away with it.)

But we’re not here to talk about Verona’s dad today. No, today we’re talking about the other one.

Verona is not an Adult

Verona’s mother does not force Verona to play Parent for her. She does not force Verona to be the responsible one in her life, or treat her like her personal maid, gardener, housekeeper and all-around servant to her emotional needs. She does not end up grinding down Verona’s personality and leave her a passionless husk who exist only in relation to herself. This is good.

The primary purpose of TA as a method of therapy is to strengthen an individual’s Adult state, so they are more able to make choices free from the emotionally manipulative pulls of the people around them, and result in more equal transactions on the whole, and, on the surface, Verona’s mom is certainly treating her as such.

They’re chatting, Verona’s mom allows her to make her own decisions, pushes back on some, but doesn’t give her own opinions more weight than Verona’s. On the surface, this seems like a very pleasant transaction.

But below the surface, there is nothing.

You see, the purpose of TA therapy is to strengthen the Adult state in adults. Verona is absolutely not an adult, she is a child, and she has a child’s needs, and a need to be a Child, yet, when she tries:

“It’s really not great,” Verona said. “He’s kind of intense, and Lucy isn’t even coming over because of it. So I was thinking, like, I don’t want to leave my friends, or school, or anything like that, but how possible would it be for you to move closer?”

“It’s not really a consideration, Verona.”

“But if you moved closer and I moved in with you?”

“No.”

When Verona tries to reach out, as a Child, to finally have that one transaction that she really wants to have, that she needs to have, to finally have an actual goddamn Parent around, Verona’s mom refuses. And not in any gentle, understanding sort of way, she straight up shuts it down, hard.

Verona’s mom has no interest in being a Parent to Verona. She’s more interested in treating Verona as an Adult friend she occasionally goes shopping with, which is absolutely cruel to Verona. She is in an abusive situation, desperate for a way out, and her mother’s response is, essentially ‘lmao that sucks, anyway, bye!’

Sure, if Verona’s mom were a way out for her, she wouldn’t have been in this situation by the start of this story already, but, damnit, I got my hopes up, and the woman let me down.

So Verona’s dad forces her to be a Parent, Verona’s mom forces her to be an Adult, is there anyone around that allows Verona to be a Child?

Lucy’s Parenting

That’s right, I didn’t forget I said I’d talk about Lucy in the context of TA last time, and this is the best place to make a start with that.

We see in chapter 2.4 that Lucy is well aware that she’s often forced to be the responsible one within the trio, and that this is something she struggles with in its own right. It’s something she slips into easily, and Verona points out that she’s good at it, but it’s not something that makes her happy. Lucy plays Parent because she thinks she has to, not because she wants to.

And, well, she’s usually a Parent especially to Verona, and, well, that’s Verona’s doing in large part, isn’t it? Verona’s desperate for any transaction in which she actually gets to be the carefree Child that she’s been denied in every other part of her life. It’s something she needs to give her some semblance of actual happiness, but in 2.4, Verona is confronted with the fact that being the Parent to Verona’s Child does not make Lucy happy.

Verona loves Lucy, she wants Lucy to be happy, and it comes as a really unfortunate shock to Verona that, maybe, what Verona feels she needs to be happy in her day-to-day is making Lucy unhappy.

Lucy even notes that she might be reminding Verona of her dad some, and there is something to this. Her father presents himself as a strict Parent also, but with him that’s an act. When Lucy takes on the role of strict Parent, it’s genuine. She’s not actually demanding Verona switches to Parent herself, just that she doesn’t lean too hard on Lucy.

Lucy’s Parent, then, is much healthier for her than those times Verona is forced into that role around her dad (and it doesn’t grind her down the way it does Verona), and the reason for that, I think, is that Lucy actually has a good parent at home, who does meet Lucy’s emotional needs, and serves as a healthy example of what a Parent should look like.

But Lucy has her own problem with the Child role. Verona’s problem with the role is that she’s not allowed to be a Child anywhere in her life. Lucy’s problem with it is that she doesn’t allow herself to be a Child. Of course, her friends rely on her as the ‘responsible one’, but Lucy has trouble allowing herself to be a Child around her own mom, too.

This is a lot of what her conversation with Booker in 2.8 was about. Her expressing her frustrations about just how quickly and easily she finds herself being the responsible, or even controlling Parent, and Booker making suggestions for her to just relax, and ways to allow herself to be a Child from time to time.

And she did that during the party this chapter, and the moment she embraces her inner Child, something goes wrong.

I hope she doesn’t beat herself up over it too much.