Practitioner Parenting

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Title: Practitioner Parenting
Major Warnings: Parental abuse, various bad parenting.
Summary: Taking a look at what separates bad parenting from abusive parenting, using Mrs. Ferguson as a case study. Spoilers up to Vanishing Points 8.4

Alright, alright, alright! I’m back to my old haunt! Bow has provided us with another bad parent, and this one’s got stuff for me to talk about.

Now, to establish what I’m doing here, I’m not going to be telling you that Mrs. Ferguson’s treatment of her son is bad. You already know this, because the text makes it painfully obvious, through Lucy’s perspective. What I want to do is dig into the exact things she’s doing, the effects they’ll have on her son long-term, and equip you with the language to understand and convey these feelings.

I should also note that there’s a difference between being kind of a shitty parent, and being outright abusive. I think Mrs. Ferguson can straddle that line, so I will be doing my best to point out when it’s one or the other so as to not confuse the two.

We start with the idea that Sol is embarrassed by his mom. This is, I think, pretty normal behaviour for a twelve-year-old. Previously endearing behaviour becoming embarrassing for your children is a difficult thing for parents to navigate, and 12-year-olds tend to be right on the cusp of that change, where they want to be taken more seriously and start to reject the ‘childish’ things from when they were younger.

Kids’ needs and wants not being taken seriously is a problem Pale touches on repeatedly, and it’s a problem in wider society. As a result, it’s likely a subject that I’ll touch on, here, but Mrs. Ferguson has a couple of more specific things going on that I want to focus on instead.

Like the fact that she made her son able to cause explosions by putting his hands together in a certain way when he was ten. That’s just kind of messed up. Awakening your kids before they’re able to fully understand what’s going on is already plenty messed up, but defining their career path (which is what specific practices can be seen as) at the age of ten is definitely a red flag.

In short: Stage moms are the worst.

It very nicely sets the tone for how Mrs. Ferguson sees and treats her son.

(We also get the beat of Mrs. Ferguson being surprised that Durocher is sitting in. I think Durocher knew exactly what Mrs. Ferguson was like, and decided to put herself here to support Sol somewhat.)

And then her lesson starts:

“Those of you who have been attending for a while may remember me from two years ago, I did a week-long series after a Storm not too far from here. I’m a career elementalist, semi-retired adventurer-hyphen-explorer, mercenary, monster hunter, writer of two textbooks, consultant for police on weird events they’d rather not get involved with, and, of course, most challenging of all, I’m a mom.”

She’s a mommy blogger. Considering her motherhood her greatest challenge, while her son is in the room is already plenty embarrassing. Especially knowing what follows, this is her establishing that Sol will play a big part in the class she’s teaching, which she has not told him about.

“This is the first year I get to teach a class with my son attending. Sol!? Where are you? Looking through the benches, Sol? Sol! Solarisse Blaze Ferguson, I hope you’re in this class!”

Sol sat up and put his hand up.

“There you are!” his mom gushed. “Come on, come up to the front, you can help with the class. I hope you haven’t been having so much fun you’ve forgotten everything you know.”

She immediately puts him on the spot in front of the entire class, using his full name to embarrass him further, and, in true practitioner fashion, making him a part of this piece of theatre, this little act she’s putting on.

And we see what I think is her biggest flaw as a parent: systematically undermining Sol by repeatedly questioning his ability.

(We also get a little beat of her treating Others like shit, but hey, Practitioners.)

“Shamanistic practices are struggling with a modern paradigm shift. Technomancy is modern but has no roots. But elemental practices have been around from an early era, and we’re still going strong today. We may even be stronger. Yay for global warming, am I right, Sol baby?”

“Yeah,” Sol stood with his back to the stage, his mother a few feet behind him. He sounded and looked like he wanted to die.

She casually peppers her lesson with these small moments of further undermining her son. In this case by infantilising him, making him look like a child in front of people he wants to respect him. It’s humiliating. I don’t think it’s humiliating on purpose, she just hasn’t adjusted to the fact that her 12-year-old is a person with his own wants and needs.

“Some say elementals are indistinguishable from spirits, but this isn’t correct. Elementals and elemental practices are the work the spiritual does, channeled through strict physical laws, making contact, sometimes violent contact with our world. Spirits govern, but elementals are the doers. It is an excorporate school of practice. What does that mean, Solisse?”

“Makes stuff,” Sol answered.

“Don’t be sullen. Come on, up on stage. Come on, don’t make everyone wait. Up, up. You couldn’t have combed your hair?”

Sol shrugged.

The embarrassing part here isn’t that she’s criticising the way his hair looks (wanting your kids to look presentable doesn’t have to be bad), it’s the fact that she’s doing it in public. In turn, that shows that she hasn’t even talked to him before this class, and hasn’t discussed with him that she wants him to help with her class.

There’s also the part where she casually makes him responsible for everyone else not getting their lesson, and guilts him to get him to hurry up in a way that I think is… pretty common in parents, but no less shitty for its commonality. It’s an easy lever to pull in kids, and many people don’t treat kids as people.

“I’ve missed you, honey,” she told him, reaching up to sort out the gelled locks of hair at the front of his hairline. Sol gave the room of students sitting in benches a sidelong look. “Excorporate? Full sentence, please.”

Way too intimate when he’s standing in front of an audience. Also common parent behaviour, and not something I think is really bad, but still something she should stop doing. Also, this constant chastising of him on even the most minor of slip-ups only further undermines him in front of this audience, and therefore the spirits, which harms his self-confidence.

“Our summoned friend at the side of the stage. Would you invigorate it?”

Sol looked over at the dimming spirit and then down at the paper.

“No pressure, really,” she told him, putting hands on his shoulders from behind him, while the eyes of every student present pressured him. “But don’t let it go out while you’re reading.”

Honestly, someone could’ve called her out on that ‘no pressure’ comment and gainsaid her, even without the audience present.

“I don’t know,” Sol told her. “Is it this one?”

She looked over his shoulder, frowned, then said, “Don’t ask me. Have you been keeping up with the reading over your school break here?”

“Some.”

“Then if you don’t know, it’s your own fault. Figure it out, now. It’s dying, by the way.”

And here we’ve finally reached the main thing that made me want to write about Mrs. Ferguson. This little segment right here is a perfect showcase of how she sees and treats her son.

He is her trophy. She isn’t inviting him to show off, here. She is using him to show off her own skills as a parent. If he succeeds, that is not his success, it’s hers, but if he fails, that is his failure, not hers.

She does not let him have any victories, only losses, which undermines his standing with the spirits, which is a metaphor for, and directly results in, a lack of confidence on his part. She isn’t building him up, she’s just dropping him into the deep end and expecting to receive praise for herself when he figures out how to swim, and will chastise him if he doesn’t.

This is absolutely abusive, even if it’s not purposefully malicious (and I don’t think it is).

Sol’s mother folded her arms. “An echo this angry is better termed a wraith. Nasty influences are mixed into it. You’ll need to summon it.”

“I know. I’m naming it as a prelude to summoning it.”

“Safeguards? What are they teaching you at this school? Sorry, Marie, I know you try, but you’re only one person.”

And when he starts solving the problem she dropped in his lap, she doesn’t so much criticise his methods to challenge him and build him up, she directly calls his ability into question, insults him and talks past him before he has a chance at defending himself.

She also insults the rest of the school, which isn’t a very good teaching method, either. She’s letting her desire to show Sol off interfere with her ability to teach, if she had that ability to start with.

We’ll see exactly how her treatment of Sol is contrasted with Durocher’s in a moment, but first!

“I’m pretty disappointed Sol,” Mrs. Ferguson said.

Sol solves her problem, but, as we find out in a minute, he didn’t do it in the exact way Mrs. Ferguson wanted, and instead of praising him for his ingenuity and then saying what she’d actually had in mind, she undermines him yet again, and again in front of the peers he wants to impress. Don’t do that.

“Carry on, Sol,” Durocher spoke up.

Durocher, though, does not undermine him, and lets him keep going, which implicitly gives him the victory that follows. Durocher’s the best.

“That was not the choice I wanted you to make, Sol baby.”

“It wasn’t the right answer,” Mrs. Durocher said, reclining on the stairs that led up to the left side of the stage. “But it’s a right answer.”

This contrast is shown at its best here. Mrs. Ferguson denies him his victory, and while she doesn’t say he’s wrong (because he wasn’t), she does undermine him yet again by infantilising, which Durocher promptly puts a stop to, by acknowledging this as his win.

“I hear you, Marie, and I disagree. If you have a multiple choice question, you’ll only get the point if you pick the most correct answer. There was another choice that was far more elegant, efficient, and economical, than using a hard-to-acquire wraith.”

“What was your thought process, Sol?” Mrs. Durocher asked.

And when Mrs. Ferguson tries to take that win away from her son (for some reason), Durocher circumvents her and just lets Sol reinforce the correctness of the choice he made. Because Durocher is the best.

“That a security guard working an evening shift would have ways to see at night. Like a flashlight or headlamp.”

“You were right. Good job. Now please don’t let it kill my students.”

Even that final statement is implicitly putting the power in Sol’s hands, in a way his mother never quite manages. She reinforces him, acknowledges him as a capable individual and lets him have the responsibility he summoned. The framing here is completely different than it was before, because Durocher makes him look impressive, rather than childlike and incapable.

This is also why Mrs. Ferguson objected. In her wider presentation, Durocher is undermining her parenting (which she considered her greatest challenge). She deserves it.

“Honey, no,” Mrs. Ferguson said, sounding exasperated. “I guess you’re only twelve, after all.”

When Sol encounters a challenge in his approach, Mrs. Ferguson immediately treats this as a defeat on his part, and infantilises him yet again.

(How much is this because she realises it won’t be her victory if he succeeds now? I’ll leave that to you.)

Mrs. Durocher walked over to Sol, carrying a flashlight that resembled what the Other had held, metal and long. Sol took it, and, hesitating for a second, wrapped the lanyard and laminated I.D. card around it. The card struggled every step of the way, moving of its own volition.

“Authority, Sol,” Durocher’s voice was quiet, but Lucy could hear with the earring. Then again, it was Durocher speaking, so maybe everyone heard.

“Uhh-”

“Exercise your Self.”

In direct contrast to this, Durocher supports him, acknowledges the challenge and reminds him of what he already knows, bolstering his confidence to help him overcome that challenge. She also doesn’t do this out loud, so she doesn’t embarrass him.

Again, Durocher makes him look cool and impressive (which we know is vital in the practice), while Mrs. Ferguson undermines him:

“Willie doesn’t like youths,” Mrs. Ferguson told Durocher.

“Too bad for Willie,” Durocher said.

In the context of the practice, this is really bad parenting. Why would you remind the spirits of reasons your son should fail while he’s succeeding? It’s really shitty. Durocher puts a stop to that, too, and, again, makes Sol look (and feel, no doubt) badass.

“A little scary, baby?” Mrs. Ferguson asked. “I’m sorry, I asked too much of you. If Mrs. Durocher hadn’t been here, what would you have done?”

And Mrs. Ferguson continues to try to take this victory away from her son, even impugning herself a little, just to infantilise him more.

“More explosions.”

“While it’s crawling all over you?”

Lady, he won, let him have it, and stop criticising him for defaulting to explosions when that’s the ability you literally tattooed onto his hands.

“The lesson,” Mrs. Durocher said, putting a hand briefly on Sol’s shoulder before returning to her seat on the stairs.

Durocher, yet again, comes to Sol’s rescue (I think this is the third time), and stops his mom from undermining him.

But there’s no saving Sol from what Mrs. Ferguson does next.

Now, is there a student named Raquel present? Raquel Musser?”

Heads of students around the room turned. Even if nobody actually pointed, the sheer number of eyes that fixed on Raquel made it pretty darn clear that there was.

“Would you come up on stage, dear?” Mrs. Ferguson asked.

Raquel rose to her feet, and because she was closest to Mrs. Durocher, had to slip past the woman who sat on the stairs to get to the stage.

“I’d like to get to know my son’s schoolmates and friends. I’ve heard your name, I’d like your help for the demonstration, if you please.”

I’m cheating a little when jumping to my conclusion here, because Bow confirmed it on Discord, but how do you imagine Mrs. Ferguson heard Raquel’s name, if not from picking up that Sol has something of a crush on her?

That makes this really awkward, especially on top of the fact that Raquel and Sol were on opposite sides of the civil war that literally just ended.

“At the very opposite end to the storm, we have another vessel for elements. And it’s one that is critical to master if we’re to direct the elements, make good use of celestial and crude elemental diagrams, or even host the elementals in our own bodies for brief periods of time, to channel power or withstand a storm such as the one depicted now. The human body. You are a very pretty young lady, Raquel. You seem to be in good health, fit. Sol?” Sol looked at his mother with that frozen poker face and those dead eyes.

“All of us, in ways both subtle and obvious, have slight affinities for certain elements. Sometimes we even give it away.”

“I like to think I give very little away, Mrs. Ferguson,” Raquel told her.

“If you’d face my son? Sol, stand here?”

And Mrs. Ferguson is absolutely trying to set Sol up with Raquel here, and Lucy, at least, seems to have picked up on Sol’s feelings on the matter. So this is just straight up public humiliation of her son. She probably thinks she’s being nice and helpful, but not discussing this with him first is unconscionable, and I really wish he didn’t have to deal with it.

“Describe her,” his mother said. “As detailed as possible, now. Every little thing can be a sign of the elements and elementals she has affinity for. Do you know, by the way, Raquel? Have you worked it out for yourself?”

“I have.”

“Good, then that makes checking Sol’s answers easier.”

So he makes her describe his crush in as much detail as possible in front of the whole class, as an academic exercise she’s already undermining his attempt at. It’s mortifying.

Hilarious, as a reader, mind, but mortifying.

“Hurry up. If you take too long, we won’t have time for everyone here to do practical exercises in the blasting field behind the school.”

“Yeah,” Raquel told Sol. “Please hurry. This is awkward.”

And that’s just plain cruel. It’s a miracle nobody in the audience has sniggered yet. Siding with Sol when it’s him and his mom makes sense, but once Raquel is in the mix, I figured a split would happen and some would laugh at Sol out of empathy with Raquel.

Thankfully, we don’t have to be present for most of Sol’s horrible experience here, but I do want to pull out the following:

“Excuse me! Thank you! I’d like to very deliberately ignore the events of this past week and focus on learning, please. Sol is making a commendable effort at describing the beautiful Ms. Musser, noting she’s dressed comfortably for warm weather. That leads us to natural body temperatures-”

“Shut up, nobody really cares about that,” Fernanda declared. “I think they found Alexander, and Wye’s like, the only guy that’s one hundred percent in Alexander’s corner. He didn’t look happy, so something happened.”

Fernanda telling Mrs. Ferguson to shut up was remarkably cathartic.

Anyway, if you’re a parent, try not to be like Mrs. Ferguson, and if you’re a kid with Mrs. Ferguson as a parent… I’m so sorry.