Soo I wanna talk about Adam's mom. I'm interested in your interpretation or if you can rec fics that deal with her? I don't know that I am going to agree with you completely but I just want to discuss her with someone who knows anything if that makes sense.
I’m going to try to be civil about this conversation, but I’ll be honest with you: I’ve seen a lot of really bad discourse about this subject, and it is intensely upsetting to me as an abuse survivor that people rely on stereotypes to inform Adam’s mother’s character instead of on what the books give us.Â
So I’m going to give you an outline of what we see from Adam’s mother in the actual books.
This is the quote that people refer to the most often in terms of insisting that Adam’s mother is also being abused:
Gansey shot back, “You think your plans are going to keep working when you miss school and work because you let your dad pound the shit out of you? You’re as bad as her. You think you deserve it.”
The basic, simplistic reading of this is to not only assume that Gansey means “You mother thinks she deserves to be abused”, but that Gansey is accurate in his assumption. This is a ridiculous reading because this exact same quote proves that Gansey has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to abuse. And it also ignores what happens immediately afterward:
Without warning, Adam slammed a small box of nails off the ledge beside him. The sound it made on the concrete startled both of them.
Adam turned his back to Gansey, his arms crossed.
“Don’t pretend you know,” he said. “Don’t come here and pretend you know anything.”
“Don’t come here and pretend you know anything.” So clearly, Gansey is absolutely wrong here. We get that from Adam, the one person who knows what this situation entails. Not from Gansey, who, as a plot point, does not understand what Adam is going through beyond an After School Special knowledge of abuse.Â
Here are some things about Adam’s mother from Adam’s POV, which is, to be honest, the only one that matters when discussing whether or not Adam’s mother is 1) abusive and/or 2) an abuse victim.Â
“Your mother was in your room today and she found something. Can you guess what it would be?”
Adam’s knees were slowly liquefying. He did his best to keep most of his Aglionby life hidden from his father, and he could think of several things about himself and his life that wouldn’t please Robert Parrish. The fact that he didn’t know precisely what had been found was agonizing. He couldn’t meet his father’s eyes.
Robert Parrish grabbed Adam’s collar, forcing his chin up. “Look at me when I’m talking to you. A pay stub. From the factory.”
“You lied to your mother about how much you made.”
There are a few ways to read this. One is that his mom was grabbing laundry or something and found the pay stub. The other is that she went into his room looking for a reason to give to his father. Whichever way you read it, she found this, and, knowing that Adam had lied to her about it, knowing that his father would hurt him for it, she handed that evidence over to his dad and told him what it meant.
This directly leads to Adam being permanently deafened because his father punches him and he smashes his head against the railing on his way down.
Out of his right ear, Adam heard his mother screaming at [Robert Parrish and Ronan] to stop. She was holding the phone, waving the phone at Ronan like that would make him stop. There was only one person who could stop Ronan, though, and Adam’s mother didn’t have that number.
Adam’s mother is not mentioned again in this scene until Ronan steps in to help Adam. She calls the police on the boy who stepped in to try to protect her son. She did not call an ambulance for Adam, who is described as being unable to stand, having difficulty processing thought, and staggering without someone holding him up. Adam is seriously and obviously messed up from this fall and it’s not the person who did it to him who has the police called on him.
For proof of how obviously messed up he is, this is what happens within five seconds of the police officer showing up:
“I’m okay,” Adam said.
The cop released his arm and then, as quickly, caught it again. “Boy, you’re not okay. Have you been drinking?”
Here, as Adam is described as swaying and staggering, barely able to form coherent sentences, he notes this:
His mother stood on the porch, watching him and the cop, her eyes narrowed. Adam knew what she was thinking, because they’d had the conversation so many times before: Don’t say anything, Adam. Tell him you fell down. It really was a little your fault, wasn’t it? We’ll deal with it as a family.
If Adam turned his father in, everything crashed down around him. If Adam turned him in, his mother would never forgive him. If Adam turned him in, he could never come home again.
“They’d had the conversation so many times before”–meaning that Adam has repeatedly gone to his mother for help, and she’s come back with this is your fault, isn’t it? every time, or at least often enough for Adam to have the speech memorized.
It is also very important to note that Adam does not once mention what his father is doing once the cops get there. The focus is all on Ronan, who is being arrested, and his mother, who is staring at him, narrowing her eyes at him, making it obvious that if Adam asks for the help he desperately needs, he will no longer have a home or a family.
So to recap in this scene, Adam’s mother
Goes out of her way to give his father a “reason” to hurt him
Calls the police on the boy who is defending her son, who is so unsteady on his feet because of his injury that he appears drunk, instead of on her husband, who beat her child to that point
Is actively non-verbally threatening Adam as he tries to do what I think is one of the bravest things anyone in this series does–press charges and save himself
Is shown to have been entirely complicit in the “this is your fault” brainwashing that Adam has grown up with
Is shown to have repeatedly denied Adam help when he’s asked for it
Moving on to the last bit of evidence people use to say that Adam’s mother was Definitely Also Abused, here’s the bit where Adam takes his father’s gun. Everyone is always saying “His dad would have used it on his mom! That means abuse!”
It was Adam’s father’s gun, and though he wasn’t sure his father would ever use it on his mother, he wasn’t taking the chance.
Compare this to the earlier mention of the gun:
“Why don’t you let Ronan teach you to fight? He’s offered twice now. He means it.”
“Because then he will kill me.”
“Wasn’t sure if it would be used” vs “He will kill me”. Adam takes the gun as a precautionary measure, not as one that he deems absolutely necessary.Â
The mentions of Adam’s mother throughout the rest of the series are largely that she refuses to speak to Adam when he goes to get his things (and his father would not have been present here, which knocks out that “she was too afraid to comfort him in front of his dad” defense), and that she refuses to show up for the trial.
There are other quotes that I could bring in about how Adam’s mother never loved him, never defended him, but those are quotes from other perspectives, and I think that what’s from Adam’s perspective of the situation says enough.
And here’s the negative space of it all: Adam never once mentions his mother being abused. Don’t you think, that if she was being abused, he would bring that up in one of the many conversations that him and Gansey have about Adam leaving his home? Don’t you think that “I can’t leave my mom defenseless, Gansey, let it go” would have been mentioned? Adam never, never mentions that his mother is being hurt.Â
What we get from Adam’s perspective is that she is complicit in his abuse, and that she is complicit in brainwashing him into believing that he should not get help, that he needs to deal with all of his problems on his own, that the bad things happening to him are his fault and not the fault of the grown man who is beating him or the grown woman who is turning a blind eye to it all.
It is incredibly, incredibly dangerous to assume that Adam’s mother is being abused with no textual evidence. It’s taking away from the fact that she is canonically abusive to Adam, to the point where he fears her reaction to him pressing charges more than he fears his fathers. It’s taking away from the fact that this is a set up that a lot of abused kids in real life have to deal with–with two parents who are abusing them, with people assuming that the mother is not complicit or is a better option for them to stay with because she’s? A woman? And stereotypes say that she’s probably also being abused?
That’s not fair to the kids who grow up in those situations; it’s not fair for them to see themselves in Adam and Adam’s situation and come online to see the same rhetoric that they have to hear about their own mothers–oh, she loved Adam, she was just afraid!–like, no. There is canonically no evidence that this woman ever cared about Adam, that she ever did or wanted to do anything to stop his abuse or even to tell him that it’s not his fault that this is happening to him.
So no, I can’t recommend you fics that have to do with Adam’s mom, because I find it genuinely disrespectful to abuse victims that people paint her as a sympathetic character in spite of everything that Adam, her victim, has said to the contrary.Â
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