I really, truly cannot believe the amount of anti-Mary sentiment going around right now, just from what I’ve seen in the tags of my own posts about the episode. People are calling her selfish, arrogant, ungrateful, a bad mother… I don’t even know where to begin with this, but I’m going to try.
Mary left for her own well-being. Her emotional and mental well-being. In her eyes, she’s just lost her husband and both of her little boys, not to mention the entire world in which she existed. She’s going through massive amounts of grief right now, probably with some PTSD thrown in on top- we’ve been shown that she remembers being burned, and I can’t imagine that was a fun experience.
Making a choice that puts your own needs first is not selfish. It’s self-care. She has every right to want some time to herself to sort things out, and people keep forgetting to mention what she said about being around adult Sam and Dean- they’re just making her pain worse, for reminding her of every day she lost with the little boys they used to be. It’s entirely fair and reasonable for her to need time alone to try to work through some of her feelings and her mourning.
Yes, her decision hurt the boys. Does that mean she’s a bad person for making it? No, it doesn’t; this Sam and Dean are effectively strangers to her, and to be perfectly blunt, she doesn’t owe them anything. Whether they’re intending to or not, they’re putting a lot of pressure on her just by existing, really (how would you feel if two strangers claiming to be your sons went around calling you “Mom” all the time?), because she’s being forced into the role of “mother” to the two of them while she’s still busy mourning the loss of the sons she does remember.
Still think she was being selfish? Consider this: Sam walked away from his family to go to Stanford for his own mental and emotional well-being. His decision hurt both John and Dean, but it was the best for him in the long-run because hunting wasn’t a good place for him to be at the time. Unlike Mary, he had a deep relationship with the two people he left behind… but he still didn’t owe it to them to stay regardless of the effect on his own well-being.
Was Sam selfish then, too?
It’s not selfish to take care of yourself, and it’s not fair to put Sam and Dean’s emotional issues on Mary when she barely knows either of them. That isn’t her responsibility, certainly not when she’s going through so much herself. Give the woman some goddamn breathing room while she comes to terms with everything that’s happened to her. Jesus.
