a meta about william's mother and his relationship with her (or lack thereof) and his general feelings toward maternal figures? if you want. pls and thank you.
meta prompts. | ACCEPTING
will’s mother left before he turned two years old, before he had any tangible memories of her. everything he knows about her is secondhand from his father, but he knows more or less the circumstances: she got pregnant with him out of wedlock, right out of high school, and her parents rushed her into marrying his father in an attempt at maintaining propriety. the pressure and what will came to recognize, once he was old enough, to most likely be untreated postpartum depression took too much of a toll on her, and she left his father to raise him alone. his father resented her for this, a sentiment will was naturally exposed to throughout his childhood, along with plenty of pity from strangers about the fact that he had to grow up without her. when he was very young, his innate tendency toward mimicry of the people around him made him idealize the idea of having a mother, as that was what all the children he knew had and what everyone seemed to think he should have, and he would come up with all sorts of stories of what it would be like to have a “normal” family.
ultimately, though, he never had any real connection to something he had never had. as he says himself, the typical idea of family was always an ill-fitting suit to him. motherhood as a concept and maternal figures are alien to him, something he can understand conceptually—or empathetically—but means nothing to him on a personal level. there’s a reason alana’s more or less immediately able to recognize that there must be a “mother” leading the lost boys and the idea doesn’t occur to will at all—he has no intuitive context for mother-child relationships. he can connect with the lost boys immediately—as alana says in the script, a loner feeling like a stranger in his own home, seeking connection that he never had with his “real” family? he’d have been a perfect candidate if he were 25 years younger—but not to the idea that the would have bonded to a maternal figure. it’s not instinctive to him at all.
out of some desire for closure he did try to find his mother when he was a young man, but she had died almost a decade prior. he feels some lingering regret that he never at least met her (on some level he has still internalized the concept of a nuclear family as ideal, even as an adult) but he doubts there would have been any genuine benefit if he had, and suspects that had he attempted to reconnect with her it would have only brought the bitterness he was exposed to from his father to the surface.
