I think it’s more than loss of control, I think it’s about a loss of Identity through that loss of control.
My own mother had this exact crashout against me when I came out as trans and started hrt (as an adult)… almost beat for beat word for word….
I think there’s a few key moments being overlooked
- She claims to not want control, out of fear of perpetuating her own deficiencies
- The frequent self deprecation
- The phrase “maybe it’s just because I’m a mother”
- Her ultimate conclusion that her grief stems from her feelings not being considered.
I think that selfishness and a desire for control are absolutely accurate descriptions of her behavior and attitude, but I think maybe we should step beyond and ask where this belief system came from.
We live in a society that pushes motherhood on women, in part through a sort of deification of the role, (very often literally when you bring in how religion gets involved as well). Motherhood is treated as a sign of success, of a life well lived, and I think some women cling to that because the world has limited them so much they believe they have nothing else that makes them special.
It’s a process that sort of, gives them a narrow socially controlled avenue by which they can express themselves more freely, and see themselves more positively. They respond to that by making it their identity.
When this makes contact with the real world, you could accurately describe it as seeing your children as property, but on paper, in their heads that’s not where this came from. I think there’s this view that parents are given power and they exploit that control for their own benefit, (and that perhaps their love for their children is on some level a lie). But the desire for power or exploitation is not necessary to commit harm. I think genuinely loving parents replicate these destructive and exploitative mindsets simply by conforming to society.
Motherhood as an identity demands more than just taking care of one’s children, it demands that you shape them into good and respectable middle class drones members of society, and ties your own place in that society to your ability to complete this task. Functionally your children are your property yes, but the way that structure itself is by selling it as your children are a part of who you are and what your own value is as a person. Its a form of dehumanization wherein children are not to be seen as complete people, but as vessels for a societal ritual wherein love and care is transmuted into social control.
The reason that this moment is ultimately painful for her isn’t that she’s lost control of her pawn, it’s that she’s being confronted with a fundamental contradiction of her structure of reality.
She’s not stupid, she recognizes this is wrong, it’s obviously an abhorrent outcome that she’s perpetuating. She believes in (lowercase l) liberal values of adults* as equals. She recognizes that she is supposed to teach and believe these values, but also that she cannot reconcile them with her construction of motherhood.
Either she fails at motherhood by contradicting liberalism (lowercase l) and imposing control when she is not supposed to (it’s past when she’s allowed to need it, she’s expected to already have a “successful” mimetic replica by now), or she fails at motherhood by failing to replicate the model she was expected to replicate (which is also where the classism plays in).
The contradiction is in some ways a revelation, the fact that she is able to begin to confront at least the outlines of the forces of her world is exceptional I think, something we want to see. But ultimately she finds herself clinging to a way to restore the balance and return the cognitive dissonance into hiding, and decides on a rather nebulous excuse that her son is ultimately at fault for failing to consider her feelings instead of continuing her line of inquiry and asking why exactly she feels like he should be required to do that. Ultimately she tries to simply try to forget it’s there, her son seeking peace tries to let her.
But I think this is not the best approach, it’s not the path I chose when I was in this circumstance myself. The barrier is weakened here, this is the time to be relentless, to force confrontations with the cracks in the foundations. Because there is more than just selfishness here, there are good intentions built into a crooked structure of control by broad societal forces of control which can and should be fought against. When someone is starting to look at where the shadows are coming from is the best time to attack the chains keeping them in the cave.
Ultimately what we’re seeing here is fundamentally a function of the western middle class culture exposing itself in a bit of an obvious and interesting way. The middle class evolves like this because it’s rewarded and influenced to be like this because of Capital and Patriarchy. But it adapts to be able to be able to replicate without exposing the power structures beneath or necessitating a strong lust for power/control/domination, because this is required for it to remain memetically successful.
*but not children, never children. this would be easier if he was a child I think actually, because she wouldn’t have to recognize the contradiction. She would still be in control, and thus free from the expectation of self examination. She would be unambiguously in the right, and she would be able to restore the balance of her worldview by enacting the punishment and control it demands of her to perpetuate.
