My defense of Mothers--like the one in Other Desert Cities

I'm back from Fremont sooner than I expected to be, and I want to do something in honor of the 11th Annivesary of the Club T-M like making a new collage, collecting e-mails, or writing a story.

But the mother in Other Desert Cities is on my mind because last night when Javier, Evelyn, Tim, and I saw that play the mother was the character I liked the most other than Trip, and I wonder whether the audience, hearing the hateful things the other characters say about her, believes that she's really hateful.  Javier seems to have even though she, like him, is a Republican and Reagan supporter.  Not since the 1980s and Ordinary People have I come to the defense of such an unpopular mother.  (Why, I wondered then, did Judith Guest tell the story from the perspective of the father and the son but never from the mother?  We were supposed to see her a cold bitch, but I thought she was a mother in deep grief for the son she loved an feeling rejected by the other son, the one who survived the accident, as she reaches out to him in spite of her pain.)  In Other Desert Cities, we watch as the mother is insulted by the sister she's taken in:  "You're not an easy person.  I'd drop you too if I could." Later she says "Honey, I deserve a Notebel Preace Prize for lovig  you as much as I DO!  WHow do you love soeone who became someone else?...I love you as much as I can, honey.   But if you fuck your daughter over here the way you did Henry, I'll never let either of you live it down.

Brooke tells her mother (though we don't see this happeing) "You criticize and find fault in every last choice I make...You make it almost impossible for me to see the love in that.  All I see is a bully who hs lost touch with gentleness or kindness....I.  Can't.  Bear.. You." 

Of course, this is followed by Brooke's saying "I'm just like you."  But she means that in the sense of "I know who I am."