sometimes home is where the heart is, eddie thought randomly. i believe that. old bobby frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. unfortunately, it’s also the place where, once you’re there, they don’t ever want to let you out.
myra kaspbrak can be interpreted as a bit of a joke sometimes. her dialogue is overly dramatic, the descriptions of her weight border on fat-shaming, and she’s literally eddie’s mother, part two. but it’s important for me to establish eddie’s marriage to myra as more than an oedipal farce, and instead as an emotionally abusive relationship in which myra manipulates and controls eddie, purposefully using his fears to keep him from realizing his true self.
first: eddie isn’t stupid. he knows he married his mother. and he does love myra and doesn’t feel any shame about her or for marrying her. his resentments are turned entirely inward. eddie repeatedly blames himself for not being brave enough to break things off with her, for not being brave enough to lose the aspirator, for not being brave enough to discover who he is outside of his mother. and myra knows this. she, like his mother, can see how eddie is tempted by bravery throughout his life and that, even when he can’t put a finger on what exactly he desires, he sometimes imagines himself running, away from myra, away from his mother, and away from the asthma in his head.
myra also knows that eddie is scared to make that leap and can be convinced he is delicate, too delicate to ever leave her, and so she goes out of her way to make his life comfortable. but comfortable isn’t enough to keep eddie from imagining. what myra does instead is weaponize eddie’s weaknesses, primarily his hypochondria and fear of the unknown, to invade his mind and maintain his destructive cognitive processes.
when eddie has to leave for derry, she is understandably concerned, but she immediately moves toward suggesting all the horrible things that could happen if he leaves. what if his cab driver gets lost? what they get into an accident? what if, what if, what if? myra voices the fears that she knows are already in eddie’s head, pressuring him to submit. and if he does, then it all rather conveniently is because of him and his needs rather than on her. it’s to the point that eddie wishes that mike could have called while myra was away so he could have snuck out, comparing the stress of leaving her to the three times he’d tried to leave his mother.
and eddie could speak up for himself, but myra has a plan for that as well. she knows he feels guilty for wanting to leave, not just for derry but for all the previous times he imagined a life without her, and she uses his guilt against him. she positions herself always as the dutiful, loving wife who only wants to protect him. what right does eddie have to be upset with her? no matter how loudly she cries or how desperately she tries to keep him in line, at the end of the day, she only wants to keep him safe and isn’t that exactly what eddie wants as well?
when eddie finally can’t take it anymore and yells at her to stop, that he has to go to derry, myra becomes the victim. she recoils and whispers and winces. she tells him she hates it when he yells, ignoring the manipulative theatrics of her crying that made him crack. eddie instantly feels guilty for not being kinder and gentler with her. he frames his outburst as something he “ had ” to do. because myra will not and does not listen until he is literally yelling. but even then he’s desperately trying not to use his aspirator because he knows “ she would see that as a weakness, one she could use against him. ”
eddie is afraid of myra, in a way. he’s afraid of hurting her, of even bruising her, in spite of his dim realization that she uses his weaknesses against him to control him. it’s to the point that, when he finally crosses the threshold of their apartment and finally takes those first steps toward derry, eddie is relieved. he knows he is heading toward danger, but the initial act of leaving myra is so freeing that his asthma disappears. the anxiety of derry will return the closer he gets, and yet even that pales in comparison to the fear he sometimes feels in his own home.
she kissed and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned. if we were in water, he thought, she’d drown us both.
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