Okay, let’s talk about Beth.
I think the fandom tends to forget how fucking young she is.
Beth got pregnant with Summer when she was seventeen. Canonically, Summer is seventeen. That means Beth can’t be more than 35 in the pilot. At the risk of sounding like an old fart: dude, she’s just a baby.
Let’s see what we can infer from this information…
Did you guys know that the prerequisites for veterinary school and medical school are pretty much identical? Basically, it’s four years of undergraduate biology and chemistry, with maybe some math and physics thrown in for fun.
With this in mind, it’s likely that Beth still planned to go to medical school after she had Summer. We know that Summer is Beth’s favorite child (Morty’s Mindblowers). On top of that, there’s canonical evidence to support that Beth had a pretty big hand in raising baby Summer, while Jerry may have had more of an influence on Morty. Remember this little exchange in Raising Gazorpazorp?
Morty: What do I do if it cries?
Beth: Then you put it down and let it cry itself out.
Jerry: Yeah, right. We tried that technique on Summer, and she’s gonna end up stripping, isn’t she? Yes, she is; she’s gonna strip for attention because she was denied it.
Beth: Stop filling it with your own insecurity! You’re gonna turn it into Morty - uhh, more - more - more of you!
This suggests that Beth kept baby Summer at home during the day while Jerry worked. It’s easy to imagine Beth taking night classes at the local university, studying like mad to keep a competitive GPA, and justifying her indifference to Summer as “good parenting.”
Beth has Morty when she’s about twenty. This falls a little into headcanon territory, but I think that Beth was a year ahead of her peers and probably started college at seventeen. I’m going to say she’s a junior in college when Morty is born.
I think the show makes it pretty obvious that Morty is a mistake. If you really want to get dark, I kind of like the idea of Jerry sabotaging Beth’s birth control in order to get her pregnant because he’s resentful of her desire to go to medical school. He sees it as abandonment or some shit. But that’s just a personal theory. Either way, I think it’s clear that Beth Smith didn’t want to be saddled with another kid.
She probably didn’t want to be saddled with the first.
Making it through medical school with a toddler is a fucking challenge. Making it through medical school with a toddler and a baby, and a husband who is nebulously supportive at best; well, Beth’s a smart woman. She knows an impossibility when she sees one.
Beth is twenty years old, and her dreams have been shattered by her husband and children. I’m sure Jerry makes her feel pretty guilty about how much their family would sacrifice if she continued to pursue her goal of being a surgeon.
(Four years, Beth, and then five more years of residency! The kids would be teenagers! And how are we going to pay the bills???)
Beth settles on vet school for several reasons. First of all (and you better believe she tells Jerry this), what the hell is she going to do with a bachelor’s degree in biology? Teach high school? Even Jerry knows that’s off the table.
But Beth’s already got the prerequisites for acceptance into vet school. Unlike medicine, there’s no residency required to practice as a vet, just four years of graduate study. Some of that is clinical rotations, a better schedule balancing family life and school. Beth tells herself that being a vet is the same as being a doctor; after all, humans are just primates. Besides, there are less than one tenth as many vet schools as there are med schools in the United States - it’s just as competitive, more competitive, even, to be a vet than it is to be a doctor. Sure, she’ll take a pay cut, but she’ll rack up considerably less student loans.
Beth convinces herself that it will all balance out.
She’s a competitive student with a stellar GPA. At barely 22 years old, Beth is accepted into one of the top veterinary programs in the nation, no problem. Jerry pretends to be proud. They don’t even have to move far from Muskegon, but Jerry takes a lower paying position that allows him to take care of the kids while Beth attends class.
Summer is five years old and startlingly independent. Already, she despises her father. Jerry tells himself that he’s always wanted a son anyway. Morty is young and impressionable, and Beth is never around.
“It’s just you and me, buddy!”
Beth finishes school in four years. She’s 26, Summer is nine, Morty is five. She takes a job in a clinic, and for a while, things are good.
But when Beth turns 29, something inside her snaps. Her twenties are gone. Here she is, mindlessly writing antibiotic orders and spaying cats. Summer is a preteen, Morty is whatever he is. Jerry got a promotion at work, despite that useless civics degree… and Beth?
She briefly entertains the idea of returning to medical school, but dismisses it instantly. Her classmates would be so much younger. They’d find out about her background as a vet, and they’d laugh at her. Jerry would whine incessantly. It feels too much like starting over.
So, Beth decides on the next best thing.
“I’ve applied for a residency program,” she tells Jerry one evening over a glass of wine.
Three years, she promises. Three years, and then I’m done for good. Equine Surgery, she tells Jerry. It’s prestigious, the highest paying specialty in veterinary medicine.
“We’ll have to move!” Jerry protests. Beth justifies it by saying that the salary for horse surgeons is highest in the nation in the northeast.
It’s surgery, she tells herself. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Horses are big mammals, just like humans are big mammals.
They move to Washington. Jerry takes (yet another) pay cut. Beth is 30. Summer is 13. Morty is nine.
Washington State’s equine surgery residency is tough. Beth is challenged. She wakes in the wee hours of the morning, and falls into bed, exhausted, in the wee hours of the night.
And for the first time, Beth feels alive.
Rick shows up on the doorstep on Morty’s thirteenth birthday. It’s a day of dual-celebration; Morty is (finally) a teenager, Beth is (finally) finished with school.
Beth already feels like she’s mourning. She’s 33, and she’s at the peak of her career (you’ll never be smarter than you are today, her favorite mentor reminds her the day before boards). She starts a job at the horse hospital next week. She’s signed a contract, even has a hefty sign-on bonus.
Then her dad shows up, and all of Beth’s “accomplishments” fall hollow from her lips.
She thought he was dead, for christssake.
She introduces Rick to her family - Jerry, her loser husband (cringe, cringe, cringe). Summer, basic little teenage bitch (does poorly in school because she would rather be popular than smart). Morty, the fuckup with some learning disability that Beth had never had the time or inclination to pay attention to (the real reason that I never lived up to the potential you saw in me, dad).
It’s enough to drive any woman to drink.
I don’t think I’m too far off the mark, here. Beth is so tetchy and self-conscious about her job because she’s relatively new at it (remember the “we’re losing him!” scene in the pilot). She’s incredibly resentful of Jerry, for all of the reasons. Summer is her favorite child because Beth spent more time with Summer when she was a baby, and she is independent and self-motivated - attributes that Beth values. She regards Morty with vague disdain, to the point that she hardly remembers his existence, because she was absent for the majority of his childhood. Beth views Morty as “Jerry’s child,” and Summer as hers.
(quick headcanon that Beth thinks of Morty as looking like Jerry, which just adds to her aversion, when he actually looks more like a young Rick. Beth has no way of knowing this because there are no photos of kid Rick Sanchez)
I don’t mean for this post to sound sympathetic to Jerry, because I’m really not. He’s a hot mess, too. I just wanted to flesh out Beth a little bit, and maybe justify Rick’s choice to clone her. Beth is young, still has a whole life to live, and never got the chance to be the woman she wanted to be, or the mom her family deserved.
Rick chose to give her the opportunity to pursue both.
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