The crazy one

@samspurpletoothbrush asked: AU gifset of laurel’s journey to the Black Canary without Sara’s retconned death.

And exactly what is the CW supposed to be promoting? Felicity’s getting a new boyfriend, woah, that’s blowing my mind. Yet another ripoff Batman storyline because they haven’t read any Green Arrow comics? Meanwhile Flash is doing Flashpoint and introducing Dr. Alchemy and Mirror Master, while Supergirl is bringing Superman and merging with the rest of the DCW. Hell, even LoT, that nonsensical mess, is giving us the JSA.

I should’ve told you what you meant to me, ‘Cause now I pay the price

I’d been thinking about compiling a list like this for a while but kept forgetting about it. I honestly tried to look for a list like this elsewhere but ended up finding more articles about Norma being not the best but ultimately well-meaning. Obviously I disagree. I’m a huge Norma stan but she truly is an awful, awful parent. And here’s why:

- She has established no boundaries between herself and Norman physically or emotionally. When a child is approaching adolescence, parents are naturally supposed to loosen up the apron strings a little to prepare you for the trials of adulthood and gain a sense of personhood. Norman has little to no sense of identity outside of his relationship with Norma and its because Norma has prevented him from doing so. From the first episode we see Norma turn away potential friends from Norman even though they have arrived in a new town where Norman doesn’t know anyone and he is a seventeen year old boy who should be having a healthy social life for his development. We also know that Norma discourages Norman from trying to have a life away from her or trying to pursue interests she doesn’t approve of. She refuses to let him join a track team, Norman rejects a lucrative offer to get his writing published because he is worried about how Norma will react, Norma refuses to entertain the idea of Norman leaving the state for college even though Norman has demonstrated himself intelligent and could likely get into a prestigious university of his choosing. And it is definitely not appropriate for Norman to be sleeping in the same bed as his mother at the age that he is especially since it seems to be for Norma’s own comfort and sense of safety than his own which leads me to…

- Norma has an unhealthy dependence on Norman to help fix her problems. Norma has put a lot of pressure on Norman in order to fulfil her emotional needs at the expense of himself at multiple times in the series. When Norma gets attacked by Keith Summers or whenever she’s in any sort of danger she immediately calls for Norman, even guilting him when he is absent. Now, I can understand why Norma would rely on Norman’s protection considering he is the only other presence in the house most of the time but in the end Norman is her child and he shouldn’t be in the role of caretaker when it comes to Norma’s physical and emotional needs. She treats him as though he is her peer or even her lover rather than her child. In the very first episode she makes her teenage son an accessory to her murder, when she is arrested for said murder she flies off the handle that her son wasn’t there to see her arrested because he was instead spending the night with Bradley. Norma punishes Norman for having a life outside of her, for having anything that might draw his attention away from her. I truly felt her confession about her past sexual abuse on the night Norman had a social outing was to put him off so he would instead stay home and comfort her. It wasn’t really the confession itself that was terrible even though I don’t think it was something she should’ve shared with him when Norman was still so young but the timing was especially poor since she would have to know a bombshell of that magnitude would weigh on his mind the entire evening. Not surprising in fact that it was also the same night Norman committed his second murder. 

- She has an unhealthy fixation with his romantic life. I mean, it’s normal for parents to want to take an interest in that sort of thing but not the way that Norma does it. A desire for romance and sex tends to be a staple part of adolescence but Norma actively won’t hear of Norman having another girl in his life. She guilt trips him for having sex with Bradley because his absence meant that Norman wasn’t there to deal with her problems and then uses misogynistic rhetoric about how sex is harmful to young girls and we also see her do this later on during his relationship with Emma. Any girl Norman shows romantic interest in we see Norma immediately disparage and insult the girl about why she isn’t good enough and why Norman should stay away from her. His mental illness only provides Norma with more fuel to dig her heels in where this is concerned. Not only that but she also validates Norman’s incestuous attraction to her claiming it as normal and doing nothing to put boundaries between herself and her son after the fact when it would probably be the appropriate action to take. In fact she exploits Norman’s attachment to her by flaunting her dalliances with men in front of him and using them to make him jealous. 

- Of course the most acknowledged flaw of Norma’s parenthood was how she handled his mental illness or more accurately… didn’t handle it. She should’ve gotten him help immediately after the first blackout. I can understand why she panicked and didn’t but it became less and less forgivable the more Norman spiralled out of control and Norma refused to do anything about it. Instead she used his mental illness as an excuse to dig her claws even deeper into him. Rather than explaining what was happening to Norman and giving him the necessary power to seek help himself, she conceals it from him. She refuses to get him medical help for his blackouts until way later in the series but has no problem informing the driving instructor which forfeits him from getting a licence, a driving license being seen as a developmental milestone towards independence from Norma and she can’t have that. When he blacked out at school, Norma refused to let him stay and get further tests because she needed him immediately to help deal with her problems and by extension added more undue stress and pressure onto him. In the end she does relent and get him the help he needs when she can no longer control his episodes which was by far her most shining moment as a parent in the series but it was simply too little, too late as far as that was concerned.