@doctorsiebert sent: meta on: jane’s parents, and how she felt about both of them + what characteristics she’s adopted from them? (meme)
jane’s parents are miri and ted andrews. the best word i can use to describe her feelings toward them is “ambivalent.” i think either parent would need to be on their deathbed before she would initiate contact with them again, as she’s cut them both off and hasn’t spoken to either, nor allowed them near dorothy, since jane was in her 30s and dorothy was a small child.
she spent the most time with her mom, especially as a child. miri had... a lot of flaws as a parent. i could probably go into the Layers™ here but what all the different factors resulted in was an inability to accept jane for herself, to understand that jane was a different person from her with different needs, and that jane could not help things like having difficulty with verbal language, needing space and quiet, or lacking what miri thought of as common sense. she thought of jane as willfully bad and destructive. you can imagine the effect this had on jane’s self-image as she grew up. she desperately wanted to please her mother and in many ways continued to believe her mother was, on some level, right about her, up until the point miri went too far. she’d been providing childcare while jane worked and telling dorothy things like, that jane wasn’t normal, that she couldn’t really love her, that dorothy would have to always take care of herself, that she’d be her mom’s caregiver all her life... etc. when jane found that out, that was when she cut contact.
from her mom, i think jane inherited... anxiety 😂 i think, also, a sense of responsibility. jane’s quality of Just Fuckin Doing It is something she inherited from her mom, 100%; miri saw a problem and she would dive for it, no pausing to ask permission.
jane’s dad, ted, was in many ways an absent and inaccessible dad. he liked to drop in and be wonderful fun dad for 5 minutes a day, then quietly duck out the minute his children needed something from him. (this is one of those things that made parenting so difficult for miri and contributed to the pressures on her and commensurately on jane.) he also didn’t really understand jane and her needs, but he was able to shrug them off, because it wasn’t his job to worry about them; he could swoop in when she wanted something and give her that, then dip again once things got more complicated and couldn’t be solved by an ice cream or a funny face. this made him seem like the “better parent” for a while, but the truth is that he just never had jane’s back for a second, and she realized that as an adult. that’s why she still doesn’t speak to him as well as her mom; there was no “better” here, just parents that failed her in different ways. she yearned toward her dad because he was so emotionally absent; she wanted him to see her and be proud of her, but also to offer her something more substantial, to really support her, and he never did.
jane inherited her height from her dad shdgskgmsdgh if you were to see jane, her dad, and her brother all lined up in a row it would be three long, lanky clones of each other, everybody with glasses, looking at you like 🧐 she also inherited his Science Brain--he was also an engineer.
i think both her parents had Insight/Puzzle Brain, like a gift for problem solving and flashes of insight, and that’s something jane got from both of them.