Courage

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 7:00 AM - 2 Comments

“I held her in my arms and I whispered: ‘If you need anything, just let me know. I’m here, whatever you need,’ ” Canadian Olympic team mentor Sylvie Fréchette recalls, her voice raw with emotion. “I really need to speak to you—but later,” Joannie Rochette replied.

The 24-year-old Canadian figure skater had, just hours earlier, been dealt a tragic blow with the death, early that morning, of her 55-year-old mother, Thérèse, of a heart attack. Thérèse and her husband, Normand, had just arrived from their home in Ile Dupas, Que., only the day before to watch their daughter skate.

Fréchette, a former Olympic synchronized swimmer, is sadly experienced to help Rochette. Just days before the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, she was struck by tragedy when her fiancé, Sylvain Lake, committed suicide in their apartment. Fréchette chose to fly to Spain; ultimately, she gave the performance of her life, winning gold. “She’s in a whirlpool of emotions right now,” says Fréchette. “I’m here to listen to her, to let her talk, to be friendly territory, a shoulder she can cry on.”

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Incontinent on the Continent

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 4 Comments

Jane Christmas remembers in high school carrying the painful secret that she and her mother didn’t get along. Other girls’ mothers “were their best friends. I could never talk about it,” Christmas said in a phone interview last week from her home in Hamilton. “When everyone was saying all these glowing things about their mothers, I thought, ‘Why don’t I have that kind of relationship with my mother?’ ” Thirty-odd years later, Christmas is talking openly about her lifelong effort to win her mother’s approval. “She was always critical. She had a harsh way of dealing with me,” Christmas said.

Two years ago, an opportunity arose to take her widowed mother to Italy for six weeks. “One of the things Mom and I discussed when we first planned this trip was to use our time together to air past grievances and come to an understanding and acceptance of our stormy past. I had asked her to come up with three things about me that had gnawed at her over the years. I said I would do likewise about her,” she writes in her new memoir, Incontinent on the Continent: My Mother, Her Walker, and Our Grand Tour of Italy. Continue…

Laughing all the way to the end

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 12:30 PM - 1 Comment

You can read Welcome to the Departure Lounge (Doubleday), Meg Federico’s account of caring for her difficult mother, Addie (and her mother’s beyond-difficult new husband, Walter) during Addie’s last 18 months, and laugh all the way through in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God way. From its opening, when Addie, 81 and unconscious on a hospital gurney, wakes up long enough to yell, “I demand an autopsy,” to 82-year-old Walter’s fascination with mail-order sex aids, the book reads like a geriatric version of a 1930s screwball comedy. Federico is a humour columnist, and her story is skilfully told, but in the end (no pun intended), it’s no laughing matter. Flowing not very far beneath the surface humour, and made palatable by the laughs, are some dead serious issues that, one way or another, most of us will someday face.

Consider Addie’s plan, in one of her more lucid moments, to deal with her husband’s unpredictable lurches into violence as he slid deeper into dementia: “You will be pleased and surprised. My plan is that Walter will have a stroke.” That is funny, but it also allows Federico to say out loud what many in her—and her mother’s—position sometimes think, but almost always keep to themselves. “At this point in my life,” the 53-year-old author says from her Halifax home, “there’s not a lot of thought suppression going on in my mind. The thought, ‘Things will be better when she dies,’ will come to you.”

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When your mother’s a narcissist

By Julia McKinnell - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

“If I called my mother and told her I was feeling fat, she’d go, ‘Oh my God, talk about feeling fat!’ ” confides 44-year-old Chantal, a Toronto artist and single mother of a teenage son. Chantal says it’s pointless trying to have a heart-to-heart with her self-absorbed mother. “She can’t hear you. With a narcissistic parent, everything is about them. If I said I’m on a diet, she’d say ‘I’m on a diet,’ then go on and on about how fat she is. She’ll tell you how she’s eliminated sugar almost, but not hear anything I was saying.”

When psychotherapist Dr. Karyl McBride counsels the daughters of narcissistic mothers, she starts by giving them a questionnaire. Questions No. 1 and No. 2: “When you discuss your life issues with your mother, does she divert the conversation to talk about herself?” “When you discuss your feelings with your mother, does she try to top the feelings with her own?”

Maternal narcissism is a far more widespread, devastating disorder than most people realize, says McBride, who confesses that she, too, felt “unmothered” growing up and looked but could never find a book that dealt with mothers who are not maternal, or a daughter’s feelings of frustration, even hatred.

“It’s very rare for a woman to come into therapy and say, ‘Hello, I’m the daughter of a narcissist.’ Usually, they come in with depression or low self-esteem or [are] exhausted from trying to achieve, achieve, achieve,” says McBride. “Good girls aren’t supposed to hate their mothers so they don’t talk about their feelings.” Still, after 17 years of specializing in treating daughters of narcissists, McBride easily spots the symptoms: “over-sensitivity, self-consciousness, indecisiveness, inability to succeed in relationships.”

In her new self-help book, Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers: Will I Ever Be Good Enough?, McBride stresses that “recovery is not about changing mom. It’s about your own internal work.” Chantal’s Toronto therapist warned her not to confront or accuse her mother of being a narcissist. “I was told she wouldn’t get it. No, I’ve never tried to talk to her about it.” McBride agrees: “If mother is a full-blown narcissist, it’s not going to do any good to confront her.”

Maybe mom should scoop some under-valued stocks

By John Geddes - Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 6:59 PM - 7 Comments

After a rather cool message delivered in the unsteadily beating financial heart of Toronto today, the Prime Minister tried for a warmer tone at an evening rally in an airplane hanger in Hamilton.

“Canadians are worried right now, those worries are understandable,” he told a throng of Tory faithful. “My mother is with my kids tonight. I’m sure she’s worrying about her savings. I worry about my kids’ future. That’s why we’re in this—that’s why we’re putting ourselves on the line in this election.”
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My First and Last Prediction Post

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 2:37 PM - 0 Comments

I rarely make predictions about episodes I haven’t seen, because I’m always wrong. But what the heck: when Craig Thomas says of Britney Spears’ second appearance on How I Met Your Mother that “her return answers a larger mystery set up earlier than in the series,” I’m going to guess, not having seen the episode, that she’ll turn out to be the mystery woman who was trying to ruin Barney’s reputation in “The Bracket.” Lily is the only one who saw the mystery woman, and I don’t think she met Spears’ character in that earlier episode (maybe she did and I forgot about it in which case this guess is null and void).

The second episode with Spears — whose guest appearance really does seem to have saved this show from cancellation — airs tonight, and we can all see how wrong my prediction turns out to be. (But in the unlikely event that she turns out to be The Mother, then I predict that fans will be furious. And I know that prediction is right.)

Oh, and a philosophical question: if this guess turns out to be true (also unlikely), does it count as a spoiler if you accurately guess an upcoming plot twist in an episode you haven’t seen? Let’s say somebody writes a post predicting the next plot twist on Lost, and that guess turns out to be right, but it’s entirely a guess, based on no actual knowledge about the episode — is that a spoiler?

Ted Mosby Really Is a Jerk?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Back when Television Without Pity was called something else, first Dawson’s Wrap and then Mighty Big TV, and was a lot better than it is now (not everything is ruined by popularity, but Mighty Big TV was a lot nastier and funnier than what it’s become over the years), they specialized in vicious recaps of Dawson’s Creek, and, in particular, pointing out that the supposed hero was actually a colossal douche. The idea was that the stuff that the writers thought made him heroic, or interesting, or superior, actually made him seem like a self-righteous jerk. Another character like that was Brandon on 90210. If a character is acting in ways that would make you want to smack him in real life, the site asked, why is he the hero?

I think the TWoP folks have kind of a crush on How I Met Your Mother, as do I. But I have to say, if they were as vicious as they were in the Golden Age, they’d be all over the recent assishness of Ted, the supposed hero of this excellent show. Look at the things we saw Ted do only in this week’s episode, that is, in only twenty minutes, almost half of which were about Barney and his wacky Will Forte adventures. (Granted, some of these are carry-overs from the events of last week’s episode.) We saw Ted, the ostensible hero of How I Met Your Mother, do the following:

- He told Robin, whom he broke up with over a year ago, that he’s “forgiven” her for exercising her prerogative to have sex with whoever the hell she wants.
- He casually, instantly, told an intimate and embarrassing secret about his girlfriend to his friends.
- When his girlfriend quite understandably decided that maybe she should think twice about sleeping with a man who betrays her trust like that, he lectured her on commitment issues so that she’ll come back to him and admit she was wrong. Which she wasn’t.
- Continued the dumping of his friend, Barney, a character we like, for the shocking crime of sleeping with somebody he broke up with over a year ago. Because we all know that Ted owns her. For life. (Where was Ted when Barney was stealing the women Marshall was interested in? Isn’t that actually a lot worse?)

Add this to the fact that every episode has him torturing his kids by telling them another story that has nothing to do with how he met their mother, and the fact that his idea of a “cute,” funny relationship with his girlfriend is to make sarcastic gotcha jokes, and this man is seriously approaching Dawson Leery territory in Unsympathetic Hero Land.

Now, before you start: I know that most of this stuff actually makes sense in the context of the episode and its theme. And taking the character’s behaviour out of context and judging it by real-life standards is so unfair, so… well, so TWoP. But still, I think it’s sometimes useful to step back and ask: if someone behaved this way in real life, would I think he was the Good Guy? And my answer is, probably not. Barney can get away with being a jerk because Barney is a cartoon character. Ted is supposed to be the guy we identify with, so it’s a bit of a problem for me that I haven’t found him very sympathetic lately.

HIMYM is, as you’ve probably noticed, one of my favourite current shows. It has many exceptional strengths. And every show has its weaknesses. The odd thing about HIMYM is that its main weakness is not peripheral to the show, not something it can play down or de-emphasize: its weakness is, and to a degree always has been, right at the centre of the show, the character of Ted. I didn’t have a big problem with Josh Radnor when the show began (except for the hair), but it’s hard to deny that he’s the weakest member of the cast, especially since Cobie Smulders became so unexpectedly funny. (If anyone was supposed to be the comedic weak link on the show, it would be a Canadian model in her twenties who’d never done a sitcom before, but she’s damned funny.) But Radnor isn’t a bad actor — though he really needs to cut it out with the bad hair — he’s got an ill-defined character. The other four characters are funny and likable because we know what they are and what they want. Ted started out as the Incurable Romantic, and when it became clear that that characterization made him seem like a complete wuss, the writers started flailing around to figure out what he should be. The reason he’s acting like a jerk lately, if you look at it that way, is simply that this is the latest stage the writers have put him through in their quest to define him.

It is, as I said, odd; most shows this good don’t have a weakness that central, because a good show has a solid foundation, and the solid foundation is usually the main character, or, if there’s no one main character, the main group What happened with HIMYM was that even though Ted is clearly the lead character, the foundation of the show turned out not to be Ted and his quest for eternal schmoopy love, but the concept of the show, the idea that the show is not fixed in time, that not everything Older Ted tells us is reliable, and that there’s an underlying mystery about who The Mother is. These conceptual building blocks are so strong that they’ve become the star of the show. (Everybody wants to know who The Mother is; I don’t think many of those people are really rooting for Ted to find true love.)

I don’t really know what the writers can do about the Ted problem if the show is picked up for another season, and I certainly hope it will be. The show would probably be more popular as a Friends-style ensemble comedy, given that the best episodes often focus either on the other four characters or on the group as a whole. But it can’t go there because the format of the show requires Ted to be the lead in most of the episodes, and the format is popular even if Ted isn’t. Of course, there’s still a chance that they could make Ted a stronger character, but it hasn’t really happened yet. Maybe if they fixed his hair….