#anyway stan mary. she's one of the most complex and layered female characters this show ever had

[thegeminisage]

I'm so sorry if this is rude or disrespectful, I just wondered if you think Mary Winchester was a bad parent too?

WELL first of all i don’t think mary has ever done anything wrong in her entire life even when she did so jot that down

by which i mean i AM a mary winchester apologist. if she ever did do anything wrong no she didn’t. if she does have shitty taste in men no she doesn’t. you see what i’m saying? and by the way like fuck the audience for not loving to her just because she had her own agenda and wasn’t always bending over backwards to take care of dean’s pwecious wittle feewings. like he’s a grown-ass man. why were we STILL expecting the women in his life to do that kind of emotional labor for him in 2016 smh this is why she got refridged i’ll be bitter about it until i die

but to actually attempt to put all of that down and answer your question: i think she just wasn’t a parent. like i don’t mean in the deadbeat way i mean she LITERALLY wasn’t there to do any parenting. by the time your kids become adults 95% of your parenting duties are finished - mostly older parents of adult children offer wisdom and emotional support/a financial safety net in trying times, right? but when mary came back, she was YOUNGER than them; what wisdom did she have to offer? same on the other two fronts - finances mean nothing in supernatural, and as for emotional support, she had just lost her entire life and gotten captain america’d 33 years forward into the future to, again i stress this, HER CHILDREN BEING OLDER THAN HER. she couldn’t offer any emotional support because she was the one needing it...and dean kind of screwed the pooch on that one, because he needed some serious emotional support himself, and he threw a tantrum about not getting it from her, about her not being the mom he remembered.

and as an aside: speaking on the mary dean remembered, i DO think she was a good parent for the first four years of dean’s life. she tried to keep her voice down on the phone when she fought with john, and tried to convince john to come home to their kids - even when she disappeared for a few days to go on werewolf hunts, there’s no evidence that she didn’t believe she was leaving her kids in capable hands (because i also prefer to think that john was a decent parent/person before the fire; it’s more fun and fucked up that way). we know she fed dean and made him feel safe because he has fond memories of both. and she REALLY wanted to be a mother - this mothering urge never really left her (look how she throws longing glances at children and parents in public, look how she is with jack - she never totally stopped missing her little boys). there’s no reason to assume she didn’t give it her all. 

but again, once she’s back, there’s not much parenting left to be done, and what there is left to do is all stuff she’s incapable of. even after mary and dean made their peace and formed a stronger, more honest relationship after the end of s12, i’d argue that it’s not a mother and son relationship. she’s a little motherly with him sometimes as a treat to them both; she wants to mother, and he wants to be mothered. but they’re sort of just tacitly agreeing to play pretend because it makes them both happy - she’s still younger than him, and he’s still as protective of her as ever, just the same way he’s protective of john and sam. 

so if they’re not mother/son, what are they? well, mary and dean both functionally filled the gap as john’s spouse, so instead i think they act as peers/equals/maybe even siblings? even though we don’t see as much of mary and sam’s relationship (which is a SHAAAME) i’d argue that the two of THEM have a more traditional mother/son dynamic. mary is one of the people who falls in next to dean as sam’s co-parent (along with cas, who DEFINITELY doesn’t have a parental dynamic with sam, but functionally protects him at all costs like a parent would because that’s what dean does and dean is his life partner).

so all of that is to say: no, i don’t think mary was a bad parent simply because she never got to BE a parent. we don’t really know what kind of parent she would have been - when your kids are that young it’s hard to fuck it up as long as you keep them fed and cared for and don’t neglect or abuse them. we never got to see her do the hard childhood/teenhood stuff and we never will! like she simply was not there because she was like, dead. i guess some people might blame her for being dead (like john...) but one could also argue she’d have never made the deal if she had known how it would have turned out. 

but i think what matters most in the end, to both mary and her boys, is that she’s there and they’re not on the outs with each other. the winchesters have such fucked up and complicated family dynamics that that’s pretty much the best you can possibly expect, so it makes me happy that they got there for a little while <3 even if it got ruined later :/

[spn masterpost]