#but my family has never been great at keeping our baggage off the front lawn

[dreamylyfe-x]

what is your unpopular 11.06 opinion we want to hear more 😎

Ahhhh. I really don’t know how this one is going to go over. Part of the problem in conveying it is that I know my reaction is deeply rooted in my own childhood. Which was not standard. And the people who disagree with me might have their own non-standard childhoods which feed their opinion. So no one’s not valid, but... I haven’t seen anyone say this, so here goes. 

Regarding this exchange in 11x06:

Mickey: Well, Frank wasn’t a homophobic psychopath who tortured you for years. 

Ian: No, he’s just an emotionally abusive alcoholic who stole my money for drugs, broke my nose, tried to profit off my mania... 

Mickey: I guess we both had shit dads. Let’s get the fuck out of here. 

I’ve seen people say Ian shouldn’t have said this -- like very angry that he did -- because Frank doesn’t compare to Terry and I guess it minimizes Mickey’s experience for him to point out the ways that Frank sucks. And the pushback I’ve seen is that Ian can absolutely say that because Frank and Terry both suck. 

I get that. But I also don’t think that's what Ian is doing and I don’t think that’s how Mickey hears it. 

I think I need something like the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal to explain what I mean here, so for that sake and that sake only -- let’s say there are only two kinds of families. There are families where the parenting is acceptable-to-great, and then there are families where the parenting is poor-to-terrible. Basically you have your “authorities won’t get involved” families and your “authorities SHOULD get involved” families. Ian and Mickey are both in Group B. 

But. Everyone who watches the show knows this. What has stuck out for me about the conversation about this particular exchange is that I haven’t seen much talk about how profoundly alienating can be to be from Group B. First you have the fun stuff that accompanies a traumatic childhood: instability, anxiety, depression, PTSD, complex PTSD, compromised coping strategies, a lack of support, a general uncertainty about what is and isn’t “normal” for most people... the list goes on. 

But you ALSO have to deal with how Group A interacts with your more public trauma. And, armed with that information, the way they act can be bizarre. And I realize I’m getting personal here, but I feel like if you DON’T have a publicly known trauma you might honestly never experience having people say things to you like “You help me remember how lucky I am.” 

(I have honestly heard that so many times. I truly do not know why people say this to me. It is not helpful. I am not helping them remember that they are lucky on purpose. I am just having weird/bad things happen to me within their view.) 

So. Here is Mickey have a very emotional moment on the street in front of the house and three whole Gallaghers. The one with tact and a Terry-Milkovich-fathered-ex ducks behind the ambulance to give Mickey some privacy. And Ian, his husband, reaches out. He touches his shoulder and Mickey is like iron. He asks him if he’s ok and Mickey doesn’t tell him to fuck off. Instead Mickey, who never talks about this father, says it’s “weird” to see Terry like that. And then lists various acts of revenge he could visit on Terry while nearly vibrating with suppressed emotion. There’s a lot of anger, but there’s something else there, too. It could be a lot of things. I read grief. There is some kind of loss for Mickey in what’s happened to Terry. Not because of anything Terry ever gave him -- maybe because of things Terry never gave him that now definitively never will -- but whatever it is, Mickey’s feelings surrounding Terry in that moment are complicated. 

And who is going to understand those feelings? Or help Mickey make sense of them? None of these other Milkoviches are Terry’s son. Mickey is the only person from that immediate family left in Southside. He is really going through this moment alone. 

But. He has Ian. Who knows more than almost anyone what Terry is like. Who has witnessed some of the worst things Terry has done. Who knows Mickey doesn’t like to talk about his father and respects it. And who, in this moment, validates Mickey’s grief -- the far less comprehensible emotion to Mickey -- over his anger. And then, when Mickey pushes back with the reason he has to be angry at Terry in a way that isolates himself from Ian, Ian responds by pointing out what they have in common. Terry’s worse, but they both are from the Brotherhood of Men With Bad Dads. Ian doesn’t share Mickey’s trauma but he knows the shape of it. He knows how to interact with Mickey about it better than anyone. Ian understand insecurity and scarcity and violence in the home, and in that moment Mickey understanding what he and Ian share is more important than focusing on what no one can share with Mickey.

Not everyone is going to feel that way in Mickey’s shoes. But we have pretty heavy indications that this is how Mickey feels, because of how the rest of the episode unfolds. Mickey never loses it with Ian. Ian lets Mickey decide what they are going to do, and only intervenes -- gently -- when he thinks Mickey is going to suffer for his actions. This provides the space where Mickey gets to work through his feelings -- mostly silently -- and eventually make his choice about how he’s going to deal with it.  

There is our trauma, and there is our shame about our trauma and then there is the weight of people who will judge both those things with no real context for them. Those three things together are exhausting. In that moment, I think there was real value for Mickey in having his experience normalized just that little bit. Just that whatever else he was dealing with in that moment, he was not standing next to someone who didn’t understand hating your father. I think Mickey wants this to be a thing he and Ian have in common. It’s part of why they can belong to each other so totally. Ian isn’t here to tell Mickey what makes him a freak. He’s here to give him space to feel however he needs to feel. And I truly do get why people don’t see that moment that way. I do. But I see more value for Mickey in what Ian did rather than what he didn’t do.