okay more on jackson’s senior center based off this post:
- it started as just miss shirley and her best friend darla wanting to live together and asking maria if she could maybe find a house for them to settle in together instead of living apart
- before this, mama shirley and darla would have to walk five houses each way to see each other for afternoon tea, which just won’t do. mama shirley is 92 and darla is 90 now, and both of them are too old to be have to walking that much everyday, mama shirley tells maria. she quickly and vehemently agrees
- maria has the idea of fixing a house up for jackson’s senior citizens to live in if they’d like to. it takes a lot of unnecessary convincing to get the council to dedicate one of jackson’s best houses to a maximum of five people, but maria gets it done. they pick one of the few houses that are placed in the farther back part of jackson, near the farm and the daycare center, so that it can be far-reaching from the entrance of jackson
- the first people to movie in are shirley and darla, who share a room on the second floor (thanks to tommy replacing the stairs in the house with a reliable ramp with a wall-attached handlebar)
- gary moves in not long after he breaks his left hip while herding the goats. he likes that the house is designed to be wheel-chair access and far away from most people in town. he also likes it because he can be close to darla, who he has feelings for, but nobody knows about that except for tommy and joel
- mr. wilson moves in on maria’s insistence that he’ll get hurt if he continues to live alone and try to do everything himself. his name is harold, but he insists that anyone younger than him calls him mr. wilson on account of maintaining a respectful distance. he’s a grumpy, gruff old asshole that reminds joel more of bill than bill himself, but he’s also known to do anything and everything maria tells him with only a small amount of grumbling. somehow, she convinces him to move in after he accidentally sets his kitchen on fire trying to make himself a pocketknife (which?????? maria still doesn’t have an answer for????? why harold was trying to do that????)
- last but not least is sandra dee, jackson’s oldest and most enigmatic member. nobody really knows where she came from or what her story is: she’s the only one of jackson’s seniors that managed to get to town on her own, arriving to town at 94 about a year after its founding with nothing but a backpack and three handguns. she clamed to be sandra, but they’re not entirely sure if sandra dee is her real name. she hums songs from musicals all the time and has expressed that grease was always her favorite. at least once a month she requests to go hunting with patrol and gets mad when maria tells her no
- senior center tea: shirley and darla have longstanding beef with sandra dee because she always cheats at cards during game night, shirley knows about gary being sweet on darla but is lowkey jealous about it because SHE is sweet on darla, and everyone thinks mr. wilson has a thing for maria but he actually told her in confidence last month that he is actually sweet on gary. mama shirley and mr. wilson can’t STAND each other
- tommy calls the seniors the jackson five. all of them call him thomas. he and joel bring them all basic living supplies at least once a week, but are known to be around there pretty often
tsym for anyone having interest in this pls feel free to add anything u want!!
tagging :))) @clickergossip @nerdieforpedro @mrsmando @callmekittenandyourmajesty @steeb-stn (ty for the idea of putting it next to the daycare!) @thatoneobsessedlinguist-writes
43 notes
·
View notes
sketch bc sometimes thinking about dee's relationship with her mother, motherhood itself, and her surrogacy drives me crazy..
here are my Thoughts (rambles) on dee and motherhood by the way
on one hand she was never meant to be a mother. she doesnt have the instincts. she despises motherhood as a concept ("moms are stupid!"). on the other? she has a baby brother. which, okay, sounds funny as a twin but the less loved child was definitely less coddled. she was likely parentified as a child. look at the way barbara seems to resent dee and see her as her competition, and compared dee to every other woman (degradingly). barbara probably saw dee as a failed woman—neither graceful nor popular nor beautiful enough. imposing in dee the need to be validated and seen as a Good Woman from a young age (see entering beauty competitions at a young age; wanting to be an actress; tell me i'm good (tell me i'm as good as an idealized woman)) and at the same time instilling in her the feeling that she will never be one. i'm going off on a tangent.
remember how dennis said barbara was warm and loving? dennis was probably always cared for more by barbara (and frank was probably never around.) and so that was just the status quo in the household to treat him with care. and so dee inadvertently took on that instinct. that dennis is cared for and she isn't. that she is sacrificed for his comfort or satisfaction. she feels an obligation or a compulsion stemming from this—to take dennis' hand even though she can't say "i love you," to let him cry on her shoulder while she has to stand a little firmer even though she is also distressed, etc. but at the same time she resents it. she hates offering comfort where it is never given to her (she's trying to care for her brother in some type of way and shes learned it from her mother who never cared for her a fraction as much as she cared for her brother.) and thus she resents motherhood—which is all about selflessness—both because it is such a parallel experience to this and because she never feels she could've been a mother. not a loving one. another failure as a woman.
the baby represents everything she could've been—loving where she is unfeeling, a dee who has moved past her mother's influence to become a mother that isn't cruel, at the same time finally winning at being what a woman supposedly should be like. but she isn't any of those things. yet she's still wholly loved by the child the few minutes she gets to hold him, and i think dimly deep down, through the echoes of her mom's criticisms, dee knows the child would only grow to resent her if she was really to mother him. another failure. dee's mother was kind of right about her—if only because she doomed her to be a failure at (their notion of) womanhood and all the warmth and beauty and instincts associated with it.
13 notes
·
View notes