The only thing more powerful than the Buffy writers' reluctance to give screentime to a woman over the age of thirty is the collective Buffy fandom's eagerness to seize on the slightest scrap of canon characterization as evidence that said thirty-plus-year old woman is some sort of monster.

The show: Willow Rosenberg likes spending time with her mother and does so willingly even after moving out (as we see, for example, in Forever) and her mother was keen to invite her high school boyfriend over for dinner to try to get to know him as soon as Willow admitted to her that he existed (at the end of Gingerbread) and her mother was fully accepting (literally "proud") of Willow when she came out as a lesbian (already implicit, but confirmed in The Killer In Me). Oh, but she has a full time job in academia and sometimes Willow wishes she paid her more attention (this despite the fact that Willow canonically does hide things from her all the time) and she doesn't always notice when Willow cuts her hair or properly remember her friends' names and she only met Willow's first girlfriend a few times.

The fandom: well, clearly Willow is as much a victim of parental abuse as Xander Harris or Amy Madison or Faith Lehane. This is a completely reasonable and proportionate conclusion to come to based on one on-screen appearance and some throwaway lines of dialogue.

I mean ... don't get me wrong. Shelia Rosenberg is not a good mother. She's not much more than a cardboard cutout, really. Less of a character than even Hank Summers, and that's saying something.

What she is, really, is the sort of lazy cliche you get in a lot of teen movies of the 1990s and 2000s (something which is true of Joyce Summers as well at times, only Sheila is permitted far less depth or screen presence or other redeeming features). She's a somewhat reactionary take on the idea of an adult woman who dares to have a professional career and therefore cannot "properly" attend to the needs of her children. A woman too busy focusing on the abstract (her academic study of "adolescent development") to care about the practical (the growing pains of her own teenage daughter).

(Get it? See, it's funny, because she's a woman with both a child and a career. What will those crazy feminists dream up next?)

As written, Willow's mother kind of sucks: not because she's a bad person but because she isn't written as a person at all. She's a joke, and not a good one.

But the weirdly popular idea On Here that Willow is somehow traumatized by having what is, by all accounts, a fairly ordinary and comfortable childhood is absurd. There is simply nothing in the text to support this.