CBR 17 BINGO: “G” (for Glass)
Back in 2019, I recommended Educated to my sister. After she read and enjoyed (not sure that’s the right word) it , she asked me whether I’d ever read The Glass Castle. “In some ways, it’s worse,” she told me. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle, and I understand now where she was coming from.
While Tara Westover’s parents were consistently ignorant and controlling, the parents of Jeanette Walls were people of dichotomy. Her father was well-educated as well as scientifically and mathematically brilliant, even teaching Jeannette to do her math homework in binary numbers to make it more challenging. At the same time, he dismisses the physicians who heal 3-year-old Jeanette’s burn wounds after she catches fire from cooking her own hot dogs (at 3, when she was too short to even reach the stove!) as “heads-up-their-asses med-school quacks.” Her mother, a Shakespeare-loving artist and skilled school teacher, wanted her children to be independent: “She felt it was good for kids to do what they wanted because they learned a lot from their mistakes. Mom was not one of those fussy mothers who got upset when you came home dirty or played in the mud or fell and cut yourself.” Right on, Jeannette’s mom! Then again, when Jeanette gashed her thigh on a rusty nail, her mom dismissed the idea of taking her in for a tetanus shot. “We’re becoming a nation of sissies,” she said. Ok, lost me again.
The Walls parents (Rex and Rose Mary) drag their children around the country from place to place, always shattering any chance of stability or prosperity they may have. Never mind that they have many advantages, including education and property. At one point, they live in an Adobe in Phoenix that Jeannette’s mother inherits. The house soon falls into disrepair because neither parent could or would hold down a job long enough to earn the funds required to maintain it (yet selling the home also wasn’t an option, as Rose Mary preferred to “keep it in the family.”) Their travels took them from California to Arizona, Nevada, and West Virginia, with Rex and Rose Mary treating it all like a “grand adventure” while their children faced bullying, harassment, and literal starvation.
Clearly, these people were not well. Rex was a raging alcoholic and Rose Mary was a raging narcissist, though I suspect both may have also had a dash of bipolar disorder thrown in as well. The Walls children survive together, but Jeannette particularly hangs on to hope, because she never waivers in her belief that her parents (especially her father) love her.
I don’t doubt that these people loved their children in as far as they were capable. I don’t doubt that their mental illnesses and their own (likely) history of abuse contributed to their utter failure as parents. And yet. There are some pretty basic things one should do as a parent to earn that title.
One should share their family-sized Hershey bar with their starving children instead of hoarding it because they’re “a sugar addict.”
One should keep a job (any job) long enough to repair the plumbing in one’s ramshackle hovel so that their children don’t have to urinate and defecate in a bucket in the kitchen.
When faced with the good fortune of finding a valuable piece of jewelry, one should sell it to raise money for food, rather than keeping it boost one’s own “self-esteem.”
One should never steal the money one’s children are saving for themselves to escape to a better life in order to go on another drinking binge and then joke about it (“What do you think happened?”).
One shouldn’t put the onus of earning a living on one’s young teenagers so that one can pursue one’s “artistic breakthrough.”
More than any of that though, more than the basic responsibilities a parent has to provide food and shelter for their children, the one thing a parent should do before all others is protect their children from sexual predators. Both parents fail miserably, and their cavalier attitude towards sexual assault is sickening.
Jeannette’s lack of bitterness is probably good for her, but it helped fuel my disgust toward her parents. Her sister Lori and brother Brian are less understanding, while their youngest sister, Maureen, suffers the most, being the most removed from the tight trio of siblings by virtue of her age. (It’s unclear from the book what happens to Maureen, but I found suggestions online the she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.)
I was distraught after reading Educated; after reading The Glass Castle, I’m furious. The writing is excellent and the story is compelling, and yes, I recommend it heartily. I just can’t forgive the Walls parents the way Jeannette can. As Brian says at a Thanksgiving dinner that takes place with his adult siblings (and his mother), “You know, it’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.”