Oh dear lord. Previously, Calendar Girl revealed Mia’s mother is bipolar and proceeds to treat this with the grace and sensitivity you’d expect from a story that has used the phrase “Samoan cock” at least 3000 times.
Calendar Girl (December) Chapter 8:
Max asks a question I have never heard a single man ask in my life, “What about me?”
She cried harder. “I got pregnant with you right after meeting Jackson. My disorder was out of control. I didn’t trust anyone. I loved Jackson, but I wasn’t in love with him. Not the forever kind of love. Every day, I was more confused than the next. I didn’t know what was happening. My therapist here told me that it was probably the baby blues, complicated more by my extreme mental state. When a woman’s hormones are up and down like that, and she’s bipolar, the outcome can be disastrous.”
I’m not in any way trying to dismiss the severity of what Mrs. Mia’s Mother was going through, but I find the connection to romantic love super weird here. It sounds like she’s trying to say, “My lack of true love fuelled my disorder.” Honestly, I don’t know what the book is trying to say here, and I’m trying to tread carefully.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t care, that I didn’t love you, Maxwell. I did. I do! Very much. But I didn’t know how to care for you. I was having all these horrible thoughts about Jackson, about killing myself and you. I did the only thing I could do…” More tears trickled down her face and her nose ran.
I don’t have a joke here, that’s just heartbreaking and terrifying, and I wanted you to know.
Meryl (Mia’s mother…because NOT ONE PERSON IN THIS FAMILY CAN HAVE A NAME THAT DOES NOT BEGIN WITH THE LETTER M) tells them that she wanted to contact them but feared their reaction and then feared losing Kent.
“So you didn’t know about us?” I asked Kent. He shook his head. “No. Meryl broke down when she saw you on the Dr. Hoffman show that first time. Then it all came pouring out. The entire truth. Eventually, I contacted the show. Told them I was your stepfather, and that I knew where your long lost mother was and wanted to reconnect the family.”
I sighed, letting all the air leave my lungs. Fucking Shandi. We could have been made aware of this bomb well in advance. I could not wait to get my hands around her spindly little neck.
It would be so funny if Shandi was somehow behind everything that went wrong in these stories. Shandi was secretly Benny’s boss and behind the terrorist kidnapping. She did it all for the ratings.
Mia feels no sympathy towards her mother because as she sees it, for years she’s been happily painting in a forest with her new husband and avoiding her responsibilities.
Mia isn’t sure she is ready to have a relationship with her mother, but Max says he’d like to try.
“My wife, Cyndi, and I have two children. Isabel is five and Jackson is just over two months. It would be nice for them to get to know their grandmother.”
Meryl lifted her hands to her lips. The tears, like a faucet, had been turned on once again. “Grandchildren. Oh, my heavens, Kent, we have grandchildren!”
I’m super unclear on what kind of characterisation Meryl is supposed to have. “Oh my heavens” feels like a really old-timey reply.
Maddy chimes in that she would also like to try, and Meryl and Kent are delighted.
At that point, all eyes were on me. I closed mine, not wanting to be judged for my feelings. I’d had years to love her and even more years to miss her… and eventually hate her.
“Mia?” Our mother asked. “And you? Is there any part of you left that misses me, wishes things could be different?” Her voice cracked and more sobs ensued.
Why are they all putting Mia on the spot like this? Maybe give her some time.
Mia gives a speech about all the things she had to go through because her mother left. Again, I feel like she’s absolving their father of a lot of the guilt here, and given the way her mother experienced her mental illness, I feel like her being around might have only added to Mia’s burden. But Mia’s anger and resentment do feel in-line with her character.
The dialogue gets…really really bad.
“…I can’t even begin to address what a mind fuck it was finding out I had a brother five years older than I was. Twenty-five years, Mother!” I grated through clenched teeth. “Twenty-five years I could have had Max. Do you have any idea how enriched our lives would have been had we known he existed? He’s now everything to us!”
He’s now everything to us! Does anyone else feel like suddenly Carlan decided to write everyone like they were on Days of Our Lives and throw all their past speech patterns out the window? Or does robot!Mia just lose her mind when things get stressful, and this is actually entirely in-character?
When it came right down to it, regardless of her disease and disorder, I needed her to care more about me than herself. Which I imagine with a severe problem like hers would be hard, but I needed people who were strong willed in my world, people who stuck their necks out for one another.
Honestly, Meryl is probably better off without Mia.
Mia heads home to snuggle with Wes who has some comforting words for her.
“Wanna fuck?” he said with a hint of humor. The old Wes was coming back more and more every day. I was beyond thankful for this medical and mental miracle.
…How is this any different to any version of Wes we’ve seen in this series?
Luckily, Mia turns him down and instead chooses to recap everything we just witnessed. Wes is mostly annoyed that now that she’s been on medication and living a calmer life, she didn’t reach out to her family and connect the siblings, which I understand.
That’s when I told Wes about the driving under the influence and child endangerment charges, but seriously? Do the crime, do the time. The likelihood that the State of Nevada would put a woman behind bars who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder shortly after that incident happened was slim to none. Besides that, I knew plenty of people who’s gotten DUIs who never did jail time. Sure, adding in the two children in the back seat and the endangerment charge would probably not get her time with her kids for a while, but we’d have known where she was.
OH MY GOD MIA WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? What a weirdly blase and harsh attitude about this. BUT WE’D HAVE KNOWN WHERE SHE WAS! Okay, I’ve been sitting here thinking deeply about this, and I can see some nuggets of truth here. Taking personal responsibility is a good thing…but how is Mia still not getting that at the time her mother was not capable of thinking this rationally about this? And if she had gone to prison, I imagine it could have had a terrible, terrible impact. Her mother would have been so vulnerable there.
I understand Mia probably isn’t thinking about this clearly now, but I’m worried the reader is supposed to be 100% on board with Mia here. Mia also goes on to say that this would have meant their father probably wouldn’t have become an alcoholic, which is also so fucking unfair.
To feel better, they go make ornaments with the rest of the family, and Mia has this super dark thought at the end.
I was, however, going to bust out some serious baked goods with Maddy. Between the two of us, we could bake almost anything.
A gift we must have gotten from a flour-spreading, dancing ballerina. That was likely the only trait the woman who had borne us passed down.
I might look like my mother, but I was nothing like her. I’d never be a woman who couldn’t be counted on no matter what the circumstances.
I don’t follow the logic here at all. She thinks because her mother had a breakdown while dancing in some flour…that means she got her baking talents from her…and she will never have anything else in common besides this and looks because Mia would never be “a woman” who couldn’t be counted on…even when it was beyond her control…
I blame Shandi for this entire chapter.
I sincerely hope Carlan has no friends with even the hint of a mental illness. This was so unbelievably offensive.
Honestly, I don’t think she’s ever been outside or talked to people. She doesn’t understand how prostitution, sex, family, marriage, PTSD, television shows, mental illness, and America work. I think she wrote these books, slid the pages under the door of her bunker, and they blew away, Xanadu-style, and landed on the desk in the bunker of a publisher who also had never been outside. The rest is shameful literary history.
I don’t really expect good things from these books, but some of this hit way too close to home. Mia removes all agency from her alcoholic father and places that blame on her mother with mental illness–that is what’s happening here. Just had to write out the actual thesis. My husband committed suicide while drunk in February after struggling with alcoholism for nearly fifteen years (he started young) and I will fight anyone who removes blame from him for that outcome. I guess it bothers me so much because that’s what Mia is doing in this scenario, blaming someone for things out of their control, and, having been blamed for my husband’s suicide by idiots a few times recently, the entire concept of agency is really dear to my heart. Mia only wants someone to apportion fault to, and while she hasn’t had much time to process, and she is human, I think even the rational part of the brain might say something like “hey, maybe this has something to do with my father’s actions, too.” She’s certainly old enough to have considered that her alcoholic father might not have 100% been in the right in what he put her and her sister through. Fuck this book for getting my blood pressure up this early. Lol.
I am so sorry about your husband and what you’ve been through. This book must really be making your blood boil. We need to put Carlan’s name on some internet watch lists. And maybe poop in her shoes.
Carlan saw the advice “write what you know” and apparently just went “nah, I got this.”
The list of things this series shouldn’t try to talk about and yet insists on talking about grows ever-longer. I knew this was going to be bad but “my mentally ill mother should have been imprisoned so we could keep an eye on her” [basically] is something else. Like I keep calling things that happen in this book next-level bad and then somehow it just. Keeps going further.
I’m mentally ill and these books are really offensive ew. And I noticed how terrible Calendar Girl treats women while it give free pass to men (especially Wes)
There are no truly memorable characters in this series except maybe Gin and that’s for all the wrong reasons. My first thought on reading the title of this post was, ‘who the fuck is Shandi?’ and maybe if Carlan didn’t insist on describing her characters by their stereotypes (Samoan hottie, latin luvah, Frenchie McFrenchperson) I’d be able to remember their names.
Also, what medical and mental miracle is Mia referring to? Did I miss the part where Wes pulled a Matthew Crowley and was able to walk again? Or is she saying that healing from physical injury over time and with medical care counts as a miracle? And mental miracle meaning that Wes went to therapy? Seriously, Carlan is already handling mental illness badly enough, the term mental miracle is not giving me any hope she’s going to do better in the home stretch.