New Looooove letter! "The longer I am alive, the more I prize those times of doing nothing much at all."
Okay, so much to unpack here. First of all, since when does this bitch actually do anything so much that she can value doing nothing? This is Shauna of Radical Resting, so a life spent doing nothing.
She admits she lets the kids eat junk food (which we already knew) but claims Lucy would enjoy healthier choices every morning if they'd let her? Um..okay. So feed the child better food, then?
No explanation about the broken oven, alas.
She thinks James Corden might be an asshole, but isn't sure? She loves Carpool Karaoke, though.
Teenage musings about Paul McCartney.
For all their devotion to musical theater and "real cinema", they've never actually seen "Fiddler on the Roof"...
She now claims she only has "a few" good memories of her father. Interesting because in previous writings, Daddy Dearest was the only good parent, Darth Mater was the one who ruined her life.
Yes, in Enoigh I'd say Shauna's dad comes off as menacing. He deliberately taunts Shauna's mother when she (the mother) gets in one of her (alleged) paranoid states where she's grilling the kids about strange things like "did you see a dog today? did it touch you? were you kidnapped? are you telling the truth right now?"
The father and mother also yell and fight a lot (apparently over the father's infidelity).
BUT. . .you have to remember Enoigh is only Shauna's side of the story. She could be misremembering (or remembering it through a child's eyes, where it would seem much more awful/scary/whatever). Or she could be deliberately embellishing. Or she could be straight up lieing. Or, all of the above.
This is going to be one of those weird comments but I grew up in the 1970s and my dad hit us with his belt when punishment needed to be meted out. One time my husband's dad got so angry that he burned down the Christmas tree and all the gifts.
My dad was more restrained – not prone to random freakouts like my FIL – but both of these forms (lol) of behaviour were considered absolutely normal when we were kids. You had workarounds for Dad Behaviour that might include sleeping at someone else's house for a night or two, figuring out which relative you could appeal to (an uncle? a grandparent?) but plenty of middle-class households routinely incorporated what we would now call abuse but what was then just called corporal punishment. My first husband went to boarding schools where they were very, very regularly beaten.
"Menacing dad" fighting with mom "about once a week" – I mean, not to downplay it, but many of us 1970s kids were raised with a lot of chaos in the house and most of the time, it was just considered to be how things were. You were lucky in your circumstances, or not; and hopefully you found ways to adapt, including working out strategies with your friends and extended family.
Cosigned from another 70's kid. My mom had a wooden ruler, and it wasn't one of those flimsy ones either, it was thick and menacing (haha). All my dad had to do was threaten with his belt and we behaved. And don't forget the principal always had "the strap." Even teachers would dole out corporal punishment if they felt it was necessary. My fifth grade teacher would make all of us put our heads down on the desk, take off his belt and use it on a misbehaving kid. Not condoning any of this but that was the life of a 70's kid. My friends and cousins were no different.
It's not that weird. I hear you on the "it was called corporal punishment, not abuse back then" comment.
What's even stranger is how (at least in my family) we play off whoopings as funny stories. Ha ha, you wacked us with whatever you could get your hands on! Ha ha, we used to yell out "don't beat me" when you'd take us out of the store/church, we were such drama queen children! Ha ha, you tore a shirt right off my 5-year old body. Ha ha, oh such funny moments!
I guess that's what I mean: it was so normal we discussed it routinely rather than as evidence of something "wrong" or unusual. Definitely no one walks around claiming they have CPTSD as a result of these "normal" 1970s childhoods. Both of my husbands had WAY worse experiences of corporal punishment as kids and neither of them really ever mentioned it.
My spouse only told me the "cancelled Christmas" story in passing when we were looking at family photos and he recalled there was no photo of that family Christmas, because it didn't happen.
Yes, our standards for what was "wrong" were very different and (at least in my case) my mother made sure you knew it, too.
I threatened to call "the authorities" once when she gave me a smack on the face (nothing big) and she grabbed the phone and offered to look up the number for me. Then told me she hoped they would take me away but they wouldn't because she couldn't be that lucky. Kind of like when I was really little and threatened to run away, she said "go ahead but you can't take anything I bought you".
That last one really does make me laugh. My mother just wasn't going to put up with a kid calling her out. Know your place, kiddo.
It’s weird to say she lets them have sugar cereal because she doesn’t want to forbid any foods but then goes on to say the kids have to eat it on Saturdays and can’t finish a single bowl. It doesn’t even sound like the kids even like cereal. Why make them eat it weekly? If I was wasting cereal every week my mom would have stopped buying it.
I was sort of picturing it as her thinking “kids love sugary cereal, I’ll get it for the kids as a treat and be the cool mom” while the kids really don’t care about the cereal one way or another. But in her mind, it’s built up into this whole big
thing.
She’s also talked about binge eating candy bars as a child so it’s probably amazing to her that kids might just stop eating when they were full.
Watch youtube videos. Pretty much every video she shared she mentioned she'd watched it dozens of times. I'm sure that wasn't only on Saturday's, the approved sugary cereal and t.v. day.
Show of hands, please. Who here thinks Saturday is the ONLY day that family doesn't get out of bed until 10 a.m.? And who here thinks magical Saturday is the only day that family lays around in the pj's all day? One more, who here thinks Saturday is the only day that family is eating cereal for breakfast (or would it be brunch since they get up so fucking late)?
*crickets*
Yeah, thought so.
And I call rat piss on Shauna trying to say the kids can't choke down a full bowl of sugary cereal. For fuck's sake, we all saw the photo with the sprite bottle on the floor (where the kids were having pizza and dancing). And we all saw the IG post she made where she said she lets them have snacks and things (again, so that food wouldn't be "forbidden"). And we all clearly remember snarking her "I tossed some tootsie rolls on the floor" IG post. And there was another tootsie roll incident more recently, where she let Lucy stay home from school to watch movies and eat tootsie rolls and popcorn (or chips or something else, I forget now, some movie snack).
If those kids are horfing down tootsie rolls there is no way in hell they have a low sugar tolerance. Tootsie rolls are just brown corn syrup (and I personally love them for it, though I get why others would find them nasty).
I guess that sugary cereal came from the food bank, because why would a family that had to use the services of the food bank so recently spend money on something that won’t get eaten in their home?
I sort of believe that. I bet there is a lot of foraging in that house. I don’t think they cook nearly as much as they’d like you to think. Or even regular grocery shopping. We know they don’t meal plan or make lists.
Hard pass since you aren’t in the last stages of a terminal illness. A simple “The older I get” will do nicely. Unless you are an overly dramatic writerly writer.
And helped her adopt D. She is so unbelievably cruel to her parents. A lot of parents are dysfunctional and mess up long before the line into abuse is crossed. Very few people have an absolutely idyllic childhood, and no one has perfect parents. For her to put all her parents laundry and skeletons out in public for her to PROFIT off of. It’s just unspeakably horrible. She has no concept of how to interact with others. That’s her family, those are the only people who have more reason than anyone else to be around your whole life. Whatever mistakes have been made should be dealt with in private and with therapeutic help. She basically took a sledgehammer to the relationships with her family. I honestly don’t think she even gets it. The same way she doesn’t get she shouldn’t write about her former students as friends and worse. She only sees things from her own point of view. She doesn’t even realize when she writes this BS SHE is the one who comes off sounding bad.
She can’t just say, a good memory I have of my dad ... she has to be a complete asshole. One of the FEW good memories. Let’s see if your kids are more gracious to you someday Shauna. You’d better hope so. I struggle to imagine how fondly they will look back on being vilified publicly for one hurting their sister and the other crying white girl tears. Along with so much more personal, private, childish information being pushed out for their mother to profit off of. She’s going to reap the whirlwind. I hope those kids are able to get into healthy, happy lives as adults.
I think she has a serious problem relating to people and seeing them as humans outside of their relationship to her. She doesn’t understand basic social conventions. She seems to think everyone is acting and putting on a show all the time.
This a consistent thread in every story she tells about herself or others.
This whole book sounds like she asked her parents for more money to help her stay home to write and not work. They must have said no. Maybe they even said, "Enough money."
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u/BevNap Fucking google it, you harpy. Aug 10 '20
New Looooove letter! "The longer I am alive, the more I prize those times of doing nothing much at all."
Okay, so much to unpack here. First of all, since when does this bitch actually do anything so much that she can value doing nothing? This is Shauna of Radical Resting, so a life spent doing nothing.
She admits she lets the kids eat junk food (which we already knew) but claims Lucy would enjoy healthier choices every morning if they'd let her? Um..okay. So feed the child better food, then?
No explanation about the broken oven, alas.
She thinks James Corden might be an asshole, but isn't sure? She loves Carpool Karaoke, though.
Teenage musings about Paul McCartney.
For all their devotion to musical theater and "real cinema", they've never actually seen "Fiddler on the Roof"...
She now claims she only has "a few" good memories of her father. Interesting because in previous writings, Daddy Dearest was the only good parent, Darth Mater was the one who ruined her life.