Sometimes the Mom Just Has to Die - Guest Post by Kristine Rudolph
I’ve been a part of two different Mother & Child book clubs with my kids over the past decade and there’s a question that the parents, mostly new to middle grade and YA, invariably ask.
“Why do the moms always have to die?”
The question is usually met with a chorus of Harry Potter
and Bambi – actually lots of Disney movies get cited – and a general
sense of frustration that we moms, super important in the lives of our
children, tend to get offed in the very first pages. That is if we make it
“onscreen” at all.
I usually wait for the din to fade before piping in. “The
moms have to die because how else can the children figure things out for
themselves? The main character has to grow, and that growth needs to come from
somewhere besides Mom stepping in to solve, or show you how to solve, the
problem.”
The moms don’t always die, of course, even if it
feels that way sometimes. But in upper middle grade and YA literature, the
parents do take a step back. They lose some of their agency.
Getting the parents out of the frame? In middle grade, that’s
a good thing.
The family dynamic is a major subplot of my novel, The
Twin Stars and the Soccer Superstar. I needed both parents plus an amazing
aunt to make my story work. But I still had to take the mom and dad out of the
main character’s primary struggle. They couldn’t step in and solve it for her.
In my story, the mom suffers from depression and the dad is a hamfisted
enabler, trying to keep his wife from being upset and, at the same time, hiding
her illness behind a chuckle and a smile for his two daughters. Neither mom nor
dad is able to help Cassaty find the missing soccer superstar. She relies on an
ensemble of tweens and teens to make that magic happen.
Gayle Forman added a layer onto the mental health angle when
she situated her main character Alex in a foster care / guardianship situation
in her lovely novel, Not Nothing. In reality, the adult guardians were
probably more invested in Alex’s well-being than he knows. But because Alex
assumes he is an unwanted burden, he thinks he can’t rely on them for support
when things get thorny. Instead, he makes a new friend. Together the two kids grow,
change and solve lots of other people’s problems along the way.
Other authors have made non-death choices as well. Rebecca
Stead’s remarkable When You Reach Me is set in the 1970s and features
latchkey kids. The adults are definitely part of the story, but they aren’t the
catalyst for the protagonist’s change.
In Allie Millington’s gorgeous novel Olivetti, the
search for a missing mom forms the basis for the story arc. She is not –
spoiler alert! – dead, but the resolution to her disappearance comes from new
friendships and a magical typewriter. The family is together at the end because
of the serious work of kids, not because a grown-up stepped in.
On the other hand, Holly Jackson’s YA thriller, The
Reappearance of Rachel Price, turns the missing parent trope on its head
with a missing mom who reappears in the first act. It’s her reappearance that
upends the main character’s life. Again, while the mom plays a part in the
ultimate resolution, the teens catch the evildoers and save lives.
If a child isn’t at the center of your story, you aren’t
writing middle grade. That child is meant to grow and change by the end of the
novel. Adults may provide scaffolding, cause more struggle or be benign “potted
plants” in the story. But what they must never do is solve the problem for the
child. There are a lot of tools to accomplish this, but sometimes the mom just
has to die to make the story work.
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