Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Chapter 3 - On John the Father
Boundaries
Boundaries are those unwritten rules about who gets to do or know what. Who gets included and who doesn't.
In some families, the boundaries are permeable. You know those homes in the neighborhood in which all the kids of a certain age wander in and out kitchen, one of the son or daughter's close friends gets semi-adopted into the family, and a "godfather/mother" hangs out after work? That's a family with highly permeable boundaries. People move in and out of family life fairly easily. Outsiders come into the family and family members move out without it threatening the core definition of the family.
In contrast, we have John Winchester's family. There are very strict rules about who gets allowed inside.
SAM: So, what am I supposed to do, just cut everybody out of my life? You’re serious?
DEAN: Look, it sucks, but in a job like this, you can’t get close to people, period.
SAM: You’re kind of anti-social, you know that?
Skin
You told her. You told her? The secret? Our big family rule number one, we do what we do, and we shut up about it. For a year and a half I do nothing but lie to Jessica, and you go out with this chick in Ohio a couple of times and you tell her everything?
Route 666
So far as we know, only Bobby, Pastor Jim, Caleb, and Travis have been allowed inside the family life. Sam and Dean don't even know the "uncle" who bought the plot for their mother's headstone. John removed his sons from the civilian world in which they were embedded at Sam's birth so thoroughly that it wasn't until Sam was prompted by Ruby that he learned of the deaths of all his mother's relatives and friends.
SAM: What about my mom?
RUBY: You know, what happened to her friends. You don’t know? You have got a little bit of catching up to do, my friend. So, why don’t you look into your mom’s pals and then give me a call, and we’ll talk again.
The Kids are Alright
John moved his sons around so much that it would have been very difficult for them to make and keep friendships. And as mentioned above, for the most part, John kept his sons out of the hunting world. A lot of hunters, it seems, knew of them, but little to no contact was allowed.
Enmeshment and Rigidity
Families vary, too, in the amount of cohesion (emotional bond) between its members. I have a friend whose immediate and extended family pretty much all live on various parcels of the farmland her grandfather bought back in the early 1900's. In my family, on the other hand, I and my siblings are scattered across the continental US and beyond. My friend's family members are in and out of each other's houses all the time and they know intimately what is going on with each other. I, on the other hand, am expected to call ahead of time and make plans for visiting, and expect this in return. I enjoy being with my family when I visit, but I don't really know much about their day to day lives. My friend's family is pretty enmeshed. My family's pretty disengaged. Most families fall somewhere in between on that continuum.
It's pretty obvious that, although they've gone through brief periods of disengagement, the Winchesters are at heart an enmeshed family system. Sam and Dean have spent the vast majority of their lives living in each other's pockets. John facilitated that enmeshment by 1) isolating Sam and Dean, as described above, and 2) insisting that they take on the hunting life.
Without anyone else to turn to, who else would meet Dean's emotional needs but Sam, and who else would meet Sam's emotional needs but Dean? One stop shopping, get it all here.
As mentioned above, fear has a way of fostering the need for control and John coped with his fears by becoming just about as autocratic a father as you can get. Everything was subsumed in the service of preventing the thing feared, his sons' deaths. He allowed no questioning of his judgment and parceled out information on a need to know basis. He expected automatic obedience and demanded that his sons learn all the skills necessary to live the hunting life so that they would be prepared. He gave them a mission, something to bond them together through their common purpose.
SAM: He barks orders at us, Dean, he expects us to follow him without question. He keeps us on some crap need to know deal.
DEAN: He does what he does for a reason.
SAM: What reason?
DEAN: Our job! There’s no time to argue, there’s no margin for error, all right, it’s just the way the old man runs-
Dead Man's Blood
JOHN: I have given you an order. Now, you stop following me, and you do your job. You understand me? Now, take down these names
DEAN: Dad, it’s me. Where are you? Yes, sir. Uh, yeah, I got a pen. What are their names?
Scarecrow
In families of high cohesion (enmeshed), communication tends to be a bit telegraphic, mostly because they live in each other's pockets and with so many shared experiences they often think alike. In fact, it often becomes an unspoken assumption that everyone IS alike. I like what you like. You like what I like. You believe what I believe, we all believe the same thing. I know what you know, we all know the same things, etc.
Sammy, it just, it never occurred to me what you wanted. I just couldn’t accept the fact that you and me, we’re just different.
Dead Man's Blood
How much flexibility is allowed is another important characteristic of family life. (pg 18-20). In John's world after his wife's murder there was no room for error or weakness. The consequence was quite likely to be death. Therefore, there is no time at which you can let up, not be vigilant, let someone get in too close, or not follow the rules. The slightest slip could mean disaster, and because of John's need for control, any deviation off of what he instructs could mean disaster.
JOHN: Come on, dude, look alive. This stuff’s important.
DEAN: I know, it’s just, we’ve gone over it, like, a million times, and you know I’m not stupid.
JOHN: I know you’re not. But it only takes one mistake, you got that?
Something Wicked
Core Family Values that Define Its Mission
Other rules that seem to influence family life in the Winchester household are peculiar to their situation. The two that seem to me to be the most influential are: 1) Reject all things supernatural and 2) Keep Sam safe.
The necessity of tight boundaries around the family to keep Sam and Dean safe doesn't only include keeping humans out. Given the experience that John had of just how powerless he was to save Mary, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to conclude that if he cannot tolerate exposing his sons to risk from humans, he would be even more adverse to allowing them to get too close to the supernatural. Therefore, in the Winchester family, John defined the supernatural as evil and the only appropriate way to make contact is to destroy it.
What if we killed things that didn't deserve killing? You know, I mean, the way Dad raised us, I mean, the way he raised us to hate those things, and man, I hate them.
Bloodlust
This is why. This book. This is Dad’s single most valuable possession Everything he knows about every evil thing is in here. And he’s passed it on to us. I think he wants us to pick up where he left off, you know saving people, hunting things. The family business.
Wendigo
If there is one command that John has issued more than any other, it's "Keep Sam safe."
JOHN: Lock the doors and windows, close the shades, and most important
DEAN: Watch out for Sammy. I know.
Something Wicked
JOHN: I want you to watch out for Sammy, okay?
DEAN: Yeah, Dad, you know I will. You’re scaring me.
JOHN: Don’t be scared, Dean.
In My Time of Dying
Do you even have an original thought? No. All there is, is "Watch out for Sammy. Look after your little brother, boy!" You can still hear your dad's voice in your head, can't you? Clear as a bell.
Dream a Little Dream of Me
Not only does he issue the command, but he holds Dean to it. Anything happens to Sam, John holds Dean accountable.
JOHN: What happened?
DEAN: I just went out.
JOHN: What?
DEAN: Just for a second. I’m sorry.
JOHN: I told you not to leave this room. I told you not to let him out of your sight!
Something Wicked
DEAN: It started out as nightmares, and then he started having them when he was awake.
JOHN: All right, when were you going to tell me about this?
DEAN: We didn’t know what it meant.
JOHN: All right, something like this starts happening to your brother, you pick up the phone, and you call me.
Salvation
(Can I just tell you, as an older sister of two younger brothers, in that last scene, where John calls Dean on not notifying him about Sam's visions, I had an instant flashback. "But, Dad! He's the one who did something stupid and got hurt, why are you yelling at me?!")
John's apparent preoccupation with Sam's safety always piqued my curiosity. It always seemed out of proportion with how John had treated Dean when he was younger and vulnerable, as well. When I look back on it and wonder how much John knew for Sam, I wonder how much of that directive's strength came from John's fears about what the Evil Thing that had killed Mary intended for his youngest son.
~*~
So, to summarize, it seems that John coped with Mary's death and the destruction of his view of the world as a relatively safe place by taking action. He prepared himself and his sons, to the best of his ability. His preparation definitely included training his sons in the skills of supernatural warfare, but it also included instilling a mindset that reduced their world down to those that they could trust the most, themselves, and set their minds to preserve each other over all else. Everything was subject to the service of the family's mission: to survive.
~*~
Next to come: Chapter 4: On Dean the Motherless Child
~*~
Chapter 1: On the Siren's Call
Chapter 2: On John the Man
Chapter 3: On John the Father
~*~
Chapter 4: On Dean The Motherless Child
Chapter 5: On Dean the Heart of the Family
~*~
Chapter 6: On Sam Born of Love and Loss
Chapter 7: On Sam in the Box
Chapter 8: On Sam out of the Box
Chapter 9 : On Sam Captive on a Carousel of Time
Chapter 10: On Sam Power Can Be Taken, But Not Given
Chapter 11: On Sam From Here Forward
Chapter 12: On Sam Out of the Box Redux
~*~
Chapter 13: On SamnDean Putting Away Childish Things
Chapter 14: On SamnDean Triangles are a Demon's Best Friend
Chapter 15: On SamnDean Stop the Carousel I Want to Get Off
~*~
credit goes to oxoniensis and marishna of summerskin for the screencaps
Boundaries are those unwritten rules about who gets to do or know what. Who gets included and who doesn't.
In some families, the boundaries are permeable. You know those homes in the neighborhood in which all the kids of a certain age wander in and out kitchen, one of the son or daughter's close friends gets semi-adopted into the family, and a "godfather/mother" hangs out after work? That's a family with highly permeable boundaries. People move in and out of family life fairly easily. Outsiders come into the family and family members move out without it threatening the core definition of the family.
In contrast, we have John Winchester's family. There are very strict rules about who gets allowed inside.
SAM: So, what am I supposed to do, just cut everybody out of my life? You’re serious?
DEAN: Look, it sucks, but in a job like this, you can’t get close to people, period.
SAM: You’re kind of anti-social, you know that?
Skin
You told her. You told her? The secret? Our big family rule number one, we do what we do, and we shut up about it. For a year and a half I do nothing but lie to Jessica, and you go out with this chick in Ohio a couple of times and you tell her everything?
Route 666
So far as we know, only Bobby, Pastor Jim, Caleb, and Travis have been allowed inside the family life. Sam and Dean don't even know the "uncle" who bought the plot for their mother's headstone. John removed his sons from the civilian world in which they were embedded at Sam's birth so thoroughly that it wasn't until Sam was prompted by Ruby that he learned of the deaths of all his mother's relatives and friends.
SAM: What about my mom?
RUBY: You know, what happened to her friends. You don’t know? You have got a little bit of catching up to do, my friend. So, why don’t you look into your mom’s pals and then give me a call, and we’ll talk again.
The Kids are Alright
John moved his sons around so much that it would have been very difficult for them to make and keep friendships. And as mentioned above, for the most part, John kept his sons out of the hunting world. A lot of hunters, it seems, knew of them, but little to no contact was allowed.
Enmeshment and Rigidity
Families vary, too, in the amount of cohesion (emotional bond) between its members. I have a friend whose immediate and extended family pretty much all live on various parcels of the farmland her grandfather bought back in the early 1900's. In my family, on the other hand, I and my siblings are scattered across the continental US and beyond. My friend's family members are in and out of each other's houses all the time and they know intimately what is going on with each other. I, on the other hand, am expected to call ahead of time and make plans for visiting, and expect this in return. I enjoy being with my family when I visit, but I don't really know much about their day to day lives. My friend's family is pretty enmeshed. My family's pretty disengaged. Most families fall somewhere in between on that continuum.
It's pretty obvious that, although they've gone through brief periods of disengagement, the Winchesters are at heart an enmeshed family system. Sam and Dean have spent the vast majority of their lives living in each other's pockets. John facilitated that enmeshment by 1) isolating Sam and Dean, as described above, and 2) insisting that they take on the hunting life.
Without anyone else to turn to, who else would meet Dean's emotional needs but Sam, and who else would meet Sam's emotional needs but Dean? One stop shopping, get it all here.
As mentioned above, fear has a way of fostering the need for control and John coped with his fears by becoming just about as autocratic a father as you can get. Everything was subsumed in the service of preventing the thing feared, his sons' deaths. He allowed no questioning of his judgment and parceled out information on a need to know basis. He expected automatic obedience and demanded that his sons learn all the skills necessary to live the hunting life so that they would be prepared. He gave them a mission, something to bond them together through their common purpose.
SAM: He barks orders at us, Dean, he expects us to follow him without question. He keeps us on some crap need to know deal.
DEAN: He does what he does for a reason.
SAM: What reason?
DEAN: Our job! There’s no time to argue, there’s no margin for error, all right, it’s just the way the old man runs-
Dead Man's Blood
JOHN: I have given you an order. Now, you stop following me, and you do your job. You understand me? Now, take down these names
DEAN: Dad, it’s me. Where are you? Yes, sir. Uh, yeah, I got a pen. What are their names?
Scarecrow
In families of high cohesion (enmeshed), communication tends to be a bit telegraphic, mostly because they live in each other's pockets and with so many shared experiences they often think alike. In fact, it often becomes an unspoken assumption that everyone IS alike. I like what you like. You like what I like. You believe what I believe, we all believe the same thing. I know what you know, we all know the same things, etc.
Sammy, it just, it never occurred to me what you wanted. I just couldn’t accept the fact that you and me, we’re just different.
Dead Man's Blood
How much flexibility is allowed is another important characteristic of family life. (pg 18-20). In John's world after his wife's murder there was no room for error or weakness. The consequence was quite likely to be death. Therefore, there is no time at which you can let up, not be vigilant, let someone get in too close, or not follow the rules. The slightest slip could mean disaster, and because of John's need for control, any deviation off of what he instructs could mean disaster.
JOHN: Come on, dude, look alive. This stuff’s important.
DEAN: I know, it’s just, we’ve gone over it, like, a million times, and you know I’m not stupid.
JOHN: I know you’re not. But it only takes one mistake, you got that?
Something Wicked
Core Family Values that Define Its Mission
Other rules that seem to influence family life in the Winchester household are peculiar to their situation. The two that seem to me to be the most influential are: 1) Reject all things supernatural and 2) Keep Sam safe.
The necessity of tight boundaries around the family to keep Sam and Dean safe doesn't only include keeping humans out. Given the experience that John had of just how powerless he was to save Mary, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to conclude that if he cannot tolerate exposing his sons to risk from humans, he would be even more adverse to allowing them to get too close to the supernatural. Therefore, in the Winchester family, John defined the supernatural as evil and the only appropriate way to make contact is to destroy it.
What if we killed things that didn't deserve killing? You know, I mean, the way Dad raised us, I mean, the way he raised us to hate those things, and man, I hate them.
Bloodlust
This is why. This book. This is Dad’s single most valuable possession Everything he knows about every evil thing is in here. And he’s passed it on to us. I think he wants us to pick up where he left off, you know saving people, hunting things. The family business.
Wendigo
If there is one command that John has issued more than any other, it's "Keep Sam safe."
JOHN: Lock the doors and windows, close the shades, and most important
DEAN: Watch out for Sammy. I know.
Something Wicked
JOHN: I want you to watch out for Sammy, okay?
DEAN: Yeah, Dad, you know I will. You’re scaring me.
JOHN: Don’t be scared, Dean.
In My Time of Dying
Do you even have an original thought? No. All there is, is "Watch out for Sammy. Look after your little brother, boy!" You can still hear your dad's voice in your head, can't you? Clear as a bell.
Dream a Little Dream of Me
Not only does he issue the command, but he holds Dean to it. Anything happens to Sam, John holds Dean accountable.
JOHN: What happened?
DEAN: I just went out.
JOHN: What?
DEAN: Just for a second. I’m sorry.
JOHN: I told you not to leave this room. I told you not to let him out of your sight!
Something Wicked
DEAN: It started out as nightmares, and then he started having them when he was awake.
JOHN: All right, when were you going to tell me about this?
DEAN: We didn’t know what it meant.
JOHN: All right, something like this starts happening to your brother, you pick up the phone, and you call me.
Salvation
(Can I just tell you, as an older sister of two younger brothers, in that last scene, where John calls Dean on not notifying him about Sam's visions, I had an instant flashback. "But, Dad! He's the one who did something stupid and got hurt, why are you yelling at me?!")
John's apparent preoccupation with Sam's safety always piqued my curiosity. It always seemed out of proportion with how John had treated Dean when he was younger and vulnerable, as well. When I look back on it and wonder how much John knew for Sam, I wonder how much of that directive's strength came from John's fears about what the Evil Thing that had killed Mary intended for his youngest son.
~*~
So, to summarize, it seems that John coped with Mary's death and the destruction of his view of the world as a relatively safe place by taking action. He prepared himself and his sons, to the best of his ability. His preparation definitely included training his sons in the skills of supernatural warfare, but it also included instilling a mindset that reduced their world down to those that they could trust the most, themselves, and set their minds to preserve each other over all else. Everything was subject to the service of the family's mission: to survive.
~*~
Next to come: Chapter 4: On Dean the Motherless Child
~*~
Chapter 1: On the Siren's Call
Chapter 2: On John the Man
Chapter 3: On John the Father
~*~
Chapter 4: On Dean The Motherless Child
Chapter 5: On Dean the Heart of the Family
~*~
Chapter 6: On Sam Born of Love and Loss
Chapter 7: On Sam in the Box
Chapter 8: On Sam out of the Box
Chapter 9 : On Sam Captive on a Carousel of Time
Chapter 10: On Sam Power Can Be Taken, But Not Given
Chapter 11: On Sam From Here Forward
Chapter 12: On Sam Out of the Box Redux
~*~
Chapter 13: On SamnDean Putting Away Childish Things
Chapter 14: On SamnDean Triangles are a Demon's Best Friend
Chapter 15: On SamnDean Stop the Carousel I Want to Get Off
~*~
credit goes to oxoniensis and marishna of summerskin for the screencaps