If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take a crack at liberating Connie’s back-story from the stupid retcons willed upon it by Lynn. Bear with me through the carnage.
Most of of the people who knew the Poirier family thought of most of them as being humble, friendly, salt-of-the-Earth types who didn’t ask much from the world and were content with their lot. For about a hundred years or so, the people of what used to be called ‘Millbro Township’ and what ended up becoming the Town of Millborough after the Second World War knew what to expect from the very predictable examples of the French Canadian diaspora. The noted exception to the rule of easy-going lower middle class Catholics was the youngest daughter Constance. It seemed to her mother Marie that the child was born to take offense. The case that came most readily to mind was family patriarch Joe’s mildly self-pitying musing about how his branch of the very big family tree was leading to a dead end owing to his taking the line running to daughters to an extreme.
He’d lost his first wife Anne to cancer, married again a respectable interval later and ended up with five daughters to marry off. It wasn’t a real tragedy and not anyone’s fault but, damn it, sometimes he wanted a boy to play baseball with like his brother Armand. Every so often, he’d made this futile wish clear and gotten a shrill lecture about his being a cruel, medieval monster who hated her from his youngest. Trying to talk to her was a risky venture because she reminded him very much of what bothered him about Anne of Green Gables. What Connie shared with the red-headed snippet is that they ‘rebelled’ against society not due to any real conviction or purpose but simply because society wasn’t going their way; what this told him is that when cultural norms started to benefit the child, she’d instantly become more Catholic than the Pope.
Of course, what really bothered and scared him was not that she had no real inclination towards the sort of domesticity. After all, not every woman in the world was meant to be a mother. What alarmed him was that she combined the sort of smug, self-absorbed self-righteousness that turned every little thing into a slight with a shocking inability to see the world for what it was. As an example, she didn’t seem to realize that most of why he and Marie were wary of her making her love interest Pete Landry out to be all twelve apostles was not that he was five or six years older than she was or that he was a black man. What bothered the two of them is that it looked to all the world as if Landry were searching for something that didn’t move too slowly or question things too much in order to get someone to cook his food and clean his house while he prowled around and pounced on anything with a pulse. They’d tried getting her to date other men during high school only to have her go right back to sniffing around Her One And Only Forever Love. Not even going on break during University broke the hold he had over her. Heh. You would have thought that her ‘twin’ from the West Coast, a Lynn Richards, would have warned her that Pete was perhaps not the most suitable candidate for monogamy but even she got a face-full of whimpering about how she didn’t own Landry. If only she’d taken advantage of that mission from the church to help vaccinate kids in Ecuador and seen the real world, she'd have finally realized that the world didn't begin and end with the need to placate a tin god with a fancy car and a likely story. Since that would take time away from yapping about how great Pete was, she never even bothered with it. All the hard work he'd went through to get ONE of his kids into university all gone to waste for a stupid reason. Instead of putting the degree he paid for to good use, Joe had to watch his youngest turn into the homemaker she wasn’t ever meant to be because her old high school rival Annie Pelletier couldn't shut up about her own alleged white knight on a steed. How very annoying that the former firebrand got smug about marrying younger and having a baby first.