The odd thing about the Jeremy Jones situation is that it was the last time April could remember her father agreeing with her about something. While April herself thinks that her dad and mom went crazy when she turned thirteen and suddenly started seeing everything she did as a threat, the real turning point seems to have been when she expressed her belief that pointing Liz and Anthony at each other at a party after they had broken up was a bad thing. The two of them did not make sense to April at the time and they still do not. While her younger self had trouble putting why that was into words, the woman she is now sees the problem: Anthony did not love Liz so much as he loved and image and Liz loved the idea of being in love. It wasn’t as if that they had the odd sort of compatibility that defined April’s parents or her brother and sister-in-law (daydreaming idiot who couldn’t be bothered learning how the world works and long-suffering caretaker) had. What they did have is a dangerous need to destroy the relationships they were building in order to achieve a horrible dream that would only hurt them most of all. What she did not realize at the time is that her parents did not especially care about that or about the people who might get hurt because, well, because of the pretty grandkids that Mom deserved and Mrs Sobinski did not. Since she expressed doubt about the glorious future, she had set herself on a path of losing family politics.
What this meant is that Dad always agreed with whatever Mom said or did. When she wanted to spend afternoons at home in front of the box eating snacks, this meant that she had to march off to Mom’s job to be babysat in order to learn good work habits and not because her parents assumed that her plus empty house equals NC-17 motion picture. Oh, no. They were not terrified of what she would do, not them. While she knew that older people were not comfortable talking to children about sex, she still feels insulted to this day that she had to be tricked into reading Our Bodies, Our Selves like she was getting away with something. Bad enough to have a mother who wanted a government censor to do her parenting for her without her and Mrs Poirier cooking up some stupid, insulting scheme to protect her from actually having to speak to her child.
Given that she had on the one hand, a distant father who had no idea who she was and did not wish to learn and a mother who could never really be trusted to look out for her best interests, one of the things that the April of the here and now wishes is that she had not been so desperate to see any sign that they wanted her around that she loved that they agreed that Becky was a bad person for wanting to run their garage band. While she still sort of envies Becky, Present-day April is ashamed of the Manichean viewpoint she had when she was young, messed-up and hoping to be finally approved of by her parents. It bothers her that she did not listen to her grandfather about how maybe, yeah, she was tired of always giving way to Becky all the time almost as much as being so naïve to think that having envy made a person a total monster. There she was, fighting some stupid war that only existed inside her head and all of it a waste of time. It was like Liz’s love life: a self-induced catastrophe brought on be being too sheltered to understand how people actually behaved.
Besides, there were real problems in her life that she should have focused on instead. The first problem was, as mentioned, a mother who never really seemed to admit that she might have been wrong about important things. Mom always wanted to change the subject whenever it was about how Kortney tricked her into letting her steal from the business. April had no real idea what her mother was afraid of but she really hoped it was not a belief that apologizing was a sign of weakness. She also had no idea why her mother thought that she was too stupid to know what a stroke was when she was asking WHEN Grandpa Jim had his stroke and if it were ischemic or hemorrhagic. While she expected it, she did not especially like the assumption that she had to be spoon-fed wildly inaccurate knowledge. She did not bring those problems on herself by witlessly blundering around expecting people to drop things on a dime like Liz did. Heh. If Liz had a clue, the fire that wasn’t Mike’s fault would have been easier to bear because she would not have been treated like another spare item.
(It should be noted at this point that April herself was being manifestly unfair to Elizabeth when talking about blundering her way through romantic entanglements. This is because she herself was so desperate for anything like human contact that she embraced a laddish dunce named Gerald Delaney who, like some other idiot named Jeffo, mostly saw female contemporaries as a commodity. She’s still trying to figure out his appeal now that she’s got her head on straight.)
That being said, most everything else that was wrong with her life kind of was Dad and Deanna’s fault. When she had time enough to think after she’d settled into the smaller house Dad loved, she realized that her older brother went loony watching his apartment burn down and turned into a kid crying for Mommy. Condemning him for acting like the infant he had reverted to would be like standing around like a blockhead screaming about the stupid child killing the dog because it’s bad form to blame a child that age for his or her parent’s stupidity. The two of them simply took advantage of his minor breakdown to achieve their own tawdry little goals. Oh, it hurt to be caught in the crossfire of his wanting to inherit the family farm because the outside world was scary and Dad (who seemed to labour under the illusion that she wanted Mike and his family to freeze and die or something or other like she was Lucretia Fricking Borgia because he was too chicken to crawl out of his coop and find out what was going on in his own house) wanting to buy that tiny house that was easy for Mom but Dad was right about one thing....it only hurt for a little bit because for some reason, the only time she ever saw her folks after high school was when she went to their place. Aunt Georgia's joke about St Elly, Guardian Spirit Of Swept Porches saw being asked to visit someone as being a defeated supplicant who had to crawl through the mud at the behest of a malicious tyrant was not especially funny, true though it might be. Another not so funny joke was Phil and his talking up how Liz and Anthony only wanted to marry one another to antagonize cartoon ogres.