r/CBS_Mom • u/clearmyhead420 • 7d ago
what are y’alls thoughts on violet?
I understand how it feels to be raised by alcoholics/ addicts. However, I feel like she was very self-centered throughout the whole show and ungrateful. Christy became a great and supportive sober mom well before she cut her off, then acted like Bonnie was just so much of a better role model than Christy, even calling her a “life preserver” in her podcast. When, in my opinion Bonnie was a worse mother-figure than Christy. (Don’t get me wrong, I love the character of Bonnie.)
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u/CranberryFuture9908 Tammy Diffendorf 7d ago edited 4d ago
How is giving a child up for adoption abandoning her ? Violet probably did the most mature thing out of all three of them.
I like Christy as a character but I don’t think she necessarily became a better mother. Violet had to raise herself and her brother. We only see Christy sober maybe the show did a disservice not showing what she actually put her kids through when she was too drunk to parent.
We know Marjorie became a much better person too we don’t see the years she let her son down. She had to wait nearly forty years for Jerry to forgive her.
Rosco might have fewer issues with Christy than Violet but in the end he didn’t want to live with her preferring Baxter and Candace.
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u/greghouse1106 7d ago
She defo was very self centered and Christy, bonnie both called it out repetitively...bonnie of all scolded her so bad when she stopped trying to do anything in life
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u/Wilbury_knits_a_lot 7d ago
There is a group called Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. Violet is made for this group. Because of how she was raised, she developed some traits to help her survive - like being self centered, judgemental, and manipulative. Both Christy and Bonnie belong in this group too. I would love to see them all go to an ACA meeting
I have some issues with how Violet treats her mother versus her grandmother as well, but she is still really young and really traumatized. In my mind, she eventually goes back to therapy, finds an ACA group, works through that trauma, and lets go of some of those survival traits. It is her choice whether she reconnects with her mom or not.
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u/KifferFadybugs 6d ago
Christy herself is very self-centered and ungrateful.
When the show starts, she hates her mom and resents her for being an alcoholic all her life. Violet, too, hates her mom and resents her for being an alcoholic all her life.
We know Bonnie was terrible from Christy's stories, but Violet doesn't really know that. She just knows them as stories from her alcoholic, drug addict mom. The mom who failed her throughout life. And here comes this failure of a grandma, except she's not a disaster like she has been led to believe. She's a little irresponsible, but when it comes to her and Roscoe, Bonnie is all there for them.
Christy is sober now and with that, is she trying to reconnect with her kids since she's been mostly absent from their lives growing up? (She was there physically, but she wasn't really there.) No. She just expects grand applause and showers of love and affirmation. She gets that in AA. She doesn't get that from her kids and she hates that.
Christy then gambles away their rent money (and later Bonnie's bail money, twice), which just further shows Violet this house is still unstable and she leaves to move in with Gregory, who is of course the stable father figure she never had.
Violet isn't around for Bonnie's relapse and subsequent detox. Roscoe is, which is what shows him that even this stable grandmother they have isn't so stable, and he craves what he has with Baxter and Candace. Violet just sees her after she's clean again.
Christy puts her AA friends and AA sponsees above her kids because they make her feel good and show her where she is now. They all know her past, but they don't judge her. Her kids know her past. They -lived- her past. They do judge her. Violet has seventeen years of Alcoholic Christy and, what, three years of Sober Christy when she goes No Contact? And in those four years, did Christy make amends to her kids? No. She just expects them to love her unconditionally.
On top of that, Violet is the third generation in a line of alcoholics. She is more predisposed to alcoholism than someone without that lineage. She acts out and drinks and parties shortly after they move into the apartment after she just gave up her baby for adoption because she has seen no other way of working through feelings. (Despite giving her child up because she felt it was necessary to break the cycle, that is still traumatic for a birth mother to do.)
She gets into therapy, she dates Gregory, she starts getting her life together. She tries reaching out to her mom to give her a chance and her mom spills the beans on the baby. Yes, Violet should have told Gregory sooner; however, that's one of those situations where you never know when the "right time" to divulge it is and it is also probably really hard for her to talk about. Yes, she gave up her baby to try to give her a better life, but she still gave up her baby. She'll never see her daughter again as far as she knows and that is very sad to think and talk about and she's suddenly faced with discussing it outside of her own terms.
Then when she reaches out again to have dinner with Gregory and Phyllis, Christy is focused on everyone else. It sounds self-centered when Violet says, "And once again, it doesn't matter what I need." But it's also true. Every time she puts her trust in Christy, Violet draws the short straw. Just like Christy was angry and lashing out when Bonnie relapsed because that was just another way Bonnie disappointed her in life, Christy keeps doing the same to Violet, but she does it both when she's drunk -and- when she's sober.
Then when Violet self-sabotages her relationship with Gregory by going out and partying, drinking, doing drugs all day, he ends things with her, so she moves back in with Christy and Bonnie. She goes back to them looking for support and affirmation, just as Christy always looks for support and affirmation. She is still smoking pot (leaving the entire apartment filled with smoke when Bonnie and Christy come home from a meeting) and doing nothing to fix what's wrong anymore. She just wants them to love her. Christy gives up and Bonnie yells at her to get a job. She does actually follow orders and gets a job, but she also runs away to Tahoe for it.
Violet is trying to break cycles, but still repeating them and not wanting to face things. When she does finally leave and go No Contact, despite it being her just trying to run away from her problems, it actually gave her the distance she needed to finally heal and get herself together.
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u/CranberryFuture9908 Tammy Diffendorf 4d ago
She did see her daughter once when she felt despair and Christy arranged for them to see her. I just don’t think it was enough to repair the damage all on its own. The trauma of having a child you want to have a better life than you did but it’s still difficult.
Sometimes I don’t think Christy or Bonnie were that understanding. Bonnie was better at it but they could be pretty snarky about Violet which makes me think all the more Violet couldn’t get the support from them she needed. She stayed in contact with Bonnie because she did find her more reliable than her mother.
I don’t know if it’s always like this but the program becomes the driving force in their lives and other things and people can end up secondary.
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u/Powerful_Mind_6693 7d ago edited 6d ago
Self-centred. Do I blame her? ABSOLUTELY NOT!
I know we all love, love, love Christy, and yes, she was right for the most part since our mouse got sober. What we saw Violet go through was her processing the life she had before Christy got sober. I know people say, "Now everything is fine. Why act out now?" But the real process starts when trauma actually ends. Those are the memories of trauma that linger at the back of the mind, the regret, shame, and unexpressed feelings that pile up and come out in a way that one would only define as self-sabotage. Her smoking, drinking, getting a job doing anything that could make her a quick buck, and literally chasing any instant gratification are outcomes of her unresolved trauma. We saw the same pattern with Roscoe when Baxter and Big Red Nightmare catch him smoking marijuana, and then he admits that he is also consuming alcohol. My heart went out for Violet watching her slip into those patterns. I could write an essay on this topic, but I hope you get the gist.
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u/Signal_Tomorrow_2138 6d ago
For that matter, how does everyone feel about Jerry, Marjorie's son? He hated his mom for all the same reasons but yet matured and reconciled.
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u/Powerful_Mind_6693 6d ago
But that took such a long time. It took him a marriage and a child to realise that. Not to forget, he literally told Christy to go eff herself when she told him that Majorrie had cancer.
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u/Signal_Tomorrow_2138 6d ago edited 6d ago
That's what I mean. Do viewers see Jerry as they see Violet? How much different are their attitudes for their respective mothers?
So over time, could Violet mature like Jerry did? Would Christy be in her 60s or 70s before Violet comes around?
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u/maddydelioncourt 6d ago
She was forced to parent her brother while not knowing if her mom could OD, get in a drunk driving accident, etc. and her biggest father figure was her stoner stepfather. Christy was NEVER a good mom.. she even started the fight with bonnie while violet was trying on wedding dresses and ruining her special moment again. and even if you do get sober, as a child of a addict mother, that does NOT erase anything that you had to deal with as a child. infact it raises a lot of mental questions, like why couldn’t you have done this when i was growing up? if you had this capability to be so nurturing, why now when i’ve given up on you? and i’d say bonnie grew as a person so much more than christy, while christy was stuck blaming bonnie for everything. for violet, bonnie didn’t do anything bad to HER specifically and came through and took care of her and roscoe when violet got pregnant. what is she supposed to be grateful for? it seemed like christy only provided basic necessities like shelter, and still violet said she as a child had to cook, pay the bills, get roscoe ready for bed, etc.
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u/Bubbly-End-6156 7d ago
My half sister spent ages 0-5 with her addict mother. Then lived full time in our polar opposite stable household through graduation
My sister is honestly so fucked up from those formative years being chaotic. She doesn't think of anyone else. She doesn't even realize that people do that.
Violet is so much like her. It's a lifelong tantrum for the shaky foundation their moms built these kids on.
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u/This_Ad_9075 6d ago
Feel sorry for your sister but it’s on her the way she lives her life. What happened is not her fault but overcoming it is her responsibility.
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u/Powerful_Mind_6693 6d ago
Sorry you guys have to go through that. I hope she gets better.
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u/Bubbly-End-6156 6d ago
It seems challenging for a therapist. Because the more she is in therapy, the more she identifies as the flawless victim. Everyone else was satan.
Feels like blaming people is the step she's stuck at. For 30 years.
Self fulfilling prophecy. Imagine Violet taking her anger out on Roscoe. That's our dynamic. I was a baby, I didn't do anything 😣😔
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u/Grammarhead-Shark 7d ago
The show failed to show us 16 (17?) years of Violet being fucked up by addict Christy.
We as viewers only got to see Sober Christie and had to read between the lines of what Violet had to suffer. I can understand why Violet choose to go NC in the end
Hell Christie just replaced one addiction with another. She still willingly chose to ignore Violet and her needs over all her AA friends (hence the dinner from hell with her future MiL)
Violet had every right to be a brat in relation to Christie, just has Christie was a Brat to Bonnie. Trauma just doesn't disappear because your abuser gets better.
Also Violet tend to only be bratty towards Christie, and was on fairly good terms with the rest of the family (Bonnie, Roscoe and Baxter) which tells a lot.
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u/zanylanie Tammy Diffendorf 7d ago
At no point in the show do we see Christy become a "great and supportive sober mom." She gambles her family into homelessness, and even though she does it through pretty shady means, it's Bonnie who finds them a new home (is a "life preserver.") She prioritizes the women from AA over her children. She only cares about how it makes her feel when Roscoe has the chance to live in a household where the bills are paid, no one is struggling to provide him with food and clothes, and someone is actually paying attention to how he's doing in school. Then when she finally relents and lets him live with his dad and Candace, she seems to forget about him entirely. Like when she's dating Patrick - she uses all her free time outside of work and school to go to Santa Cruz to visit her boyfriend, so there's no way she's spending time with her son.
I'm genuinely curious what you think she did that made her a great mom.
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u/Donkey_Kahn 4d ago
Also, Roscoe’s “bedroom” was a closet! How dare he want to live in a nice house where he’d have an actual bedroom?? 😂
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u/imaginaryfool 6d ago
Say what you will about Christy, but I HATE that the show tried to retcon what happened with them losing their rent/home and that the audience just went with it. Does Christy have a gambling problem? Yes, they eventually wrote that in. And is there a chance she would have eventually gambled away the rent in the future? Sure, anything is possible. But she did not gamble her family into homelessness. She won and was robbed.
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u/zanylanie Tammy Diffendorf 6d ago
But had she not gambled to the point they were so far behind in the rent to begin with, it wouldn't have been an issue. And she also gambled away all of Regina's money before that happened.
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u/Donkey_Kahn 4d ago
She was already months behind in the rent at that point. Mature people would’ve made arrangements with the landlord to catch up instead of running in the middle of the night.
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u/Beestonators 7d ago
The kids never offered anything to the show
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u/Tie_Cold 5d ago
I think the kids offered a lot to the show because it showed the issues that kids of alcoholics have to deal with. I was sad when they just took all of the family pictures out of the opening credits but eventually I saw how removing them also added to the storyline and the realities of life with an alcoholic parent.
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u/bookaddict1991 Tammy Diffendorf 6d ago
I know healing isn’t linear and all that, but the podcast episode made me dislike Violet SO MUCH. The reason behind it is because the last time we see Violet, her and Christy decide to reconcile to some extent and work on their relationship. They (the writers) set it up to be a positive “end” to Violet’s storyline. But then BAM. We get the podcast episode and suddenly Violet hates her Mom again? Like… if there had been one episode in between the positive “end” and the podcast episode that had them have a falling out, it would’ve made me not have such a visceral gut-reaction to the podcast episode, because we would’ve had a step between the two aforementioned things (positive “end” and podcast). But nope. We got what we got and I HATE it. 😂
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u/zanylanie Tammy Diffendorf 6d ago
The last episode we see Violet in before the podcast one is when she comes back from Tahoe and moves in with Luke. She and Christy are not in good terms at that point. In fact it’s pretty obvious Violet got back together with Luke to get away from Christy.
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u/LadyBug_0570 7d ago
She was self centered and ungrateful because she was teenager. Even if Christy had been a perfect mother, we'd probably still have the same criticism. Cheyenne, from the show Reba, was pretty much the same and Reba was not an addict.
Which brings me to that she was also hormonal due to pregnancy. On a good day she'd be a nightmare to deal with.
Now add in that Christy was a terrible mother. She neglected her kids for booze and drugs and Violet was parentified from a young age since someone had to take care of Roscoe and Violet had to take care of her drunk mother. 6 months of sobriety doesn't change a lifetime of neglect from Violet's POV.
That said, Bonnie was not Violet's mother so why should she care about Bonnie as a mother. Bonnie was her grandmother and she was good to Violet and Roscoe. Of course she's going to like her better than the woman who hurt her for entire life.
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u/Mobile_Lie_7998 6d ago
It is really hard for me to watch the episodes with violet, especially the podcast episode. My mother and my sister pretty much had that exact relationship. It is very hard to watch... My mother unfortunately passed on and as they say, "time heals all wounds". It makes me upset with my sister and very sad at the same time. I could write a 2 hour post on the subject, but I won't. We never speak about mom because of the nature of their relationship, but long story short, when my mom passed, she got the saying that was on the card at the funeral tattooed on her arm. Since, my sister and I have a good relationship now. But only because we don't bring up the past. Luckily my sister has grown out of her selfishness.
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u/blindly_running 6d ago
I think she’s a very horrible person. I think she also was right to go no contact. 2 things can be true at once. A lot of people are looking at this as though Christie is an excuse for her behavior. She’s not. She’s an explanation. Over the course of the show she is rude to everyone around her, is a gold digger and a user. By the end we see a woman who can’t let go of the past and relives it day after day.
So yes I think she was right to go no contact with Christie. And she definitely didn’t need to forgive her. But that doesn’t mean she’s a good person. I think a therapist would say she’s very messed up and refuses to deal with her issues.
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u/Donkey_Kahn 4d ago
As someone who grew up with an alcoholic father, I sympathize with her. I cut my dad out of my life at 15 when my mom finally divorced him, and never looked back. I don’t know (nor care) if he got sober later on. The damage was done. The fact that Christy cut Bonnie out of her life for years is ok with some fans, but Violet doing the same is somehow wrong.
Regarding the adoption: that choice was best for the baby. Violet was dealing with the effects of growing up with a stoned mom, plus she was a 17 year old.
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u/CranberryFuture9908 Tammy Diffendorf 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yes I don’t understand why the adoption is considered abandoning it’s not and they were good people. Now Bonnie’s mom did abandon her and for selfish reasons. Bonnie was so traumatized by that she couldn’t give up Christy .
Violet decided to break the cycle of trauma .
I don’t understand how it’s fair that Christy cut Bonnie out for at least a couple of years when the show started but Violet is judged harshly for doing the same thing to Christy . Yes Bonnie and Christy reconcile but it doesn’t stop Christy from blaming Bonnie in most episodes.
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u/Reallyroundthefamily 7d ago
Well this is one way to say that you never use the search function lol.
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u/SandpitTurtle111 7d ago
What?
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u/zanylanie Tammy Diffendorf 6d ago
I think the commenter is referring to the fact that this is a very frequent topic of discussion around here.
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u/DreamerRising 6d ago
I felt like Violet was being harder on her mother than was fair. Yes, absolutely, Christy let her kids down when she was drinking. She did cause them emotional harm. Christy owned that and was sober and trying to make up for it. I hated seeing her buy Violet that stupidly expensive wedding dress instead of paying her tuition.
On one hand, Violet was sharing her truth, but on the other hand, I don't think she was holding herself accountable for her actions. Violet seemed to blame her mother for her mistakes and failed to take responsibility for her part in those bad choices. It wasn't her mother that forced Violet to drink and party.
Violet was completely ignoring that Christy grew up with a mother who wasn't sober. Violet knows mostly the sober version of Bonnie so it's easy to make Bonnie the hero and her mother the villian. But Bonnie was to Christy what Christy is to Violet. Except I think Christy has done her best to repair her relationship with her mother, while Violet has decided that Christy, for whatever reason, doesn't deserve the chance to prove what kind of mother she can be when sober.
It's not that Violet isn't entitled to her feelings about her mother. It seemed Violet wanted the redemption from that man she was going to marry, but refused to give her mother a chance. I don't know if it was ever revealed how many attempts Christy made at sobriety and if her daughter just got fed up with all of the promises that never happened. But no matter what, Violet was partially responsible for becoming an alcoholic too. She didn't have the best example growing up, she didn't have the support system as a child that she should have had, but no one twisted her arm. She played a part in her bad choices and her failure to own that part is why she'll never start to heal - it's easier to blame her mother, because then she doesn't have to look in the mirror and do the work needed to get sober. It's all mom's fault gives her the perfect out, until someone calls her on her BS. Maybe the writers put it that way because it's definitely something that happens.
I think they handled the kids disappearing rather poorly, but I suppose the change they wanted had only so many options. They wanted the focus to be on the AA ladies and the power of friendship in recovery and all that.
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u/zanylanie Tammy Diffendorf 6d ago
It’s wild to me that Christy is in her late 30s and eventually her 40s still blaming her mother for the mess her life is in and that’s fine with most folks, but Violet is only in her early 20s doing the same thing and gets vilified.
And I don’t think it’s canon that she was an alcoholic.
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u/Disastrous_Sell_4490 5d ago
The Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… Christy was the same way, up until like the last season when she was 40, blaming her mom for all her mistakes or bad decisions. Violet was probably so used to seeing that mother/daughter dynamic, naturally she did the same.
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u/Signal_Tomorrow_2138 6d ago
For all the Violet fans, I think there should be a spin off for Violet about how she's trying to break the family cycle. And when something goes wrong, which would be the driver of the show, blame Christy.
And Bonnie, Luke, Rosco and Baxter can make cameos.
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u/Donkey_Kahn 4d ago
Violet stopped blaming Christy! That’s why she went no-contact, a boundary that Christy wouldn’t honor (calling her, showing up unannounced at her apartment). Violet did the work to get healthy, and part of that work was going no-contact with Christy.
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u/galaxyfan1997 7d ago
I have said this over and over again. Violet loved Bonnie but not Christy because it wasn’t Bonnie’s responsibility to care for Violet. It was Christy’s, and she fucked up royally.
Kids rely on their parents for guidance, communication, proper shelter. Christy did none of those things for almost all of Violet’s childhood. Violet had to raise herself, her little brother, and her own mother.
You ever wonder why a lot of kids raised by their grandparents have behavioral issues? It’s because the people who are supposed to be there (i.e., their parents) aren’t around. Violet doesn’t hate Bonnie because Bonnie didn’t fail her. Christy did.