Jun 27 | Cathy and my mum (Letters from the Coast)

I read this article recently and it brought me back to earlier days when I would lie around devouring comic strip compilations. I loved them: Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, B.C. (my grandfather must have had twelve of those in paperback), and that mainstay of ’90s working women, Cathy.

I was surprised to read that younger women looked at Cathy with such disdain. I always rather liked her.

Going back and re-exploring old strips, I can see where the disdain comes from. Cathy these days does seem pretty dated. She wasn’t exactly a paragon of feminism, although she did try. Her relationship with Irving is probably the most frustrating part of the series. I don’t know much about how people reacted to her marriage to Irving, which occurred in the mid to late 2000s, but it annoys me today. I also find him grating today in a way I didn’t before. Here’s some stuffy emotionally constipated nonsense balanced against man-child phases over sports or other women.

There were plenty of strips where she railed against the fashion industry, or her mother’s tiny dreams for her, but she was regularly crushed under the machinery of the patriarchy, or simply her own insecurity.

Reading it again, I found that I still had some love for her, especially after reading this from Cathy Guisewite’s website. I can’t believe she managed to create a cartoon empire having never actually learned to draw. And I agree with Guisewite that her character has real resilience. As neurotic and messed up as she is, she pushes back against her limitations every single day.

I resonate a lot with that.

Then I read a little further, and damn but if girl can get a real laugh out of me every so often.

TELL ME THAT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN WRITTEN LIKE A WEEK AGO.

The only difference is that you can tell that the reader is meant to empathize with Cathy, not Andrea. Today, there would be 75K retweets from folks who had just changed their avatars to Andrea’s guileless grin.

Don’t you adore the three thousand pounds of ’70s smashing into you through the power of that blonde dude?

There were a few strips like this in the early days when Guisewite was younger and punchier. This one was by far my favourite.

Again, you can see from the art that this was early in her career. Believe it or not, the lusciously coiffed dude on the end of the couch is Irving, he of what I once believed was the perpetual crew cut. The first few strips, actually, involve Cathy trying to get up the guts to tell him what a jerk he is, but of course she never can.

And I feel for her even more in those!

Look at her face in the last panel. She feels Andrea’s rage, but also feels unable to communicate it. And in this way, I think she captures a generation very well, “a generation of women who came of age in a brand new, exciting time for women,” and yet some of whom were Cathys and some of whom were Andreas.

Both Cathy and Andrea have careers, but only Andrea, especially in these early days, seems capable of speaking out about the bullshit she sees around her. Cathy, who shares most of Andrea’s beliefs, is nonetheless having to rebel against everything she has been raised to be with every step she takes.

That’s why the in-depth explorations of her relationship with her mother are so interesting to me. Cathy has resilience and drive and the power of the feminist movement, but the world has shifted and she is forced into a totally new universe where she feels she has to balance her trained civility, innuendo-driven communication, and passive-aggression against a strength borne out of the knowledge that despite how infuriating she finds her mother, Anne is a) a survivor and b) loves her more than life itself.

I see so much of me in Cathy, perpetually struggling against the problematic coping mechanisms she has while trying her best to bust ass all across the kyriarchy.

But I think the real reason I love Cathy is that, when I was growing up, I saw so much of my mum in her.

Cathy gave me a vocabulary for the struggles I saw my mum go through: the perpetual battle to maintain a desirable weight, the pressure to work twice as hard as the men around her to impress half as much, the search for a life partner (although my mum was never as needy or desperate as Cathy), and the strong feminine bonds with friends which were mostly based on sharing complaints about any of the above challenges.

Like Cathy, my mum was a working dynamo, overachieving morning, noon, and night to be seen and recognized. Neither of my parents grew up with much money, so when they divorced my mum knew it was up to her to pull us through (since my dad, God rest his beloved soul, really wasn’t good with money). She’s always been ambitious, but there is so much of my childhood that, when I look back on it, was the way it was because my mum was determined that I would never have any need to worry. She was incredibly warm and accepting, and yet a real task-master when she put her mind to it. She was also determined that I would be the first in the family to go to university, and was adamant that I pursue the degree that I wanted even if it seemed “fluffy,” because education was its own reward. When I decided to take what felt like the ludicrous steps toward a Masters of Divinity, she gave me, with no questions asked, four hundred dollars to supplement what I scraped together for the year before I could qualify for work study and bursary assistance. She never stopped encouraging me to continue with school; I often joke that when I came to her with my master’s degree in hand, she said, “So…PhD?” (It’s not really a joke).

Unlike Cathy’s mother Anne, my mum has never pressured me to marry or have children. She adores my husband and I do know the latter would make her very happy, but she has always only wanted my own happiness. It was clear that, even when she was driving me crazy, a good and happy life for her child was her ultimate intent. I always trusted her wholeheartedly.

That, too, I see in Cathy and Anne’s relationship.

So here’s to you, Cathy, even though you married a schmuck. You finally got what you wanted from the start, and that’s something to cheer for.