Happy March. The rain has been steady and insistent—rivers overflowing, streets flooding, both of our dogs look permanently like waterlogged Paddington Bears in their yellow slickers.

Still, last week while walking to Alley Cat, there were two solid hours of sun, which is exactly what you want in the Mission, which is colorful and steams with a heat that isn’t ever a reality for San Francisco: for this part of the city to be somehow hotter than the rest of it. An open-faced sky.

The two hours of sun, plus the two bulbs finally emerging from my tulip bed, are offering a bit of respite: March will be easier, if only because it signifies the end of Winter, which has felt particularly long and sad this year.

When the rainy season hits, I find myself dreaming of the high desert. Tuscon, my grandmother’s old, flat ranch house with the baskets large enough to hold my child body, cold terra cotta tiles that matched the shapely ones curving like fault lines on the roof. Cacti with their arms in the air, holding atop their heads screech owl nests and bats and colorless flowers.

Instead, because it’s clearly a year to stay close to home, I find myself going on weekend trips to places I loved as a child, places that signaled to me, when we moved from Southern California to Northern in the late-nineties, that we’d found abundance in the form of rocky shorelines and tide pools.

My mom, sister, and I took my niece and nephew to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium at the beginning of February, a belated Christmas present. We rented a little house in Seaside, and cooked, and played endless games of Uno, and gave each other nicknames, and spent one rainy day combing the streets of Cannery Row, eating salt water taffy and looking at the leggy jellyfish and seizing any moment when the sun disentangled itself from the clouds.

My favorite exhibit has always been the giant female octopus, even if she has crammed herself into invisibility in spaces the size of a bell jar.

Octopodes are extraordinarily smart, though that isn’t exactly why I admire them. I love them because they are seemingly equal parts fierce and vulnerable.

An octopus can make her skin raised or bumpy, change color, turn to spikes, or do anything necessary in order to match the landscape around her, by controlling the projections on her papillae. While this is a feature of both male and female octopodes, it is usually the female who deploys this skill, turning to a one-woman battalion if her young are threatened.

They have three hearts. Their blood is blue. Octopuses are boneless, which is how they can wedge themselves into jars, behind tight coral or curl around objects or plants in the sea.

Octopus mating rituals are nothing special. Many marine biologists have remarked that they look like “they’re just going about their business.” No pomp. The male octopus has a mating arm, which he extends and inserts into a cavity on the female octopus, keeping his distance lest she try to ensnare and strangle him.

“The males have a host of tricks to survive the mating process,” says Katherine Harmon Courage of BBC Earth. “Some of them can quite literally mate at arm’s length. Others sneak into a female’s den disguised as another gal, or sacrifice their entire mating arm to the female and then make a hasty retreat.” 

Female octopodes are larger and hungrier than their male counterparts. It’s every bit as likely that they’ll mate with a male as strangle and eat him. Conversely, the females die shortly after laying their many eggs, dissolving their own bodies to feed their young. Joan Halifax uses this as an example of pathological altruism in her book “Standing on the Edge”.

As I stood at the edge of her tank at the aquarium, which was covered with small, white, rectangular signs that featured a picture of a camera with an X drawn through it and words reading “DO NOT FLASH THE OCTOPUS”, I watched men of all sizes and shapes shine their iPhones directly in her one visible eye. I thought about the lines from the Mary Szybist poem:

The Lushness of It 

It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you 
with each of its tapering arms:

you’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus.  But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think

about themselves, or you.  Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn.  Abandon 
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon

your heavy legs to the floating meadows 
            of seaweed and feel 
                        the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea-
spray, barnacles.  In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over
the abyssal plains: as you float, feel 
                                    that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
                          your spine.  Feel 
fished for and slapped.  No, it’s not that the octopus 
wouldn’t love you.  If it touched,

if it tasted you, each of its three 
hearts would turn red.

Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon.  Not its dotted head.

The fourth time the flash flashed—when the octopus didn’t reach through the glass and strangle and eat the man next to me—I put my body between him and her. “You’re done here,” I said firmly. He looked at me with surprise, his own pupils large in the low light. I could see myself shining in his own pupils, arms crossed, a good foot shorter. Something moved in the blackness there, and I felt it as surely as a heart turning red: this is a man who has hit women. He looked at the people gathered around us, the children with their faces flat to the thick glass, and he walked wordlessly away.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because she is like the very best people I love: shape-shifting according to circumstance, principled in her priorities, and completely no-bullshit. When she needs to, she exercises extraordinary boundaries. At the same time, she knows when it’s time to acknowledge a great cause—in her case, the need to keep alive an entire next generation of youth.

The no-bullshit of animals means there’s no performance of self, no need to deconstruct the way a self is socialized. Maybe animals are a living manifestation of honesty.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because I have reached a level of self-awareness that includes knowing what I struggle to become.

When I was young, my adopted dad used to take the door off my room when I was in trouble, which always felt like the worst punishment imaginable. He read our emails, our diaries, listened in on our phone calls—he asked his friends around town to keep an eye on me and my sisters. When I had my first kiss in the almond orchard by my middle school, he knew about it before I even registered what had happened. Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.

Context: my adoptive dad was abusive. I got in trouble for everything from legitimate fuck-ups of youth (skipping class) to things that just bothered him (burning incense). As a manipulative, MENSA-level genius with a history of Vietnam-era warfare, my adoptive dad know exactly the kind of violation taking a door off the hinges was for a teenage girl.

Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.
Click To Tweet

To circle back around–maybe the female octopus isn’t the best example of boundaries. However, she’s a really great example of understanding where her boundaries are. Anger, for example, is a useful tool because it shows us where our boundaries are, and thus, how they’ve been violated. And while we can’t be 100% certain that the female octopus is angry when she strangles and eats her mate (she might just be hungry, and that’s okay), she has a robust understanding of how to get where she needs to be in the world. She doesn’t care about whether or not her behavior is socially acceptable.

This is the moment where I meet and try to channel the octopus—there seems to be a lesson in this for me/us: the realization that boundaries are necessary for cultivating and protecting the work you’ve done on yourself. That psychic, emotional, physical, intellectual, romantic, platonic energy are expendable resources that all work together in an ecosystemic way.

We are taught, especially people socialized as female, that:

• we have no right to boundaries
• putting up boundaries means sacrificing love and care
• putting up boundaries means people will leave rather than invest the time to respect them
• putting up boundaries is cold-hearted, or less vulnerable than not
• putting up boundaries means you are inflexible, unavailable to change

Furthermore, that forgiveness is not only a) mandatory, but b) must look like inviting someone back into your space and life, and lastly, c) the work of the person most harmed in the situation to do and do alone.

On boundaries, the magnificent Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says:

“What steals energy that you do not fully grant, is a thief in the house of the psyche. Whether it be a person, a place, a memory, a conversation, a meeting, or you yourself being the leaking seal around the chamber wherein the treasure is kept.

Think on these things if you lose energy easily, and make the adjustments to what you can and cannot engage with, accordingly, as you can, as is within your will and within your power.

We all have an energy range, as does a light bulb. Put too little or too much or too sustainedly or not sustainedly enough energy through the vehicle, and the light will not be the brightest as it has been constructed for/to/with/about/regarding.”

In her podcast ‘Tarot for the Wild Soul’, Lindsay Mack says this of boundaries: “The management of the fences around the property of yourself are necessary to make sure your crops and cultivated self is taken care of.”

What a concept to realize that setting boundaries is something that usually happens because you love the people involved. My friend Joey Gould insists, “’No’ is a love word.”

Here’s the not-so-secret thing about introspection in winter: the season is, itself, remarkably boundaried. You have less energy, sleep more, are more accountable to the animal of yourself because the borders of your landscape (the weather, the city, the clothes, the darker days) are starkly clear. And perhaps tulips, and sun, both respectively breaking from their bulbs and the clouds, teach us that we must hold on to the borders of ourselves even as the world around us becomes less obviously boundaried.

The lessons we learn from the female octopus may not be one of taking her boundaries as our own, but rather, understanding what our own boundaries are. What’s more: how to be both fiercely protective and generously tender at the same time.

“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
Click To Tweet

But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke

The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.

Dear Mothers,

Not mine.

My mother was allowed in the country without questions — an infant in her arms. My mother was given a green card and told to go forth and prosper in the American Dream. She knew only elementary English.

My mother got a job quickly. She stayed with the same company for decades and rose through the ranks. Bootstraps. My mother had a salary; not extravagant, but enough to take care of me.

My mother became a citizen 17 years after she stepped onto American soil — never once afraid of deportation in the interim. My mother was naturalized and no one was excited but us. A quiet assumption: She was American. Like them.

A “good” immigrant with auburn hair and seafoam eyes. A model immigrant for posters hanging in U.S. Customs and Border Protection offices.

My mother is white.

I am brown.

Dear Anyone Who Is Listening
theestablishment.co

Brown like the mothers who are seized at U.S. borders. Mothers who cannot move so freely through the world for fear of having their children ripped from their arms as they await trial for crimes they did not commit. Brown like the mothers seeking asylum. Mothers who want the same safety for their children my mother provided me. The same chance afforded to my mother as she arrived in a new country. I am brown like the mothers in holding cells, wondering if their children will survive in internment camps.

My mother’s whiteness afforded me the safety to grow up in her arms, not a cage. My mother’s whiteness afforded me protection from a system that criminalizes mothers who look like me. I am often plagued by the idea that if I were my mother, trying to do what is best for my child, my story would not be so kind.

So, Dear Mothers:

You deserve safety.
You deserve respect.
You deserve humanity.

You deserve to live a life like my immigrant mother.

Mothers, I love you.

In October, a family court case out of England exploded into international media attention when a judge removed custody of a 7-year-old transgender girl from her mother and transferred her permanently to her father, who is not supportive of the child’s gender expression. This past spring a similar case in Canada resulted in a judge initially ruling that a trans child was not allowed to wear female clothes in public. These cases and others like them have become a hammer for conservative political operatives to attack the very idea of supporting transgender children — usually by attacking mothers for “confusing” their trans daughters.

When trans kids who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) socially transition, it is most often the mom that is demonized by the press and subsequently by society. Sometimes, other women come under attack; the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail used a similar case — a trans daughter, a supportive mother, an angry father — as an excuse to run a hit piece about Susie Green, the CEO of social services charity Mermaids, a U.K. organization with the mission of supporting children who are struggling with gender identity. But the paper also targeted Green’s transgender daughter, suggesting that its animus is just a larger-scale version of vilifying women for supporting their transgender kids. Mothers of trans kids now live in fear of losing their kids simply for supporting their children’s transitions.

Typical media interviews of trans kids’ parents feature the mother laying out how the family first noticed and dealt with cross-gender insistence, the initial reaction to allowing exploration of the child’s gender, and ultimately how the family has facilitated a social transition. After the mother’s take on the emotional labor of laying out why a social transition is truly necessary for their beloved child, the interviewer then turns to dad and asks “So how do you feel about all of this?” This type of coverage centers the father’s feelings in the transition for the entire family and we see it again, and again, and again.

Whether or not dad approves often signals how everyone else should feel about a child’s transition, specifically about the “loss” of a “son.” The roots for this are deeply steeped in misogyny, and established before the child is even born. Both times that my own ex-wife was pregnant, when I was still male-presenting, everyone would always ask if I wanted boys. Even when I replied that my child’s sex truly did not matter to me, I still got pushback: “yeah, but you REALLY want boys, right?” The expectation was that I would love any of my kids, but as a presumed man, I would REALLY love boys more. Interestingly, upon coming out as trans, more than one person has remarked “So THAT’S why you really wanted girls.”

The flip side of assuming that all fathers want boys is that when trans girls express a desire to transition and live as their true genders, those that oppose any child transitioning love to blame the mother. They argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that she must have groomed the “boy” to want to be feminine, as if mom really wanted a girl all along and so she projected her feelings so strongly onto her AMAB child that the kid finally took the hint. It’s true that fearing the loss of parental approval is often enough to keep a trans kid quiet — that was my experience, and the experience of most of my trans friends who waited until adulthood to transition. But can tacit parental pressure really force a cis child to pretend to be trans?

Children are sharper than we give them credit for, especially with social skills. They know at a very young age how a lot of the basic world works. They’re beginning to observe how gendered systems around them work. They have an understanding, deep down, of what society considers “normal”. When I was 8, I knew the feelings, thoughts and desires I was having were “wrong.” That boys weren’t supposed to tell anyone they were really girls. I understood the consequences, even then of what would happen if I did that. What are the consequences for a cis kid standing up for their own “natural” gender identity? At the end of the day, children understand when society has their backs. Parental approval is simply not a strong enough motivator to make children face the fear and shame of being trans. Implying that mothers “feminize” their AMAB children is just another way of overlaying misogyny on top of transphobia.

The tendency to see women as undermining masculinity and gender norms is common and dangerous, and it’s expressed especially vehemently in cases of young trans girls assigned male at birth. Trans boys children face terrible oppression as well, but I haven’t seen as many visceral reactions to international headlines; the rejection of masculinity outrages society in a way that the rejection of femininity does not. This dynamic is also in play when discussing how trans women are demonized in public access rights debates (like bathroom bills). Trans women tend to come more under fire, because of societal fear of emasculation, and concomitantly, trans men tend to be erased from discussions of trans issues. But in the few cases involving AFAB trans children — like one in Missouri about a trans boy who wanted to change his name — tend to focus inappropriately on mothers. In the Missouri case, a judge tried to cut Nathan’s mother out of the proceedings by assigning a court-appointed guardian, even though the mother was present and active in the case.

Criticism of parents of trans kids is centered in misogyny. When AMAB children transition, mom is assumed to be projecting her own desires onto her kid. When AFAB children transition, mom is failing to project a strong female presence as a role model. Both attitudes simultaneously overburden and pathologize the mother’s role as a child’s chief advocate. In fact, the mother is often at the forefront of transition efforts not because she’s the cause of the child’s gender dysphoria, but because she’s the child’s main caregiver and first defense. It’s the mother who most often puts in the emotional labor to research, consult experts, and ultimately initiate the conversation to help their child. It’s also the mother that becomes the target of hate, the biggest scapegoat.

This is part of a long-standing tradition of blaming mothers for any issues with their children. After all, it wasn’t really that long ago that “refrigerator moms” were blamed for causing autism. Supposedly, cold (hence the term “refrigerator”), unloving mothers caused children to withdraw into autism. It’s cultural gaslighting to blame a parenting style or a mother’s personality for their children’s traits that society doesn’t approve of. And it’s part and parcel of the way society blames women whether they do “too much” (the mothers of trans children) or “not enough” (the mothers of autistics).

Fathers that support transitioning children are subject to much less scrutiny, despite sometimes being their child’s strongest advocate. In the rare instances when fathers of trans kids are attacked, they’re often blamed for allowing their wives and partners to rule over them, a subtle attack on their very masculinity. Seizing the chance to criticize the mother of a child transitioner is really just about taking a free shot at women. It’s pure misogyny.

The media and courts need to stop demonizing the mothers of child transitioners and work to find ways to be more supportive of these vulnerable families.

Ahoy! There be spoilers ahead.

There are plenty of things to talk about regarding The Gilmore Girls reboot: the irksomely incorrect depiction of what the life of a journalist is like, the body shaming, the stigmatization of people with mental illnesses, racism, Rory’s inability to care about or even remember her attentive partner, the sarcastic use of “triggered!” and the general failure to be intersectional. (I could also likely write a feature-length complaint about how there wasn’t enough Jess present in the reboot, but I’d rather not have the Logan and Dean diehards throwing rocks at me, as they may already after reading some of what I have to say. #TeamJessForever.)

But one thing in particular is really sticking in my craw: the looming sense that Rory is fated to be just like her mother. Not only does the past lurk throughout the four episodes in the form of nostalgic and referential minutiae from the original series, it comes up repeatedly as a source of conflict among the leading ladies — serving as an echo chamber constantly reminding you that all three generations of Gilmore Girl are actually the same person.

This kind of writing is especially noticeable given the numerous parallels between the characters of the show and my own life. Since the show first aired in 2000, the similarities have been hard to ignore: I, like Rory, am the single child of a single parent (at least, I was until my mom married, inherited a stepdaughter, and gave birth to my half sister around my 11th year).

And while my mother did not have rich parents to lean on in the way Lorelai did, she did drop out of college at age 22 when I was born, much in the same way Lorelai dropped out of high school when she had Rory at age 16. On top of this, I, like Rory, was the quiet kid who generally didn’t get into trouble; my mother, per the occasional story she told me, was “wild” — again, in much the same way Lorelai was.

For obvious reasons, then, the show has always been one I’ve related to — up to a point. Unlike Lorelai and Rory, my mother and I are not particularly close. As she was always working, we didn’t get much of a chance to emotionally bond when I was growing up. Today, we rarely see or talk with one another. We don’t dislike each other, but we also don’t really relate to one another. My mom and I just aren’t alike, and I was brought up believing that I should never under any circumstances make the same mistakes and decisions she did; she was always terrified I’d get pregnant before I was ready or while I was unmarried.

So while I’ve always taken issue with how unrealistic the original series’ depiction of single parenthood felt, the reboot bothered me on a much deeper level, bringing up a question I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember: Are children doomed to make the same mistakes as their parents?

These four mini-movies seem to answer with a resounding finality: “yes.” And while developmental psychology does not make this contention with the same certitude, there is some psychological basis for the ways children mirror their parents.

When The Gilmore Girls first hit TV screens, the show repeatedly and aggressively pointed out that Rory was nothing like her mother. She’s good at school, she’s organized, she excels in structured environments — all in contrast to what is presented as Lorelai’s irresponsibility and lackadaisical attitude. Lorelai was uninterested in school and considered to be the black sheep of the family; she partied, she hooked up, she got pregnant and ran away. Rory is her redemption, the proof that she’s not a complete fuckup: She produced a model child, and she strove to be the parent she had wanted but didn’t have.

While I object to the show’s inherent classism and don’t consider Lorelai to be a fuckup (see: her successfully raising an independent human being, rising up from being a hotel maid to actually owning and running her own inn), what’s important is that she does, and so do her parents (and possibly even Rory). Such a perception certainly informed her mothering, which is a pattern I understand from my own experiences.

In my own life, my mom’s “mistakes” — getting pregnant at 21 by a man who was unwilling to care for either of us, dropping out of college, running away without telling her parents, coming back months after my birth with nowhere else to go — were things I was simply not allowed to do. It wasn’t something that was explicitly imparted to me, but instead impressed upon me by her other words and actions.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to reposition my mother’s past not as moral failures, but as things that were hard for her. I took those difficulties, internalized them, and learned from them. I’ve also made my own, different mistakes — we’re all human, after all. But despite knowing the ways in which I’m different from my mother, I’m still left with this lurking anxiety that I will echo my mom’s mistakes; watching The Gilmore Girls reboot only served to heighten those fears as I saw that reality play out for Lorelai and Rory.

Such an anxiety, it turns out, has a psychological basis. Steve K. D. Eichel, Ph.D., ABPP — a psychologist with significant experience working with children, parents, and families — told me over text: “From a psychological point of view, the old saying ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ is actually quite true.”

He elaborated: “Our parent(s) is/are the first lens through which we contact the world. Not only their words, but their emotional relationship with the world gets funneled to us, mostly unconsciously, when we are very young. It’s unavoidable.”

Through my shuddering, I continued reading: “Especially when it comes to relationships . . . Much of our most basic assumptions about the world and other people come from our parents. Basic assumptions like: Is the world a safe place? Can I trust other people? Is love really permanent? Am I basically deserving of a respectful loving relationship?”

His words are very much underscored in The Gilmore Girls reboot, which was particularly heavy-handed in the way it affirms that Rory is obviously echoing — and will continue to echo — her mother’s relationship and life choices. The mini-series seemingly says, “Rory can’t help but be just like her mom. She does have her eyes!”

The original series certainly made a small show of Rory making mistakes and becoming less responsible — getting drunk, hooking up with her ex before his wedding, taking time off from Yale (gasp) — actions that the show sometimes relayed as massive mistakes (just take her grandparents’ reception of her time off from Yale). But for the most part, her decisions are excusable, constituting mistakes that humanize her to audiences.

However, while the characters were known to be occasionally unlikable — almost always bad at (all forms of) relationships and frequently making missteps — the reboot turns this up to 11, with Lorelai and Rory both seeming directionless and hurting the people around them with their uncertainty. They both do terrible things that they’re either not held accountable for (Rory’s mistreatment of Paul and her fling with Logan), or forgiven for (Lorelai’s lack of consideration for Luke and sudden disappearance).

Perhaps most notably, the reboot emphasizes the ways in which Rory is destined to follow in her mother’s romantic footsteps.

In the case of Rory, there’s her continued association with Logan. Somehow, almost a decade after dating — and two years into a relationship with Paul that she keeps forgetting she’s in — Rory has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” set-up with her former boyfriend, Logan Huntzberger, a veritable carbon-copy of her father. Logan represents everything Lorelai tried to run away from in her parents’ life: ostentatious wealth, ridiculous privilege, and the no-holds-barred and often questionably legal “fun” that comes along with that.

Rory lets a perfectly fine relationship whither while pursuing this dream from the past, much in the way her mother did when she left her fiancé Max for her high school boyfriend — Rory’s father Christopher. While, Rory, at least, didn’t marry Logan in the reboot, you get the sense she would have if given the chance. And based on what we can all surmise from the much talked about “last four words” (except by my count, it was only three? Unless you count the sigh preceding?), she did the next best thing and is now carrying his child. He is, after all, very much like Christopher: a rich bad-boy with commitment issues.

Meanwhile, after Lorelai has a breakdown when all of her selfishness in how she treats her relationship is made apparent to her, Luke points out to Lorelai how he’d waited for her. It was always her, he says, even when she was with other people, even when he was with other people, even when both of them were married to other people. It was always her.

Mirroring this, ex-love interest Jess appears out of the blue and provides the support Rory needs in a time where she lacks direction. As Rory slowly unravels under the weight of a life without a goal, he recognizes it, and without judging provides a solution and a direction. No questions asked, no reciprocation required, no expectations.

I always liked Jess as someone who seemed to really understand and support Rory, even if he had communication issues. He never seemed to have let go of what they had, which is supported in his last appearance in the reboot. Standing on Luke and Lorelai’s porch on the night before their wedding, we see Luke asking Jess if there are still any feelings there, which he emphatically denies. Immediately after this denial, we see him wistfully looking through a window at Rory: a clunky and obvious admission of that lie.

Jess is Rory’s Luke, and I don’t say this simply because it’s what I want: I say it because that’s what the plot, the characters, and all the less-than-subtle hints from the show indicate. If Logan is symbolically Christopher, Jess is symbolically Luke. I could likely guess many of the details of how Rory’s life will move forward after the ending of the reboot.

Such predictability is a sad confirmation of the poor writing behind the show. Dr. Eichel assured me, however, that we aren’t actually all stuck in an infinite loop where we’re nothing more than the sequels of our parents:

The takeaway is that it’s both unlikely and unrealistic that we’ll become carbon-copies of our parents in the way Rory seems destined to. We do, however, internalize much of how we view the world based on how our parents view and interact with the world, and we act on that in similar but different ways. Dr. Eichel gave the example of a father who is a radical right-winger whose son rebels, becoming a radical left-winger: They’re both, in the end, radical — if at opposite ends of the political spectrum. I’m not fated to be just like my mom; it’s much, much more complex than that.

Dr. Eichel ended our conversation on what was for me a high note: “Children often believe, feel, and behave in ways that are on some level analogous to their parents’ beliefs, feelings, and behavior, but they rarely imitate them exactly.”

Which is to say, we’re not stuck in the same timeline as our parents — as much as that would make for a convenient script.