Ruth Fisher may have looked like a stereotypical, throw-back of a housewife what with her hair tucked away in a tidy little bun, her housedresses and her omnipresent aprons as she bustled about in her time warp of an avocado kitchen. But she was no mother of the year, though not for a lack of effort as she tried to raise her children well, in her own, restrained, bottled-up kind of way.
Then there was Margaret Chenowith who was, in many ways, the polar opposite of Ruth; she was outgoing, vivacious, overtly sexual and wildly inappropriate. The other Six Feet Under mothers — Lisa Kimmel Fisher, Brenda Chenowith and Vanessa Diaz — were, as a whole, far from the conventional, cookie cutter mothers that you often see on TV, which only made this show much more intriguing to watch than the garden variety TV drama.
Ruth was the mother hen around which the rest of the Fishers gathered, whether they wanted to or not. (She was the reason that Nate stayed in LA and never left.) The flame-haired, soft-voiced, quick-tempered and largely oblivious Ruth was a conundrum. On the one hand, she wore aprons, made all the family meals, wore schoolgirl ankle socks with her dresses, and washed, folded and put away her adult children’s laundry. On the other hand, she had an affair with a hairdresser during her first marriage — something she confessed to her shocked offspring on the day of their father’s funeral, sexually harassed an employee at the Fisher & Diaz Funeral Home and impulsively married a man whom she’d only known for six weeks.
As a mother, Ruth never seemed as though she really wanted to know the truth about what was going on with her screwed up kids any more than they wanted her to know about their chronic drug use, serial love affairs (and one night stands) and occasional illegal activity. Take Ruth’s relationship with her youngest child, Claire, who was more seriously affected by her father’s sudden death than Ruth — distracted by her own grief and love affair — realized. Teenaged Claire had already been dabbling in drugs when her father died, then, a few weeks later, stole a severed foot from the family’s funeral home and planted it in the locker of a boy who’d told all his friends that Claire had sucked his toes. Claire was in serious need of guidance and compassion, but Ruth was almost willfully clueless as to the goings on with her daughter, as if a steady stream of hot meals and loads of clean laundry was all that was required to keep the morose family moving forward.
However when Ruth became very involved in Claire’s life, it got a bit ugly. When Claire took a semester off from art school to frolic with Billy (before he went off his meds again), Ruth decided that the only way to send the message to Claire that she was making a huge mistake was to cut off access to her college trust fund money. The pinnacle of their estrangement was when Ruth, overwhelmed by caring for her mentally ill husband, slapped Claire across the face at Nate and Brenda’s wedding after Claire snapped a photo of the fresh-from-electroshock George after he’d spilled a drink. It was the death of Ruth’s sister Sarah’s friend that finally drew the red haired mother-daughter duo back together with these words: “I don’t hate you.” Ruth’s final act of maternal selflessness occurred after Claire offered to remain in LA with her grief-stricken mother. Ruth told her, in no uncertain terms, that she loved Claire and urged her to chase her dreams and go to New York City.
On a completely different hemisphere was Margaret Chenowith, the self-absorbed, exhibitionist psychologist who loved her troubled children in her own narcissistic way. The woman who sent her gifted daughter to be intensively studied when Brenda was a young child, never handled her son Billy’s bipolar disorder very well, despite her successful work as a therapist. She and her husband Bernard allowed their daughter Brenda to shoulder the emotional burden of her brother’s disease by forgoing her Yale education in order to provide comfort to him. Never one to be worried of how her actions and snide commentary affected her daughter, Margaret once had Billy released from the mental institution solely so she wouldn’t have to spend Christmas alone, regardless of whether Billy was healthy enough to be out in the world. Margaret also didn’t inform Brenda, whom he’d physically attacked with a knife which led to his institutionalization, that Billy was going to have Christmas dinner with the family.
From time to time, Margaret did attempt to be there for her daughter. For example, she tried to soothe Brenda when Brenda was considering having amniocentesis because a blood test had suggested that her unborn child had anomalies (she and Nate were also arguing about whether to abort if the baby had problem). How did Margaret respond to her daughter’s angst? By saying: “You think I didn’t want to abort you and Billy? But your father talked me out of it both times and the rest is history.”
On the day of Nate’s funeral, Margaret compared pregnant Brenda’s grief to her own sadness at recently breaking up with her boyfriend. “The pain is just searing,” Margaret said.
It wouldn’t be fair, though, to call Margaret heartless. When Brenda was miscarrying on the day of her wedding, Margaret was in tears, which she surprisingly hid from Brenda, because she couldn’t do anything to relieve her daughter’s pain.
For her part, Brenda tried to be a loving, helpful and caring mother to Nate’s daughter Maya, cleaning up her previous bad girl/pot smoking/sex addicted act save for her prolific potty mouth. Brenda read to Maya, put her to bed each night, packed her lunches for daycare and looked out for her while she pursued a career as a therapist. Her biggest challenges as a mother came when, following her miscarriage, she had a troubled pregnancy with Willa, who prenatal tests indicated might have a disability. The uncertainty of the tests, capped by Willa’s extremely premature birth, where she weighed only 2.4 pounds, were further complicated by Nate’s sudden death and infidelity.
Brenda’s parenting, at least of Maya, occurred in the shadow of Nate’s first wife Lisa, whom Nate impregnated during a one night stand while he was engaged to Brenda (the first time). Lisa’s brief time on Six Feet Under as a mother would now be described as earthy-crunchy, bordering on sanctimommy territory as Lisa was quite dogmatic about her parenting beliefs. Whenever I think about Lisa as a mom, I’m reminded of how she freaked out at Ruth for feeding Maya peanut butter and was subsequently reluctant to leave Maya with Ruth … which was ironic given how much of the time Ruth wound up taking care of Maya after Lisa died.
By contrast, Vanessa Diaz was the one character who was the closest to being considered a “typical” mother. The married mom of two, who met her husband Rico in high school, worked long hours and reluctantly dragged herself into the kitchen to make dinner each night as her husband usually wasn’t home yet. She let her boys watch cartoons and play video games and brought them to loud kids’ pizza places. Though she and Rico were separated for a short period following her bout with clinical depression in the wake of her mother’s death, they eventually reconciled and together opened their own funeral home.
What scenes between Six Feet Under mothers and their offspring were most memorable to you?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Aug 18, 2011 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
