‘Mom’ Meeting: Bonnie’s Response To Her Mother’s Death Was Perfectly Unexpected

Photo Credit: Mom/CBS, Acquired From CBS Press Express

When Bonnie’s estranged mother suddenly passes away, ‘Mom’ presents Bonnie with a wad of cash, a new brother, and an opportunity for forgiveness.

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Mom informs Bonnie of her mother’s death with a very characteristic nonchalance. As Jill teaches the women how to line dance for Christy’s impending date with a country boy, Bonnie receives a phone call from “some lawyer” and apathetically announces her mother died. She’s ready to keep dancing, but her friends bring her down to Earth to face the gravity of the situation.

The woman who abandoned Bonnie is gone, and with her their scores of unresolved issues. Mom makes Bonnie go through the motions of mourning the only way she knows how: Rage-eating a burger, growling at Wendy, and suppressing her feelings with the precision of an Olympic diver. Last week’s episode, which found Jill taking on a mothering role with her foster daughter, rolls right into this week’s. Bonnie’s unsettled resentment for being thrust into the foster system by her mother returns at the most inopportune time. But Bonnie’s ultimate reaction to her mother’s death arrives at a surprising, perfectly unexpected place of forgiveness.

Per Christy’s insistence, she and Bonnie head to her mother’s apartment in San Francisco to clean up her belongings (and see if there’s anything they can sell). While cleaning out the freezer, Bonnie finds a gallon plastic bag full of cash, a combined total of five to six grand. Don’t ask Bonnie and Christy to do mental math. However, the surprises don’t stop for Bonnie. A man drops into the apartment claiming its his late mother’s place. Bonnie has a brother. A brother her mother kept.

Salt meets wound when Bonnie realizes that her mother abandoned her at a firehouse at age four, but she decided to step up and raise her son. He sat with their mom as she passed, and he was instructed to check the freezer. All he finds is a bag of peas. Obviously, Bonnie and Christy don’t spill the beans on the money they’ve claimed. After all, doesn’t Bonnie deserve at least as much when her brother became an attorney and her mother’s mistakes drove her to drink?

Photo Credit: Mom/CBS, Acquired From CBS Press Express

Instead of attending a meeting, Bonnie stews in her apartment and plays the blame game. Everything that has happened in her life—addiction, going to jail, her complicated relationship with Christy—leads back to her mother’s neglect. She feels slighted, an emotion no amount of consolation prize money can mend. But Jill relates to her struggle. When her mother passed away, Jill held onto her grudges, a gameplan that didn’t inspire a single shred of closure.

On the advice of Marjorie (that sound you hear is Bonnie’s groan), Jill wrote a letter to her mother releasing her pent up feelings and read it at her grave. It lifted a weight, put that anger to bed. Bonnie gives it a shot, fully prepared to slap her mother with a laundry list of her failings and finally give it to her straight. But like Anna Faris’ character sings in the movie Just Friends, “Forgiveness is more than saying sorry. It’s accepting people’s flaws.”

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Allison Janney does breathtaking work with Bonnie in the latest emotional episode of Mom. For a character as headstrong and unwilling to express any vulnerability, Bonnie lets down her guarded and admits the truth: She may not like her mother, but she’s not responsible for how her life turned out. Bonnie’s bad decisions, whether learned behavior or resultant of abandonment, won’t be repaired by pointing fingers. She assumes ownership and allows her mother to rest in peace. The hardest part of forgiveness isn’t accepting other people’s flaws. It’s accepting your own.

What did you think of the episode? Were you moved by Bonnie’s development? Sound off in the comments!

Mom airs Thursdays at 9/8c on CBS.