Mother Figures

Tyson has two mother figures in his life, his mother and Jasmine: a maid at the family manor.

Anne walked out of his life when Tyson was only four, to escape the abuse of his father. Any memories that he has of her are so faint that Tyson doesn’t know if they’re actual memories, or events that people have told him about. When Tyson thinks of ‘mother’, he thinks of Jasmine. He even calls her ‘אִמָא’.

This isn’t a one-way street, she calls him ‘מתוקי’. When she started working at the Delaney manor, she never expected it to become her home. She was there to pay off her student loans, from studying to become a therapist*, but now? Tyson is her son by everything but blood and law.

Whenever Tyson wanted to be alone, yet find-able, he would hide in his mother’s art room in the family manor. He tried to piece together an image of who she could be based on that room, and stories from Jethro. Tyson keeps two things that he found in that room in his apartment: the painting in his bedroom and the teddy bear in his walk-in cupboard/panic room.

When Tyson’s father sent him to bed without dinner unjustly, Jasmine would leave food out on the kitchen counter for him to sneak up to the East Wing’s attic. She taught him how to calm down after a panic attack by keeping his hands behind his back. Her baking is his favourite and he loves the raspberry white chocolate cookies she makes.

Tyson’s Synesthesia says a lot about his view of a person. Tyson views Anne in bright, primary childlike colours; shades one would associate with bottles of paint in a classroom. Jasmine is viewed in homely, earthen tones that feel grounding with a delicate pink and blue woven in. He views his mother with the idealistically simple eyes of a child, but views Jasmine with the nuance of actual memories and more tangible feelings.

* Though Jasmine will often say that she abandoned therapy as a career path because Tyson needed her, it’s more complicated than that. Working at the manor - cleaning, managing, arranging events with the university, et cetera - was largely simply work, but in doing that, Jasmine realise just how stressed and unhappy she was with therapy.

She liked being a maid with extended duties, and now practically serving as the head of the Delaney family. It’s simpler work, but Jasmine enjoys it and there are people who need her involved, people that she cares about and wants to help.