#stayed up until 3am to write this instead of writing lesson plans for my teaching methods class

[acethetically-bway]

fiona and her kids

today on shameless metas with annie, we’re going to talk about why it’s so important that the writers let fiona canonically decide she doesn’t want kids of her own. because it’s not just about the fact that she raised her siblings since many of them were babies, it’s not just about her becoming their legal guardian, and it’s not just about them viewing her as their mom in certain regards (TWs for brief talks of abortion/miscarriage)

fiona not wanting kids of her own is vital in the context of the show itself. first off, she’s the only female main character on the show who does not carry a baby to term or already have biological children of her own prior to the start of the show. that alone is such a breath of fresh air in a show where being a mother is so ingrained in every other major female character. and it’s especially important considering that she’s been playing this patriarchal trad wife type role in the gallagher family as frank’s chief enabler for so long. no other leading female character is allowed to coast on casual sex for the majority of the show. even when she tries to have a longer term relationship or commit to a marriage, it doesn’t work. why is that you ask? because the whole notion of the long haul is fundamentally incompatible with fiona’s character. she inherited her parents’ impulsiveness, and that in itself is her fatal flaw. every decision she makes is driven by it, and because it is literally impossible to impulsively decide to have a baby (you can decide you want a baby, you can decide to have sex/get pregnant, but pregnancy/true motherhood are not impulsive decisions), it wouldn’t work at all with her character. square peg, round hole.

even in the context of raising her siblings, fiona’s whole character is built on impulsive decisions, recklessness, and wild abandon. to even suggest that she’s the type of woman who would consciously, and with full agency, commit to raising her own babies for at least two decades is lunacy. it goes against everything she aspires towards and everything she wants for herself, especially later in the show. committing 9–10 months for a pregnancy and another 18+ years to a child (and a boyfriend/husband/father on top of that) is so obviously anti-fiona that it would literally destroy her character to have her backpedal into consensually having a child, even if the hypothetical father didn’t stay in her life.

fiona pins her distaste towards having kids on raising her siblings, but in reality it’s also the fact that there is literally no space in her life to raise a child. even if she didn’t have her siblings to worry about, by the time she would have been considering having kids, she’s already made multiple attempts to start a career for herself and she’s continuously been jumping from man to man for instant gratification. the one commitment she’s locked herself into is the one she’s literally forced into out of pure obligation and devotion towards her (in the beginning) infant/toddler siblings who could not fend for themselves. and by the time she realizes what she’s doing, she just keeps going because what is she gonna do, leave two mentally unstable young adults, two preteens, and a preschooler on their own?

now of course, the natural thought is "she's essentially been a mom to her siblings all these years, what's the big deal about having a kid of her own?" fiona may be the closest thing her siblings had to a mom, but she is not their mom. she does not have the maternal instincts that mothers develop from the moment their child is born, because her siblings are not her biological children. she may act maternal, but she’s not inherently a mother at any point. she knows how to love her siblings, but loving your own child is completely different. she’s seen what the lack of a mother’s support and love can do to a kid and she knows that if she’s not 100% sure she could love that kid unconditionally, she should not have kids. so that’s what she does. also, having a kid at 25 or 30 is also essentially hitting the reset button on this big countdown timer she’s had going for almost two decades. it’s why she was so against franny being born (obviously it was insane of her to make debbie’s pregnancy about herself, but it was a very valid fear to have). in the same vein, fiona’s decision to have an abortion was so necessary for her, not only because a baby would quadruple the absolute shitstorm her life already was in s6, but because it goes along with everything her character is meant to represent. she never second guesses herself even when her family tries to talk her out of it, and she never feels any sort of guilt or shame in having an abortion. and honestly i think that that’s just amazing, particularly the fact that she has the option and pursues it actively instead of coincidentally miscarrying (so that narratively she’s not the one to blame for “killing” the baby) or having the kid and going through some forced “learning to love the child because that’s your baby and you’re their mother” arc.

also, in season 8 she maintains her aversion to having kids, which is even more crucial because it shows how even though most of her siblings were over 18, she doesn’t need to be a mother to feel satisfied in her life anymore. when her siblings are little, she says outright that mothering them makes her feel wanted. she doesn’t leave with jimmy steve because she feels her kids need her. but in seasons 7 and 8, she starts living her life independently, moves out, and makes her own money purely for herself. she’s found other ways to feel fulfilled. she never feels some “unexplained void in her soul” now that she isn’t a full time matriarch to her siblings anymore. she is allowed to be her own person, she’s allowed to grow as a character, and she’s allowed to have her own identity. even though she loves her siblings, her life starts to gradually revolve less and less around them, and she’s allowed to be okay with that. so many times a female character will have this major character development, and then suddenly a love interest or a reminder of their past life comes knocking at their door and they’re right back where they started. but not fiona. fiona has goals and ambitions that are purely personal, and we get to see her start to achieve them. and even when she spirals in season 9, she doesn’t regress as a character. she doesn’t seek out the comfort of being wanted because she doesn’t deem that as the most important thing in her life anymore. fiona’s s4 spiral and her s9 spiral are two completely different events (they both involve heavy abuse of substances, but that’s really the only thing they have in common), and this demonstrates how her character has evolved over the course of the show. her s4 spiral ends with her taking personal responsibility for her actions and not blaming them on being some helpless little kid or a victim of her circumstances. meanwhile, in s9, she takes what she’s learned from this and applies it to other areas of her life. she is her own person with her own agency and freedom, and the best way to use that autonomy is to start over somewhere else. deciding to have a kid at that point in her life would not only feel shoehorned in for the sake of meeting some BS societal quota, but once again it would undermine everything her character has been building towards for nine seasons.

so in summary, it is so so incredibly important that the writers never made fiona have her own kids or even want to have her own kids someday because doing so would refute the core of her character. it would lump her in with every other wife and mother in the show and reduce her character to an aspect that should always be secondary (for many women, but especially for her). motherhood was always forced on fiona; it was never her choice, and making it into her choice would not be some badass act of ownership/reclamation. instead it would require her to sacrifice everything she’s worked for and hoped for just for the sake of appeasing the patriarchy, thereby undoing every ounce of development she had undergone throughout her time on the show.

tl;dr : the shameless writers fucked a lot of shit up across 11 seasons but i have to defend them on this topic because god they knew what they were doing by continually having fiona outwardly oppose having kids of her own.