Relationships

[Louise]

The whole mama's boy (man child) characterization is way over blown by The Canonists. He was the man of the house after his father left and he did go to and graduated from MIT (a school almost 3,000 miles from his home) This proves that he didn't HAVE to be tied to his mother. I always thought Howard came home to help his mother pay the bills, not cause he needed someone to baby him.

I saw someone on IMDB say that Howard "just kept taking and taking and taking everything from his mother." What show were they watching??? He takes care of her just as much as she takes care of him. Mrs. W is irrational and had increasingly poor health. There's no way she could manage that house and all the bills and errands and such without help. Howard was always driving her somewhere or picking her up. Canonists seem to think that she was financially supporting him; that he was living off her.

Well, Mrs.W is never mentioned as having a job, and his Dad wasn't contributing, so what does that leave us with? It's far likelier that Howard was supporting both of them. Maybe Mrs.W had Social Security or a pension of some kind, but Howard was def. helping. The organization and running of that house was up to him. His dependence on her is emotional/psychological, not actual. Mrs.W was not an easy person to deal with; I'd say Howard definitely earned those waffles and chocolate milk. It wasn't completely a joke when he insisted that "I don't live with her, she lives with me." That was true, to some degree. Which makes it all the more unjust and outrageous that *his* house now apparently belongs to Bernadette. TBH, early on, I thought that the joke was that Mrs.W was a bit senile. Not a very nice joke, but this is Lorre we're talking about. Howard was actually very responsible. He *had* to be; there was no other way.

My preferred Alternate Universe theory is that Mr.W did not leave the family when Howard was 11, (was maybe emotionally detached but not literally absent), and that Howard's dad died while he was away at college, and this is what prompted Howard to come home again and take care of his mother. This is an idea that people were discussing on Livejournal prior to S3 when the "Howard's long-lost daddy" storyline was introduced. I think it makes SO MUCH SENSE in every way: plot-wise, character-wise, psychologically. I know that idea's been thoroughly jossed, but it's still my headcanon. Maybe I'm cherry-picking like Dev described below; but that Letter episode is corny as f*ck and I believe H's dad is dead or completely out of the picture, and that he abandoned his family in more of an emotional sense than a literal sense.

I like the word Canonists, btw. It's clearer than saying "Canons."