The cat’s been out of the bag for a while that it was Jenna’s mom Lacey (Nikki DeLoach) who wrote her daughter the infamous “carefrontation” letter that changed Jenna’s (Ashley Rickards) whole view of herself and her high school life in the premiere season of Awkward. But it hasn’t been known that Jenna knows. Until the series returned for its second round, that is. Faced with the truth about her mother, and unable to see past the action to the motivation and intentions behind it, Jenna taped the letter up on her wall and then decided how to confront her mother accordingly.
“There’s a lot of tension between her mother and her, and there is a resolution,” Rickards revealed to LA TV Insider Examiner. “I think Lacey and Jenna’s relationship is unique because I think Lacey has a hard time being more of a parent than a friend. She is still really young herself, and she had her kid while she was still a kid, and sometimes her parenting skills are more peer-enting, so I think if Lacey were to tell her something, it’s going to look very different than if an actual parent were.”
We obviously saw shades of that last year, with Lacey’s enthusiasm for Jenna to be dating such a popular jock, her desire for her daughter to throw more parties, and, of course, her equally infamous bedroom make-over (about which Rickards could only laugh and call it “heinous” and “not Jenna”). But once Lacey learns Jenna knows she wrote the letter-- and sees just how badly Jenna is hurt because of it-- DeLoach shared that it might be time for Lacey to learn a few new parenting tricks.
“Her heart’s always in the right place, and she has really good intentions-- like most moms,” DeLoach reminded about Lacey. “But the thing is, they carry their past, and they carry their baggage, and they carry the tools that they learned from their own mothers into their relationships with their daughters. Lacey didn’t have a great mother as an example; she didn’t get a lot of tools from her. So season one was kind of her really realizing that she had done the one thing that her mother had always done to her, but she didn’t really want to become her mother. And she tried to repair that toward the end of the first season, but I think in this season, Lacey really tries to get the tools and learn what Jenna needs. She always tends to look at something through the perspective of ‘What does that mean for me? How does that effect me?’ So instead of doing that, it will be ‘How does that effect my daughter?’”
DeLoach pointed out that Lacey just wants the best for her daughter in every part of life-- from style to boyfriend-- and that is one area in which Rickards agreed but also pointed out that Jenna having “the best” of things also would reflect on Lacey in ways she may not even be able to realize she enjoys.
“I knew this one mother as a kid who just felt like it validated her daughter to have a boyfriend, and I feel like Lacey’s whole idea of high school is to be popular, to be on the cheer squad, to be kind of mean, and to have a boyfriend. And if Jenna’s doing all of that, and he’s not a total dork, she’s fine,” Rickards said.
Though Lacey was so behind Matty (Beau Mirchoff) as a boyfriend, both women felt she would be equally behind Jake (Brett Davern), even if he wasn’t as stereotypically popular.
“You know, Lacey married a guy that she loved and that she gave her heart to, and that’s what she wants for her daughter, essentially. So that’s what Jenna has to figure out with the whole Jake and Matty situation: where does my heart belong? So whenever Jenna figures that out-- whenever she makes that authentic choice-- Lacey will be one hundred percent behind her,” DeLoach explained.
Especially now that she feels so guilty over the whole carefrontation thing, we imagine!
“She’s kind of in a place where she can get what she wants!” DeLoach said of how mother may try to make things up to daughter as episodes continue to unfold.
Awkward. returns to MTV on Thursday nights, starting June 28th at 10:30 p.m. Be sure to check out our video chat with DeLoach to the left, for more about how the carefrontation reveal effects things within the family-- the whole family.
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