I can’t think of a mother more ingrained on the American subconscious than Norma.

Even if you’re not a supernerd who’s read the 1959 novel by Robert Bloch (but if you are a supernerd, let’s be friends), or haven’t seen the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film based on it (in which case, shame on you), you’d probably get the reference if your friend told you she broke up with her boyfriend because he was a “total Norman Bates.”

If that happens, by the way, give her a bear hug and a bottle of wine. She needs it.

But here’s the thing about Norma: Bloch wrote her in ’59. Do you know what was happening in the world of feminism in 1959? Nothing good, you guys. Rosie the Riveter was being encouraged to go back home because the war was over and the menfolk were back to claim the jobs she’d been handling in their absence. At least six psychiatrists believed that female ambition was the womb that nurtured mental illness in the country’s wives, emotional distress in its husbands, and even its boy children to desire other boy children, according to Life Magazine.

It wasn’t until the 1960’s – and well into them – that groups lobbying for female equality started working on a woman’s legal right to choose, equal opportunity employment, and to crown sheep as Miss America while tossing their bras in the Freedom Trashcan.

The Freedom Trashcan, you guys.

And you thought Freedom Fries were important.

So it’s no wonder that Norma Bates was written as a two-dimensional character who served only to have driven her serial-killing son to his own madness.

But A&E has fixed what I would argue is one of the most egregious cases of misrepresentation in the history of fiction. Norma Bates, according to Bloch (and Hitchcock’s loyal film version of Bloch’s work), was a puritanical harpy whose shrill nagging on the virtue of the women surrounding Norman is implicated as the reason he went insane. Of course he poisoned her and her new special friend. The woman was awful.

Except that everything we learn about Norma from the novel and the film is by way of an acutely unreliable point-of-view character. At the outset of the story Norman has already killed her. Probably, his understanding of her is skewed. And I know, I’m not usually one to advocate for blatantly ignoring canon and excusing liberal revisions of an already established fictional universe and history.

Except that by the end of Bates Motel, the five-season A&E series, I didn’t just understand Norma.

I loved her.

I sympathized with her.

I rooted for her.

And here’s why: From episode one Norma is a whole person. Norma has a backstory that’s riddled with emotional abuse and neglect at the hands of her parents, and atrocious assault at the hands of her predatory brother. She winds up married to an abusive man, with one son born of incest and one who blacks out and murders people.

That’s how the series starts, for the love of Pete! Norman has blacked out and murdered her abusive husband, his abusive father, and has no idea. Fast forward through to just the middle of season one and Norman’s blacking out and murdering shady high school writing teachers.

Just slow your roll, guys. I know we want to hate Norma for what Norman is, but can we? Can we honestly?

Kinda.

Yeah, we kinda can. Norma’s an astoundingly broken woman, which makes her an inauspicious candidate for motherhood. But let’s look at what Norma has intentionally done wrong throughout the course of five seasons. And what has been her intention through it all?

I’d argue that Norma’s greatest crime is a startling lack of insight. In Norma’s world, nothing outside of herself is safe. Even this child, this little baby bird of a manboy – because how else can you describe little Charlie Bucket all grown up and slaying the townsfolk in his tidy sweater ensembles – is a simmering threat. If our position on the temperament spectrum is shaped by external experiences, and if more negative experiences tend to correlate with more negative personality traits, then let’s be honest: Norma had more reason to become a serial killer than Norman ever did. Arguably, using just Norma’s upbringing for comparison, Norman has a relatively blessed life. Norma allows for levels of intimacy between them that will make your skin crawl, and she refuses to accept that something is amiss with her precious Norman. But I wouldn’t classify anything she does as a parent as either neglectful or abusive. She toes the line, for sure. She puts certain information on Norman – the nature of her relationship with her brother, for example – that should never have been his to process. But if taken overall, within the context of her own experience, Norma tries really hard to be an exemplary mother, and her efforts are nothing less than valiant when you consider that she was shooting blind, with no example of a good mother to copycat.

I think, given this new wealth of character development that Bates Motel offers the fan of the Psycho universe, we need to have an updated conversation about Norma’s composite score on the Fictional She-Devil Wickedness Inventory (patent pending). And if, by the end of season four episode one, you can watch Norma beg Dr. Edwards on the Pineview portico to diagnose her son so that she can get him out of the psychiatric ghetto that is Willamette County and into the fancy pants inpatient residential facility without feeling even the tiniest flit of sympathy for her, I would argue that you, sir, are evil.

I don’t know why I assume you’re a sir if you can’t feel for Norma. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

“I didn’t get him help because I thought I could control it and I was afraid of the doctors. I thought that they would take him away from me, but I can’t control it,” Norma says, defeat washing over her face as she pleads with Edwards. “I’m just afraid that they’re gonna lock him up and I’ve just never been so scared in my life.”

In that tender moment of honesty – a rare thing for Norma, I’ll grant you – Norma is every single mother in the history of ever.

None of us know what we’re doing. The vast majority of us hope we’re doing a half decent job. And, in the middle of it, very few of us have a whole lot more insight than Norma. And we all, at one point or another, fear that we may have already created a monster.

It’s the nature of the beast that is parenting.

In the end, every mother is potentially just the subject of her child’s therapy sessions.

Norma Bates, in that moment, is every mother who’s ever walked this bewildering earth.

So happy Mother’s Day, Normas.

I salute every last forlon one of you.