Demigods and Monsters (15 page)

Next, let's look at Smelly Gabe, Percy's stepdad. Unlike Atlas, he is actually responsible for
saving
Percy's life. You'd think this would boost his grade, but according to the strict rules of Sarah's Sliding Scale of Parenting Skills, intentions matter. Gabe protects him by smelling so overwhelmingly human that he masks the magical “scent” of a demigod, hiding Percy from the mythical monsters who hunt the children of gods. (I'm thinking this isn't a literal smell, but maybe I'm wrong—Percy says “the guy reeked like moldy garlic pizza wrapped in gym shorts.” Yum.) This protection is in no way intentional on Gabe's part. As are most people who have not encountered deodorant, Gabe is unaware of the power of his scent, magical or otherwise.

If we look at Gabe's intentional acts, we see he emotionally abuses Percy, physically abuses Percy's mom, and gambles and drinks away the family's money. When his wife and stepson disappear in
The Lightning Thief
, he accuses Percy of foul play and milks the situation for personal gain. So while he performs a valuable service for the series (preserving the protagonist = good), as a parental figure, he fails.

Our final failure is the god Ares. Ares is the epitome of all bullies, and that translates directly into his parenting style. Look at the exchange between Ares and Clarisse in
The Sea of Monsters
. “You're pathetic,” he tells her. “I should've let one of my sons take this quest.” She swears she'll succeed and make him proud. He says, “You will succeed. And if you don't . . .” He raises his fist, and Clarisse flinches. Like Gabe, he's an abuser. Clarisse embarks on her quest in book two in large part to please and impress her dad, but she won't get the support and praise she needs from Ares. He's a failure
as a father. (Incidentally, he's also a failure as a son and brother. He thinks a war between relatives is the best kind of war. “Always the bloodiest,” he says. “Nothing like watching your relatives fight, I always say.” He must be such a joy at family reunions. Just imagine what Thanksgiving is like.)

Only mildly better than the actively evil parents are the negligent ones. Thalia's mom falls into this category. All we know about her is that she was an alcoholic who died when she drove drunk. But that's more than we know about the other D-grade parents. The other near-failures are the scores of deities who fail to acknowledge their offspring as their own. Cabin eleven at Camp Half-Blood is filled with Undetermineds (kids whose parentage is clearly divine but unknown). Percy describes them in
The Lightning Thief
as “teenagers who looked sullen and depressed, as if they were waiting for a call that would never come. I'd known kids like that at Yancy Academy, shuffled off to boarding school by rich parents who didn't have the time to deal with them. But gods should behave better.”

Because of this parental negligence, the Undetermineds are left to feel bitter and angry—and are therefore vulnerable to manipulation by Luke and Kronos. Thanks to these D-grade parents, Kronos's army grows. And that's just inexcusable. Maybe gods aren't into the whole introspection thing, but you'd think that after several centuries of parenthood, they'd absorb a few tips, perhaps read a few self-help books (
Men Are From Mars, I Am Venus
. . .). I'm with Percy—the gods should know better.

If it weren't for the fact that all of Western Civilization would be destroyed in the process, I'd say these deadbeat moms and dads deserve the walloping that's coming to them.

Four divine parents fill out the center of our bell curve. Some rate high C's, and some rate low C's. They are occasionally negligent (though this can, in part, be excused by the rule against direct interference) and occasionally manipulative (Percy calls it “treating their children as chess pieces”), but they do show some hints of parental competence.

Let's begin with Poseidon, Percy's father. On the plus side, he does claim Percy as his own shortly after Percy arrives at camp, which is more than many other divine parents do. (I really wish he'd said, “Percy, I am your father,” in a deep James Earl Jones voice. How awesome would that have been? That said, an elderly teacher figure does give Percy a pen that transforms into a magic sword, not unlike a light saber, and says that his father wanted him to have it when he was old enough, so my inner Star Wars geek is appeased.)

Also on the plus side: Percy's dad is there for him every time Percy calls for help. For example, after the Chimera bites him in book one, Percy calls on his father to save him as he falls into the water, and his father not only saves him but sends someone to dispense helpful advice for completing the quest. (Looks like someone is angling for extra credit. . . .) In book two, Percy calls for help, and his dad sends hippocampi. (Hippocampi are so my newest favorite mythological creature. I keep asking my husband for one. He keeps saying no, the griffin wouldn't like it.)

On the downside, like most of the gods, Poseidon is a rather absent father. In
The Sea of Monsters
, Hermes asks Percy if he ever feels abandoned by his father, and Percy thinks, “Only a few hundred times a day.” He wishes his father were with his mother, he wishes his dad would make contact more often, he wishes he'd given him more warning that he has a half-brother, and he wishes his dad would acknowledge him more. Like Clarisse, Percy craves parental approval, even if he won't admit it. As Grover says, “You're glad your
dad is alive. You feel good that he's claimed you, and part of you wants to make him proud. That's why you mailed Medusa's head to Olympus. You wanted him to notice what you'd done.”

Unlike Ares with Clarisse, Poseidon does acknowledge and compliment Percy. More than that, his dad vouches for him and places an enormous amount of trust in him, betting that his son won't turn evil and destroy the world. (Okay, for most parents, this isn't really a stretch, but gods have to worry about stuff like that.) He also manages to show up at Percy's birthday party in
The Battle of the Labyrinth
, despite being in the middle of an ocean war, and tells Percy he's his favorite son. As Percy recounts, “He smiled, and at that moment, just being in the kitchen with him was the best birthday present I ever got.” Hmm . . . maybe Poseidon should really be upgraded to a B. The only thing that keeps him from a higher score is that fact that he left his son Tyson (the Cyclops) to live on the streets of New York in a cardboard refrigerator box. Granted, he later grants Tyson's prayers by giving him Percy as a brother and finding him gainful employment. . . . Okay, he's a C+, but with some grade grubbing, Poseidon could move up the Scale of Parenting Skills to a B-grade parent.

Hermes is another C-grade parent who also has the potential to move up the Scale of Skills. His heart is in the right place: He wants to save his son Luke. Luke has turned out rather badly. Possibly due to lack of parental guidance, he has fallen in with a bad crowd. The evil Titan Lord who wants to overthrow civilization can't be a good influence on a still-forming mind. (I keep thinking there should be some kind of Public Service Announcement: Don't smoke, don't drink, don't plot world destruction with the aid of ancient mythological monsters. . . .) But despite Luke's dastardly deeds, Hermes refuses to give up on his son. “My dear young cousin,” he says to Percy in
The Sea of Monsters
, “if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting
they make it.” Hermes hopes that Luke will notice his attempts to help him, but he hasn't had any luck yet.

Luke clearly has father issues. (Seriously, just look at his boat—it's named after Andromeda, a girl who was chained to a rock by her parents to be eaten by sea serpents. Talk about family problems.) You see his bitterness about his father right from the first time Percy meets him in
The Lightning Thief
, and that bitterness fuels his betrayal of Percy in book one, his actions on behalf of Kronos in book two, his role in Annabeth's imprisonment in book three, and his donation of his body for use by our chief bad guy. So even though we only see him for a few scattered pages throughout the series, and even though he means well, Hermes is also the driving force behind Luke's destructive behavior.

Another so-so parent-god is Athena, Annabeth's mother. We don't see her much in the first four books. She does help out her daughter on occasion—she gave Annabeth her cap of invisibility (hey, that's what I should ask my mom to get me for Christmas!), and she gives Percy advice while on his quest to save Annabeth in
The Titan's Curse
. But she's not exactly having mother-daughter pizza nights with her. I'd rate her a flat C. She's a neutral force in Annabeth's life.

Zeus is a low C. Yes, he saves his daughter Thalia from death by transforming her into a pine tree, but is life as a tree really such great shakes? Couldn't he have intervened a wee bit sooner or more effectively? How about turning her
enemies
into trees? (I know, I know, no direct interference, but isn't he already breaking the rule with the tree-transformation thing?) He also supplies angels to help our heroes escape from the skeleton warriors at Hoover Dam, but he's not so quick to answer her other prayers (for instance, in
The Titan's Curse
, she prays for a thunderstorm with no more effect than my chanting “rain, rain, go away . . .”). So he's there for her when things are at their most dire, but he's not a day-to-day kind of dad.

It doesn't make for a built-on-trust kind of relationship. When lightning nearly hits her in
The Titan's Curse
, Thalia thinks her dad is trying to kill her, but it's actually Kronos using her parental hang-ups to try to manipulate her. Dr. Thorn later tries to lure her to Kronos's side by talking about how her father abandoned her, and Luke gets her to hesitate by mentioning her dad. To be fair, Zeus does acknowledge and compliment her at the end of the quest—more than just “Hi, kid. Nice hair.” But his unreliability makes Thalia a wild card for much of book three, so that's not enough to boost Zeus to the next grade level.

One thing that can be said about these C-grade parents: They at least sometimes try. They don't always succeed, but at least they occasionally care. “Families are messy,” Hermes says in
The Sea of Monsters
. “Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we're related, for better or worse . . . and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.”

The Most Improved Parent of the Year Award belongs to Dr. and Mrs. Chase, Annabeth's father and stepmother. When Annabeth talks about her dad and stepmom in
The Lightning Thief
, she is far from complimentary. She complains that they treated her like a freak who endangered her stepsiblings and made her feel so unwanted that she ran away. She paints them as such ogres that when Percy meets her stepmom in book three, he says, “I half expected Mrs. Chase to turn into a raving lunatic at the mention of her stepdaughter, but she just pursed her lips and looked concerned.”

Clearly the Chases failed in some way to connect with their daughter, or else she wouldn't have run away at age seven and been nearly squashed by the bad guys—tough to get a perfect score on Sarah's Scale of Parenting Skill with that on your record—but I think Annabeth is wrong about them. Think about it: Whenever she's
home, monsters attack. Can you blame her parents for being a wee bit tense around her? Other kids bring home problems with bullies or grades or smoking, but heroes bring home problems with teeth, claws, swords, and way too many arms. You don't find info on how to deal with that in any parenting advice book (“Just say no to monsters!” “I don't care if that hellhound followed you home, you can't keep it unless you promise to walk it every day . . .”). Despite this, the Chases keep trying. At the end of
The Lightning Thief
, Annabeth takes Percy's advice and writes a letter to her dad. He responds instantly with an invitation for her to move back home. Give the man a gold star.

In
The Titan's Curse
, Dr. Chase takes “trying” to a whole new level. When Annabeth is kidnapped and her friends need transportation to reach her, Percy and Thalia turn to Dr. Chase for help. Dr. Chase and Mrs. Chase loan them a car without much argument. In fact, Dr. Chase wants to do more, but Percy and Thalia refuse. As they leave, Mrs. Chase tells them to tell Annabeth she still has a home with them. But that's not the last of it. Just when things are bleakest, Dr. Chase flies in on his plane, machine guns down the monsters, and saves the day.

I think all the parenting advice books would agree: Gunning down an army of evil monsters to save your daughter's life is good parenting.

And the envelope, please. . . . Winner of the award for Best Parent in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is . . . Sally Jackson! [Insert sound effect of wild applause. Sally smiles, waves shyly at the audience, and makes her way to the stage. Her son Percy toasts her with a cobalt blue Cherry Coke.]

Sally loves her son. She is willing to sacrifice her happiness for his safety. As Percy learns in
The Lightning Thief
, she married the odious
Smelly Gabe in order to protect Percy from the monsters who hunt half-bloods—or at least that's Grover's theory: “Gabe has been covering your scent for years. If you hadn't lived with him every summer, you probably would've been found by monsters a long time ago. Your mom stayed with him to protect you. She was a smart lady. She must've loved you a lot to put up with that guy.” (Given Sally's previous taste in men, I'm inclined to believe Grover. Plus, as soon as Percy proves he doesn't need protection, Sally rids herself of Gabe, and finds the much-nicer Paul.) Regardless, Sally does her best to give Percy a normal life for as long as possible. Okay, yes, she nearly gets him killed by not sending him to Camp Half-Blood sooner (details, details). She makes up for it by insisting that he leave her and save himself when the Minotaur attacks. He doesn't, of course (again, details).