November 3, 2021:
The prior presence of cute. There's something central there.
The Beatles were cute, as The Monkeys were cute. You could say she was never able to reach past that early observation, so that as art The Beatles simply did not or could not register. You could equally say she'd trapped herself inside a cycle of patronization which was ridiculous in any reasonable perspective, profoundly damaging in the perspective of her relationship to me.
She'd been able to somewhat engage with my earliest childhood because early childhood cuteness gave her permission to leave it at that. It's not coincidence that until the day of her death she wore a locket with my five-year-old photo. "You were so cute then..." Nor is it coincidence that she was never to her final day able to interact with me as an individual with my own identity. Certainly not as an adult.
In the end it's that she was never an adult herself. She was a little girl locked in a closet. That she constructed her adulthood closet from television and fantasy novels was in its way inevitable. It's what she knew.