"My story is a variation on one I've heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter."
In the late 1950s philosopher Erich Fromm wrote an essential book on love as the antidote for human separateness. He suggested humans have the capability for five types of love. To Fromm, the most expansive, nurturing, and selfless love was motherly love. When I read Fromm as a new mother, cradling my recently materialised daughter, I was convinced he was correct. My love for her was deep, pure, and unending. Like a glacial lake fed by rain.
Now that my daughters are older, I think dismissively: Fromm was never a mother to daughters.
Motherly love. A mother to daughters (some say 'girl-mom', as if this rich, entangled, beautiful, messy, and often tragic relationship between mother and daughter could ever be captured in a meme, a clip, or a glib two-word phrase) I call it 'Mother-Daughter Relationship.' The formal term feels weightier, and heftier, and offers more capacity. Or 'MDR', because who in an MDR (I occupy both roles currently) has time to write things out?
The relationship has many variations like daughters without sisters, daughters with sisters, first-born daughters, first-born mothers, daughters of divorce, mothers of divorced daughters, and so on. And this one I think of a lot: daughters whose mothers forget they have daughters. Said scientifically: mothers who have dementia. Like Mexican poet Coral Bracho, who reacts to her mother's disease with gut-stripping poetry. Or Rebecca Solnit an activist and writer beloved for essays on large-scale human compassion and the pleasures of being lost.
Rebecca Solnit (born in 1961), the intellectual, open-minded, and reason-based writer that she is, writes her way through her mother's dementia by ostensibly asking: Do we love our daughters differently from sons? Why and how?
My mother had begun to get confused, to get lost, to lock herself out of her own house, to have serial emergencies that often prompted her to call me for a rescue or a solution. She had memorized my phone number decades before; my three brothers lived no farther away, but they had other area codes and newer numbers, and she had always hidden her troubles from them. They were the audience for her best self, for whom she wished to be seen as, and I was stationed backstage, where things were messier.
The MDR is terribly messy because humans are messy. For all the dark, there is light, and so forth, and it just so happens that for many, many women, the MDR sits in the dark. And yes, Solnit is correct, daughters are sometimes loved differently by their mothers. Loved differently, even loved less.
What? (I imagine you reacting) Not I! Ah yes, all of us are empowering and emancipating our boss-girl daughters at all times. We embrace them, champion them and never, ever diminish them as daughers ... or do we?
While it is easy to sneer at societies over there doing this thing that is no longer done over here, but reality is more complicated. As much as we'd like to draw the line of things we would never do, as a mother I find myself reaching that line often. Or at least seeing the smug faces of my female ancestors on the other side more clearly than expected as I ran from them toward the ideal of having it all. One ancestor holding a behavioural and punishment manual. Another clutching guidelines on appropriate appearance for girls, with an appendix on placating society's aggressiveness and energy matching. Is the message that if I don't control and contain my daughter to think less of herself relative to everyone else, society will? If I don't conscript her into the management of all the mental load, I will drown?
Solnit intimates her mother thought so. Especially once her mother showed signs of dementia. It takes a scratch of the status quo to show inequality beneath the surface. Something goes wrong, and the daughter is called. (Women are made from glue and tape, didn't you know?)
I told my middle and younger brothers that we needed to make it a group effort, because if this chaos remained my mother's and my secret, as most of her illnesses and complaints had been before, it could consume me. These brothers did a lot for her in other ways; they stepped up, and the burden was shared, but all her emergency calls still came to me. One day I asked her why she always called me and not them. "Well, you're the girl," she said, then added, "and you're just sitting around the house all day doing nothing anyway." That was one way to describe the life of a writer.
My mother rarely, if ever, calls. Maybe once a year? Is this her way of saving me the implied social burden she has become as an older person? (Someone outside technology, outside physical aptitude she once had, outside the constant change). Or am I simply an ocean away and thus, out of mind? Who am I kidding? My sister is much more efficient; she'll get the calls, if there are any. But there won't be. My mother is someone with whom the pain stops. She will consume it all, and pass on nothing. My mother-in-law was the exact opposite. I want my daughters and I to land somewhere in the middle.
Solnit, as the girl of her family, accepts her fate to care for her mom and absorb its companion pain.
She summarizes neatly: "My story is a variation on one I've heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter." We become the mother to one's own mother.
We kept trying to prop her up at home. I put a hook behind the front door to hang her purse on so she'd know where it was, but she wouldn't use it, and she took my proposal to reduce her nine or so purses to one badly; she liked the big red luggage tag I put on the key to the front door until she lost it, and then a series of highly visible successors, and appreciated the list of essential phone numbers I pinned to the wall, but she called up and cursed me the day I borrowed her address book so I could make a large copy bound in red with a ribbon on it as to tether to furniture or dangle out of a pile.
The effect, of course, is that as Solnit steps in to be a mother, Solnit the daughter, in her own right, disappears. "I composed an essay in my head somewhere in the midst of all these crises, but never found time to write it," she admits wistfully. Her identity is folded, put away in a drawer, at first longed for, and then utterly forgotten.
Or perhaps I'm just talking about my post-kids self. Because eventually, Solnit does write that essay or some essay. One assumes it is the book I'm writing about here. She must not be a mother herself, I find myself thinking, viciously.
And then, I'm embarrassed to admit it but will anyway, I think: why is Solnit unnecessarily harsh on her mother?
For argument's sake, let's finish the thought: Why are you mad at your mom, Rebecca? It's not her fault society broke her. Is it her fault she's doing the same to you? And now you're doing it back to her - telling everyone who will read your book what she took from you because you cannot get it back any other way.
I keep thinking something I never thought I would say to any other woman in such a reductive, diminishing way: you do not understand, you must not be a mother.
Something in this somewhat shameful, judgmental thought is correct. I know it.
"I ask the keepers of the journey to make sure her travel is safe and sure." The covenant of motherhood comes with one truly awesome, unexpected gift. No, not children. I mean yes, sure, whatever, they are great and you cannot imagine how much you love them. But it is not that. Motherhood comes with an increased awareness of what it was like to be your mother, I mean the person, the actual person who lived well before you arrived. The one who is completely independent. The choices, what she went through, the pain she swallowed, the breaking of you to save you the way her mom broke her. You see all this when you become a mom.
I am not suggesting Solnit would have been softer to her mother had she herself had children. The fact that she devoted an entire book to understanding their relationship is love in full. I just mean perhaps the relationship would have had another layer of complexity, certainly less certainty. Based on the universal truth of motherhood (one which I am loathe to accept): it is a blessing to have your daughter be so confident in your love that she feels safe hating everything about you.
Reading Solnit's piece I wonder if it is the same the other way around? Maybe it wasn't society that took from Solnit's mother, maybe it was her mother, and her mother's mother...
Gillian Wearing as her mother Jean Gregory, 2003. Wearing, famous for dressing in the masks and costumes of family members, makes a brilliant comment on how we inhabit our parents, and they us. Look closely at the eyes, you'll see Wearing under the mask. Learn moreFor the first time, I realize how much my mother has given me by not calling me to help. Freedom, equality, love. It is a gift not to be called when the call requires you to set aside your identity and life. I also realized that I failed her: Does she not trust my love, is that why she doesn't call? Should she?
Are we supposed to have unconditional love for our parents? Yes, for our children, obviously. I do not have unconditional love for my mother, I don't think. Am I supposed to? I do for my children.
Solnit's line: "Mothers are divided by daughters" has me nodding vigorously. I definitely divided my mom, and still do probably.
But, here is the most important thing, my mother multiplied me. And I'll multiply my daughters in a way I never would or could do for a son. I don't need to for a son, they are multiplied by society's patriarchy. My daughters need more from me, of me. All our daughters do. I do not know how much I needed my mom as a mom, but as a woman navigating all of this, I need her desperately. More than anyone else, she knows what it is like to be me.
Couple Solnit's broad and often painful narratives of self in The Faraway Nearby with my rather more existential essay on where we look to see ourselves and a look at how we often fail to give our mothers personhood, seeing them instead as they affect us, serve us, disservice us - not as women out there in the world (although each generation changes that slightly). Those gorgeous women who were once completely independent of us, their daughters.
