In February, when one of my writing groups just met, one wrote about her mother. Two weeks, someone else wrote about her parents. As for now, more than half of the members had written about their mothers. It’s personal, and it tells as much about the writer as about the mother, if not more.
As I was reading these pieces, I noticed a pattern among them. The writing and the curiosity of mothers’ stories are often motivated by the daughter’s dissatisfaction. The mother wasn’t the version the daughter wanted her to be. And the daughter examines the mother’s stories to understand what went wrong, and the daughter’s choices often reflect a corrective strengthening of what was weak in the mother.
The correction could be a projection from a mother to a daughter.
In Weike Wang’s Chemistry, the mother of the protagonist emigrated from China to the US. She was ripped off the materials she’s used to in Shanghai, her smartness and her middle-class upbringing origin did not matter in a land of foreign. She had to work in physical labor because she was limited by her language. The barrier wasn’t only at work. She fought with her Chinese husband, someone who’s proud of his practicality and his earning power as an engineer. The father took little interest in communication, and family quarrels rarely ended in resolving the conflicts. Hours after hours the mother would stay on a phone talking Shanghainese. The daughter wondering why there were so many things for the mother to talk about.
The daughter pursued and dropped out of a Ph.D. in chemistry, finding herself a lack of the passion required to continue academic researches. For a long time, she kept the drop-out from her mother, knowing that what she gave up was what the mother desired.
The correction could be a defending mechanism developed from the childhood of a daughter.
In “Bad English”, an essay included in Minor Feelings, Korean American Cathay Park Hong wrote that growing up she picked up a mechanism to defend her mother. By stepping in and speaking with the native authority of English whenever a white person talked condescendingly to her mother, she pushed back that invading whiteness and privilege. She knew how much a foreign language took away from her mother, just by comparing the personality disclosed in her mother’s Korean — “sharp, witty, and judgmental, if rather self-preening” — with that of her mother in expressions of English, “a crush of piano keys that used to make [Hong] cringe.”
The daughter wanted to be good at what the mother was not, just to protect her.
In both Chemistry and “Bad English”, the daughters sympathize with the mothers, even though the mothers had caused pain. The effort to recall memories and to look for explanations is all a search for reasons to forgive. The bond of love forces the daughter writers to discover one truth: unconditional loves are not perfect. They are often more complicated than any single narrative available out there. This revelation comes with the maturity of the daughters. On top of the mother-daughterhood, they now acquire a new lens shared in similarity — a lens of being women. The discomfort associated in early childhood caused by mothers, daughters contemplate in their writings, were side-effects of mothers’ struggles of being women at the time. Having no access to earning power, or facing challenges of two new roles (immigrant and a young mother), or proving her own existence, or doing something to correct her mother like her daughter would do to her… the daughter was in sync with the mother in the difficulties life throws upon them. The past time of the mother and the current time of the daughter.
We write about our mothers also for how they participate in our adult traumas.
Meena Kandasamy began her novel of a young writer wife escaping from an abusive marriage with how the mother of this woman tells a dark anecdote as the symbol of the awful marriage. In an exaggerating, earthly theatrical manner, the mother described thousands of lice walking on her daughter’s once beautiful and untouchable hair, and the lice multiplied, just like the rumors of this affair among women, to the degree that the mother declared a war against the lice. The narrator saw it as both an expression of motherly unconditioned love and a detour from the story that the narrator wanted to tell, to me, it was also a story the mother created for herself to be in the battle against of a patriarchal system that otherwise she couldn’t ally with her daughter.
But we often forget, there is only so much that a mother could do, for the real difficulties are not an individual’s consequences but results from something much bigger. The maturity of a woman signifies itself when what she experienced reached beyond her mother’s scope. In these situations, the mother ceased to be authoritative, and instead, powerless or even ignorant.
The Nigerian young woman Ifemelu, the protagonist of Americanah, remembered her mother as a religion enthusiast who, arbitrarily in Ifemelu’s eyes, switched from one church to another. The mother’s commitment was extreme: shave off her beautiful hair on a whim, or starve herself skin-to-bone, or chant fanatically with people who are way above her class. I almost forgot this part of the story, because the main plot was Ifemulu’s immigrant life in the US, which I resonated to when I first read the novel. But who could say the mother’s obsession and blind attachment to religions wasn’t a trigger for Ifemulu to leave, in search of intelligence and reasoning?
We run away from our mothers without knowing who we were running away from.
As I joined the writers whose mothers became their primary subject of understanding the world, the question of fairness often bothers me. Could daughters ever be reasonable for their expectations? After all, we were all born self-centered, as babies, we equaled our needs with that of the world. Could mothers ever fully satisfy their daughters, for the little ungrateful creatures took for granted the mundane feeling of warmth and being fed, only carried on the memories stood out because of their intensity?
Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective refers to female writers that they read as “mothers”, acknowledging their work as nurturing and bonding. I want to borrow this new definition of “mother” to think of my own mother so I won’t always lock my attention at the pains, she did her share, and now it’s my turn.
