Mothers and Daughters
An old essay and some new thoughts
My mom is eighty. Her eyes and ears are better than mine and she’s generally in good health. Something is shifting though, because something is always shifting. She’s still very independent, but more vocal about her concerns. She’s affronted by the number - “I’m eighty!” - almost surprised that it’s happened to her. I’m not sure what she expected.
She’s suddenly a little bit mean, seemingly annoyed that life (and the people in her life) haven’t turned out the way she’d hoped. I’m very close to her, but the shifting is showing our cracks.
Look what life has done to me! What are you all doing about it?!
I’m not sure how to feel about any of this, other than to worry it like a stone that fits my palm. Why the flaring irritation, the tiny cruelties? I try to be what she needs, but also what does she need? Could she tell me? Would she? Could I provide it if she told me?
Mothers are as complex and messy as the rest of us, in spite of archetypes and stereotypes. We’re told that mothers are (or should be) everything, but they’re just flawed humans. We forget that they were mothered (or not, for better or worse), as were their mothers. She is herself, and I am mine, and we just have to work with that. Until we don’t.
These are the bees swirling in my bonnet as we lean into another Mother’s Day. I’m not a fan of Hallmark holidays, the forced fête, the oversimplified narrative. But this one is a prompt.
How to be a good daughter? A good mother?
How to be good?
I wrote the following essay years ago, prompted by a photo, and think it’s worth sharing again. It was originally published in The Hairpin (RIP), so I kept the hairpins.
Mothers and Daughters
That’s Velma in the big chair. Arms crossed, stoic caution written on her tired face. She was always old, to me. Old lady hair, soft body shrouded in old lady shifts. Voice of a tentative crone, she would speak when spoken to. When delegating, or calling us to meals. Always tending something, someone. She was somehow joyless, but always kind.
Nana, my mother’s mother’s mother. Matriarch.
She buried three babies and raised six children in the shadow of the wandering dandy she called a husband. The big old house on the dirt lane named for the family is as alive in my memory as she is. The house was her realm, all doilies and polish, cooking and scrubbing. The lilacs and the rabbit hutch, the pony next door and the scary relatives down the lane. I’ll only ever know it — know her — through a child’s eyes. And stories.
That’s Rosemary, daughter of Nana, sitting in the peach sweater, her serene face a lie. Genteel hellraiser, she abandoned her husband and two small children to run off with a Mexican playboy. She left her kids with Nana, who raised them, and she ran around wild and free in 1940's America, when such a thing was an unspeakable scandal. She finally brought the playboy back home to live a cloistered life for two, formal visits and holidays with her children an attempted retribution for her crime.
Grandma, my mother’s mother. Black sheep, hellion.
She was haughty and tempestuous, a self-styled princess with a peasant’s pedigree. She breathed fire and left ashes in her wake. She broke a full set of fancy china, dropping one at a time into the bathtub with dramatic flair. A man once dared to spit at her feet and she beat him with her umbrella. I adored her because she adored me. She showered me with everything a child wants and questioned none of my whims. I was the light in her life, the child of the child she gave away, the chance to make up for her transgressions. The crime ghosted in my mother’s eyes.
That’s Rosemarie — daughter of Rosemary, granddaughter of Velma —standing in peach. Looking haunted. Or stricken. Angry? Posing? I’m never sure. The hands tell a tale — one on the woman who raised her, the other on the one who should have. I watched her walk that divide and wrestle with loyalty, learn how to mother with only part of the manual.
Mom, with the mother-sized hole in her heart.
She’s beautiful, leaning tragic but always resisting, exhausted by the demands of mothering and the burden of motherlessness. Balancing the solid, silent lessons from her strong grandmother (the woman she called Mama) with the wild, selfish, genetic inheritance of her mother. She has steered herself through a world that defines her by the men and the children in her life. I know her as mother and I know her mother’s story. But can I ever really know her?
That’s me, the child. The girl, pulled from a headlong rush at childhood to stand still for a four-generations photograph. Clearly impatient with the ritual, probably dressed for a holiday. Distracted by things offstage — cousins and small animals, tables loaded with sweets — uninterested in the meaning of the moment. My mother looks filled with the moment, my grandmother looks filled with herself, and Nana just looks resigned. Mothers and daughters, stories and sins. The fraying matrilineal thread running through the generations.
Me. Daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter. Mother.
I now have a mother’s appreciation for the mess of the thing. I’ll not make those mistakes, we say. And yet. Are they mistakes? Or just small navigational errors in a long and difficult journey? Is life just a series of course corrections? My grandmother, Rosemary, used to say after any blunder, “You just pick yourself up and get on down the road.” A convenient mantra for one who left so much wreckage behind.
I love all of the women in that image and I have felt loved by them. But I know each of them only through the prism of their mothering and wonder what’s missing from the picture. What have those women not shared with one another, what are their secrets? Does a measure of blood connect me to their stories? Do the tales we tell about them capture the truth? Do our stories define us?
Will my daughter ever really know me?
Does it matter?
🌸
Things to share:
This essay about being a mother might be the best thing I’ve ever written.
A poem (the spacing shows up wrong on the phone, but the link will show you the original):
Mother, In Love at Sixty by Susanna Styve Reason number one it can't work: his name is Bill. For god's sake, he hunts. He has no pets, other than two doting daughters, and his ex-wife is still alive. He's simply not my type. Who wants to get married again, anyway? I'm too old. I go South at the first frost. Plus, he's messy. Men are messy. He could die. Then where would I be?
Cheers!
Lisa
This was excellent. I also read your other essay on motherhood. Wow. The feeling and the words. I felt it, I lived it, too. Thank you for sharing. I always enjoy what you write & connect with it.
I feel a start of a book with the essay about the generations of mothers. It is so good at getting to the marrow of the thing, and yet the elusive questions we still ask ourselves. I have lately been writing about my mother in my journal and what was missing from our relationship( she passed away in 2019). And that of course had me look at my grandmother, and her mother, who had very different outlooks on family. I now see my mother did the best she could, considering her background ( my grandfather was emotionally abusive to her, especially being the oldest) and my grandmother tried, to her detriment, to stay in a marriage with a selfish man, to be a “good, Christian woman” versus her mother who married several times. I was not super close to my mother, she told me I was difficult from the first months of the pregnancy and she couldn’t relate to me as a person, more feisty, outspoken, physical, and so on than she was. Later, a year or so before she passed, she told me she was always a little in awe of my boldness as a child, and she regrets trying to squash it in the name of being “more ladylike.” She was kind, curious about many subjects, and her elementary students loved her. She was creative and generous with family or strangers. She was also deeply depressed, withdrawn socially and lupus had really been hard on her body. I miss her, and will ask many questions that may go unanswered about her life and how she related to me. Thank you for writing this- it is so well written because it makes us go there when we think of our Moms.