What My Mother And I Don't Talk About (ed. Michele Filgate)

3+/5. Recced by Captain Awkward, and it sounded so exactly up my alley that I immediately put it on hold at the library. And indeed it was.

There is a lot of pain in these essays. There are a lot of people... who have really terrible family situations. There are some of these essays where my reaction was something along the lines of, "man, I'm glad I never had to go through anything like that." There are essays where -- regardless or not of whether their specific relationship with their mom was better or worse than mine (generally worse), I empathized with them so hard that it was both painful and cathartic to read. There are a couple of essays by people who had actual good relationships with their mothers, and those were rather a relief to read.

I think the essay I enjoyed most was Leslie Jamison's "I Met Fear on the Hill," talking about her mother's first marriage, before she had children, and how it refracts how she thinks about her mother and her relationship with her mother. (This is one of the good relationships.)

When I told Peter [her mother's first husband] this essay would be about his evolving relationship to my mother, it was the truth. But it wasn't all of the truth. Because the essay is also about my evolving relationship with my mother, how some part of me wanted to humanize her myth, and how I found, in Peter's portrait of her, another gaze saturated by worship -- but also the puncturing of that worship with the admission of her actual, textured self.

The essay where I found myself wincing in empathy the most was Carmen Maria Machado's "Mother Tongue," not that my mother is really so much like that, but somehow there is a consonance in the relationships, more perhaps in the way that I'm like Carmen than in the way her mother is like mine, except that she is rather more self-aware than I was at that age.

A vast and unbridgeable crevasse erupted between us. Whenever I saw her, she found some way to let me know that despite my accomplishments, I was failing. "You need to learn to make better choices," she told me, though what choices they were, she never specified. Besides, all I could hear was, I wish I'd made better choices. And I couldn't help her with that.

I almost didn't quote that bit because, after saying I identified with this essay a lot, it honestly isn't very much like my mom or like our relationship, at least surface-wise -- and I had the same trouble with the other quotations I was thinking about using. My mom was really proud of me, in fact. She never told me to make better choices, nor did she wish she had made better ones.

So now you're saying, well, how are they similar at all? I think there can be a certain amount of... insecurity, for stay-at-home moms. For achievement in your career you can't point to something you made, or customers you made happy, or money you made. You pour yourself into these kids and in the end you only have what they make of themselves, which in the end you have no control over, and if they're screwed up or don't live up to the potential you think they had or come back from therapy telling you that they think you didn't give them what they needed... I think it can lead to insecurity. And that's what I see in this essay, even if Machado didn't explicitly write about it.

The one that kind of annoyed me was Andre Aciman's "Are You Listening," about his deaf mother who learned how to mimic hearing people very well, in which he says,

[My mother] had spent her first eighteen years learning how to do what couldn't have seemed more unnatural: pretending to hear... [My mother's school's headmistress's] method had disastrous consequences for my mother's ability to process and synthesize complex ideas. Past a certain threshold, things simply stopped making sense to her. She could talk politics if you outlined the promises made by a presidential candidate, but she was unable to think through the inconsistencies in his agenda, even when they were explained to her... She might like a painting by Monet, but she couldn't discuss the beauty of a poem by Baudelaire... Did she think in words, I'd ask? She did not know...

I mean. My mom is (a) not deaf and (b) really, really super-competent at a whole bunch of things. Including math! She majored in math in college. She's not dumb at all. And yet all those things (including some I left off just so I could finish this post) are things she doesn't do either. If you asked her if she thought in words she'd look at you like you were crazy. I just... feel like it's sort of reductive and obnoxious to say it's because she was deaf, or because of her education. Maybe it was! But maybe his mom was just like that!