I'm Not My Mother's Daughter from the Spoken Word Podcast by Anamika Dutta

Link here for the audio version of my podcast on Anamika Dutta's Spoken Word podcast. 

Written Transcript: 

I always wanted to be a writer. My first memory is of holding a pencil and writing on a lined sheet of paper. I went to college and studied creative writing. Soon after graduation I was talking with my mother about my future. I was working as a waitress to have time outside of work to finish the novel I began my senior year in college.

“I always thought you’d write lovely children’s books,” my mother said. She said it warmly, it was clearly one of those sto aries she told herself and her friends. I had just graduated from Stanford, working hard to learn about literature and how to write. I finished my degree even though my father died the summer before my junior year. After he died, I took a full load of classes while working thirty hours a week. And it was the writing that drove me, this hunger to read, write, use my voice.

Children’s books can be lovely and transformative, and I enjoy them. But I never wanted to write them. Women write children’s books. That was my mother’s narrative. Having a daughter who wrote small books for small children was a story my mother could get behind.

I don’t remember what I said to my mother when she made that comment. But I mentally rejected her story with anger that still echoes across the intervening decades. And yet. I can still feel her story, like broken glass on a bedroom floor; hard to avoid barefoot in the dark. I write things and then don’t submit them. One rejection letter paralyses me, and I stop submitting anything. It’s as if my psyche has made an accommodation with the narrative box my mother put me in that day; you can write, but you can’t publish, you can’t be recognized as a writer of anything other than children’s stories. Which I don’t write.

My mother died three years ago. We had a difficult relationship, and my grief was difficult as well, prickly, surprising, grueling. I felt so much relief that she was no longer on the planet, but I was still unsettled, undone. Everyone has stories about mothers and daughters. People liked to tell me my mother loved me. But I knew that was a fiction. I needed to reframe what love was in a way that did not include how she treated me, so I could claim love in my own family.

Her stories still haunt me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I didn’t publish a book until after she died. The book comes out this month, and I find myself flinching reflexively when I get attention for it. My mother didn’t like anyone else getting attention, especially her daughter. She was of the generation of women who competed with each other for attention and scarce resources, and she competed with me. Which left me both craving attention and fearing it. My mother waits behind some marble column in my mind, daggers drawn, to come after me for taking the spotlight from her.

I always gave her more power than she actually had, because, as my mother, she once was all-powerful to me. When my son died at nineteen my mother resented the attention I got as a bereaved parent, and she pretended my son never existed. I was terrified by that story, since the memories of him were all I had, and I didn’t want her rummaging through my history and erasing him. She’d made up stories about me and our family my whole life, and it made my reality feel tenuous, fungible. My father died of a rare heart disease, and my mother told me, a teenager, that it was hereditary, and I would probably get it. I called my father’s cardiologist, who paused, shocked, when I told him what my mother had said. “It was a virus,” he said, “there is no hereditary component at all.”

I don’t look much like my mother, except a bit about the eyes. I wear glasses, which she did not, to deflect those moments when I see my face in the mirror and recoil from the eyes that look back, an echo of hers. But I do have the same bad hips she had, the chronic pain, the multiple surgeries. Her mother had hip pain as well, I remember my grandmother leaning on the furniture to walk across the room, that hitch of the hip to move forward. It is an unfortunate genetic legacy. I fight back with fitness, doing the PT and exercise my mother refused. A friend suggested the pain might be an ancestral wound, and it’s my job to feel it to begin to heal. I don’t believe that, but I like the image, taking on the healing so it doesn’t transfer to the next generation.

Healing is often slow, in fits and starts. So I focus less on what I feel and more on what I do. I have built a life much different than my mothers. I have a close relationship with my daughter, and I see my two grandchildren often. I am happily married. I am careful with my money. Whatever ghosts haunt my dreams, whatever narratives claw at my progress, they are not going to be passed down to my daughter and grandchildren. I have a spiritual practice that has helped me have compassion for my mother’s woundedness while also forgiving myself for not always dealing skillfully with the scars she left. I have close friends, my chosen family, older women with whom I have built strong maternal relationships. I don’t compete with the women around me, I try to uplift and help as many as I can personally and professionally.

Sometimes, I imagine going back in time and talking to myself as a child, a teenager, a young woman. And it occurred to me that maybe that actually worked, perhaps all of those imagined forays into my own history somehow got through and build the scaffolding upon which I could make this beautiful life.

And I remember that I had another parent. He died when I was young, but I did get nineteen years. I’m his child too. Maybe I did inherit his heart. And the book, the one I finally finished and got published? It’s dedicated to him.