Mother no more
My relationship with my late mother was a loving but rocky one. Not long ago, when I drafted a tribute to my grandmother, the wonderful editor who guided me through the revision of that essay pointed out major holes in the piece. These holes represented places where I hesitated to write anything remotely negative about my mother in the recounting of my childhood. I don’t know how much of it is a black thing or a Southern thing or a Christian thing, or if it’s just a daughter thing, but speaking ill of one’s mother (particular one’s deceased mother) seems to be nothing short of heresy– unless she did something like beat you with wire hangers when you were a kid.
(Aside: Something about that Joan Crawford-wire-hanger-beating never rang true to me. I’ve wondered if Christina Crawford may have taken creative license and invented the wire hanger incident because she feared people reacting to the non-physical abuse as no big deal. Notice how the wire hanger incident remains in the popular imagination, a shorthand for physical child abuse. And yet we hear far less, if anything at all, about Crawford’s overall cruelty, manipulation, and emotional abuse. This is not to disparage Christina Crawford, nor to cast doubt on abuse allegations in general. My commentary is not about Christina Crawford’s credibility; it’s about how, when it comes to mothers–rich, white ones, especially–our culture is loathe to picture them as anything but perfectly nurturing. (Unless said mother is Britney Spears, in which case her inadequacies as a mother are writ large because they can sell magazines.) The flip side of this adoration is that when mothers act like monsters, as a society we are louder in our calls for punishment and justice than when fathers are the culprits. “How could a MOTHER do such a thing?” We expect more of mothers, so we punish them more harshly when they fail.)
Back to the holes in my grandmother essay…By leaving out less-than-saintly details about my mother, I was not giving my grandmother her full due. She filled in gaps that my mother could not. In order to pay tribute to my grandmother for filling those gaps, I had to acknowledge my mother’s imperfections. It’s not that my mother was negligent–nothing could have been further from the truth. In simplest terms, she was very overprotective–but even writing that felt like a major betrayal.
I try to imagine how I would feel on the other side of the mother-daughter equation. What if my daughters wrote about my shortcomings in a national magazine? Would I yield to their right to expression, and respect their recollections? Would I offer acceptance of their freedom to tell their stories? If so, would this acceptance be of the grudging variety, or would I have a thicker-skin?
So I read with interest a recent article from The Times (of London)–”The Day Feminist Icon Alice Walker Resigned as My Mother”–about writer Rebecca Walker’s estrangement from her mother, Alice Walker. Having read and appreciated books by both women (and crossed paths with Rebecca once at Yale; she was a year ahead of me), I have mixed thoughts about the whole matter.
Further coloring my mixed viewpoint is the fact that of course I identify with both women: I am a writer, a mother, and a daughter. On the one hand, I feel a writer should be free to air her family’s dirty laundry, free to tell her story, her truth. On the other hand, intent matters. Airing dirty laundry to exact vengeance, embarrass, or otherwise hurt a family member should not be shrouded in the protective cloak of “I’m telling my truth.”
I can’t claim to know Rebecca Walker’s motives, but it’s a zero-sum game. If her version of events (chronicled in the artice and in her two memoirs) is to be believed, what a horrible light this casts on her mother. But, if Rebecca is not being honest, or if her intent is to wound her mother or capitalize on her mother’s celebrity, then Alice Walker’s iconography remains unblemished–and it’s Rebecca who’s standing beneath the bad lighting.
The Times article (and the comments which follow) raises many issues. Among them:
–the question of airing dirty laundry–heresy or right?
–accusations of Rebecca Walker “whining” and “milking” her mother’s celebrity and her painful childhood to gain celebrity of her own
–accusations of Alice Walker’s narcissism
–the irony of feminists (or anyone who subscribes dogmatically to any ideology) trying to save the world, but neglecting their own backyard (families, personal relationships)
There are three sides to every story, but on this one I’m inclined to lean toward the daughter’s telling. Perhaps because it will be many years before my girls can take to the pages of a magazine and tell the truth about me? Maybe then I will identify more with the elder Walker. For now, I empathize with what I presume is Rebecca’s struggle–telling her story at such a high, personal cost.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
A fifty plus year odyssey with my mom and I can say I will never write anything revealing about her because no one would believe me. The relationship between mothers and daughters keeps psychiatrists in business. Yet, there is no fiercer love than that between mother and daughter. Whew!