your mother was first a daughter
some thoughts about my favorite film of the year
It’s almost the end of the year which is both terrifying and exciting, so I’ll be dropping Liz’s Favorite Things™ sporadically this month to help me cope with all my mixed feelings about endings and new beginnings. In this posting, I want to spend some time talking about one of my favorite topics, mothers.
My favorite film this year was Petite Maman, directed by Céline Sciamma, best know for making another cinematic masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Most movies need a real build up with dramatic tension, an emotional soundtrack and incredible acting to be tearjerkers, but this one made me cry just by my sister telling me the plot over the phone in the middle of the day while I was in an uber. “It’s the story of a girl who gets to hang out with her mom when she was a child,” my sister Emilie told me casually as a puddle of tears started filling the upper level of my n-95, which thank God was still mandatory so that my driver could be saved from second-hand embarrassment of watching me cry about a movie I did not see. A few days later, my niece played the film’s main title song while we were eating snacks and my sister had to stop mid-conversation because she noticed me crying. AGAIN, I HAD NOT EVEN SEEN THE FILM YET. Even writing about it makes me teary-eyed which is probably something I should unpack in therapy, but instead I’m going to do it here because I have a sneaking suspicion it might help you too.
As you probably already know, I’m pretty obsessed with motherhood and its broader meaning in human development and society. I mostly write about why we need to protect moms and pay them, but lately I’ve also been quietly exploring my own inconsistencies when it comes to the demands I have placed on my own mother. It was while watching another great film this year, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Lost Daughter (which coincidentally also lead to a lot of mask crying, a theme in my life) that I realized that I was publicly demanding that we stop expecting the world from moms, while privately expecting twice and more, from my own mother.
The truth is that all of us want to save and be saved by our mothers. We grow up with an insatiable desire to be unconditionally loved by the one who brought us into the world and then blame that same force when she falls short of that impossible task. Of course that primary parent can really be anybody and be any gender, but for most of us, it’s still our mom. And receiving love from our mother is so essential for our survival that it is evolutionary programmed into us, in such a sophisticated way that our development is interrupted if attunement between the primary parent and the child doesn’t happen. Maybe that’s why we treat moms like crap. No policy proposal could ever begin to properly quantify or reward the impossibly enormous task of being a mom in the world.
But what happens when our mothers inevitably fall short? Especially in a capitalist patriarchal society that traumatizes and disproportionately overworks and impoverishes women. As Gabor Maté writes in his new book The Myth of Normal, a child cannot understand the motives of the parent. A son can’t tell that his mother is absent because she has two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet in a country that doesn’t have parental leave, he just knows she’s not there. A daughter does’t know that her mom is emotionally unavailable because she was sexual assaulted in a country where most rape kits won’t ever get tested, she just knows she’s absent. And when a child is abused or neglected, she doesn’t stop loving the parent, she only stops loving itself. This kind of childhood trauma is so preventable, and yet continues to be at the root of most human suffering. Even sociopaths who have genetic predispositions to kill, don’t end up murdering anybody if they have a decent childhood. And it’s not just humans. Maté cites research on baby monkeys showing that after only four days of being separated from their primary parent, brain chemistry shifts and their dopamine receptors are altered. That’s why supporting caregivers, especially mothers, would be the single most cost-effective strategy to building a better society. We are evolutionary wired to be attuned to maternal moods, so the happier moms are, the better off we all will be.
To be clear, if you had an abusive or neglectful parent, I don’t believe compassion is owed to them, but if placing your individual experience within a wider social context helps lessen your own suffering and contributes to your own healing, it might be worth exploring.
I have about seven billion more things to say about motherhood but I just started reading Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance by trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel, and I can already tell it’s going to make my list of best books of 2022 so you' haven’t heard the last of me on why moms need more support. But I’ll leave you with one important piece of wisdom I’ve already gleaned from McDaniel’s book if you’re feeling resentful towards your mom. Every mother was also a daughter. A lot of neglectful mothers were once abused daughters. A lot of suffocating mothers were once under-loved daughters. Our mother is the first place we get to live in. And no one forgets her first home.
I’m sending you so much love.
x
Liz-
Hit me super hard from all angles. I read a lot of Gabor in an ADHD household and the piece that’s not loud enough is how we don’t support moms (which you deftly handled in a few simple sentences). Also when we watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire my queer teen asked “Is that what love is like, mama?” And I wept that someone was able to capture it in a way that could be understood through a screen despite inexperience. Thanks for the shares 💖
This hit me hard, as both a daughter and a mother. Thank you.