The point of writing The Mother Memoir can be misunderstood. The guest post, below, by Laura McHale Holland, “Some Spirits Are Better Left Alone,” provides an opening for me to add some clarity. The Mother Memoir is not meant to be about extolling the virtues of or praising the woman you call mother, although mother’s positive merits are frequently in play when writing about a healthy relationship. In any case, a Hallmark greeting card The Mother Memoir is not. Rather it’s asking you to look at mom from the inside out and learn more about her, as well as yourself, from a new perspective.
I ask people to write one short story to capture the intrinsic character, whether positive or negative, of their mothers to keep spirits alive. In the case of difficult relationships, people can use what they learn from mindfully writing about their flawed connection with mom to honor themselves. Understanding ensues.
The Mother Memoir is about honoring the relationship with the woman who gave you life, with the word honor being multifaceted, implying more aspects than admiration. Looking at what honor means in the context of relationships is anything but clear-cut. In Laura’s guest post, her angst is palpable, her anger frank, due to the actions of the mother who shockingly abandoned her and for the stepmother who abused her.
As long as we draw breath, our feelings about our relationships with our mothers will be ongoing journeys, and their spirits will be alive within us, even if we think we’ve shut out them out. Cutting them off completely isn’t an internal possibility. Laura chose to write a compelling memoir, Reversible Skirt; as she stoked the spirits, she was honoring her own essential being in a powerful way. She also wrote a short Mother Memoir, which I’ve included in my upcoming book, TellTale Souls Writing The Mother Memoir… (Spring 2012)
Some Spirits are Better Left Alone
By Laura McHale Holland
Should you honor the woman who raised you if she abused you? How about a mother who abandoned you? I had two such women in my life: a mother who killed herself when I was a toddler and a stepmother who was a Nurse Ratched, not a June Cleaver. And, frankly, I don’t feel like keeping the spirit of either one of them alive today.
It jolts me, after decades of life as an independent adult, how mutable my feelings about both of them are. My mother and stepmother are long gone, yet my relationships with them are ongoing journeys. For quite a while, I’ll think I’ve reached a resolution and stopped wishing for what never was. Then an article or book I read or an anecdote someone shares will bring negative feelings to the surface, and one or the other of my mothers will be on my sh– list for a while. Over the years, however, I am more often at peace with their legacies than not, and for this I am thankful.
It has been a complicated process, sorting through layers of feelings about my early years. Take my mother. I wrote a memoir, Reversible Skirt, about what it was like to grow up in the aftermath of her suicide, which cast a long shadow on my childhood even though (or maybe because) her life and death were swept swiftly under a rug by my father. My stepmother was a major part of the aftermath, as she took a wrecking ball to any part of me that didn’t conform to who she thought I should be. And one of the things I was never allowed to be was my own mother’s daughter.
I couldn’t really portray my mother in Reversible Skirt; I could only convey my sense of who she might have been and why she came to a tragic end. I could, however, portray my stepmother because I had many years of memories to plumb. My goal in the book wasn’t to honor either one of them, though, nor was it to condemn them. The goal was more to honor the resilience of my sisters and me for finding ways to not only cope but also provide for ourselves the love and support our mothers should have given us but never did.
For my sisters, I will forever be grateful; for my mothers, not so much. I know they, like most of us, had their good points. I also know I’ve learned something from all of my experiences, good and bad. And I do have compassion for both of my mothers, especially my stepmother because I know much of her story and why she was so broken.
But neither of them is truly dear to my heart. They are far removed from the Eleanor Roosevelt mold; their memory doesn’t uplift the spirit. They aren’t unsung heroines who rose to life’s greatest challenges and gave it their all. Instead, each in her own way, gave up on herself and her family when her mettle was tested. And my stepmother in particular did me great harm. So I can love them and forgive them, but as far as honoring their spirits goes, I believe I have better things to do with my time here on earth.
Laura McHale Holland’s memoir, Reversible Skirt, won a silver medal in the 2011 Readers Favorite book awards. Her stories and articles have appeared in such publications as Every Day Fiction Three, Wisdom Has a Voice, the Vintage Voices anthologies, NorthBay biz magazine, the Noe Valley Voice and the original San Francisco Examiner. She is a member of both Redwood Writers and the Storytelling Association of California. To keep up with her and purchase her book, please visit http://lauramchaleholland.com.
I appreciate Laura’s honesty about the difficulties of writing memoir that “honors” mothers who did great harm. I’ve got Reversible Skirt on my reading list.
For over a year I’ve been working on a memoir in my MFA program–a collection of topical essays around themes of family love and loss via generations of alcoholism, abuse/emotional neglect and mental illness. One essay grapples with my enmeshed and severed relationship with my own mother and the after-effects of distrust after her suicide attempt nine years ago. Another essay, somewhat fictionalized, peeks into her world as a pregnant 19 year-old creating a secret life with my father as they planned to give up my brother for adoption (and later took him back). Conveying that compassion (often found in how she miraculously survived her own origins) is as important to me as weighing it against my dismay. In some ways it’s easier to describe the loss of my brother, whom I was quite close to growing up and who is now so mired in alcohol and other disorders that he passes on similar pains we grew up with to his own boys whom I love as much.
It’s all tricky stuff to navigate–a tightrope walk between getting all the material down and shaping it for a compelling read. I agree with Lynn that by writing it down we come to a new understanding of ourselves, a fresh perspective (that, for me as the narrator, includes my own collusion and attempts at transformation).
I’m taking a break from it all this semester and will return to it come summer–revising more than 200 pages for my final thesis manuscript!
Thanks for posting this, Lynn. I think your clarification is most useful.
Nicole, I just read your comment. I agree it is quite a challenge to achieve the right balance when depicting loved ones who have treated us in harmful ways. I look forward to reading your collection one day because I believe I will gain insight from what you have to share about your journey.
Dear Nicole,
Appreciated your respone to Laura’s post. It sounds like it meshes well with your memoir work. And good luck with your thesis after the break! I think you’ll get a great deal out of reading Reversible Skirt – Laura is a powerful writer, to say the least.
You mention “collusion” in writing memoir. Collusion has been an issue that has been on the back of mind for some time. Thank you for bringing it to the forefront. I’ll get a blog post written about it soon. I’d love to hear your take on the topic (I’d quote you in the post, if you’d like that – and it will probably get me moving!).
Keeping Spiritis Alive,
Lynn
You’re welcome, Laura. Your journey is an important one, and one that strikes a chord with many people who, after reading Reversible Skirt, will appreciate your honestly and willingness to connect on an intimate level. I applaud your ability to articulate, with grace, the personal feelings on suicide, abandonment, and abuse that you’ve grappled with most of your life.
Terrific posts, Lynn and Laura!
I appreciate the clarity and honesty that you both bring to the complex relationship between mother and daughter, particularly when one’s mother is less than ideal, not nurturing, or even so abusive as to be soul damaging.
I first want to say how much I appreciate Laura McHale Holland as a contributing author to the anthology I edited about Mother memoirs: Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother. With the courage to tell her story and considerable skills as a writer, Laura depicted her profound sense of mother loss in her piece, “Little Traveler.”
Secondly, I am increasing aware that the way out for me in remembering my own mother, one who was cruel and even life threatening to all three of her children, is to see her as separate individaul. As I write about her in memoir, I have come to accept her lineage and legacy, her actions as logical extensions of unconscious generational behavior. And in the bigger society picture, I see how trapped she was, how angry, how resentful of me.
For our generation, it is now possible to let go of the “wounded mother” who raised us. By telling and witnessing our mother memoirs we can find freedom from mother hunger. We have the tools that they did not have to understand and to break the cycle of pain.
I agree with you, Kate, that we do have tools we can, and have, used to break the cycle of pain that for some families has gone on for generations. And that is a real blessing. I can’t really speak to the kinds of tools my mother and stepmother might or might not have had at their disposal. I think when it comes to abusing your children there is an element of choice involved, and I don’t attribute someone making bad choices entirely to a lack of resource, tools or support. Lots of women have felt very trapped in past generations and yet managed to convey a deep love to their children. What makes some able to do this and others not is a mystery.
Dear Kate,
Thanks so much for stopping by and giving us your thoughtful comments on how you gained understanding and freedom through writing Mother Memoir. Your insight into seeing your mother as the “wounded mother” will be helpful to other women who have had similar negative experiences with their mothers. I recommend your anthology, Wisdom Has a Voice — so many voices with so much to share!
That note of “mystery” you ended with is exactly why we need to continue exploring, writing, sharing, and helping others to do the same…
The work both you and Kate are doing in this regard is worthwhile. I appreciate both of you for encouraging me to be part of the process.
I think for me what I’m grapplng with right now is anger. Except for when I was very small and fought with my sisters (three tiny, biting, kicking, screaming baby girls) anger just hasn’t been in my emotional repertoire. My father and stepmother were allowed to express anger, but my sisters and I weren’t even supposed to express displeasure. When things have gone wrong in my life, I’ve blamed myself and felt shame. When people have apologized to me for things they feel they’ve done that have harmed me I’ve said things like, “Oh, it’s okay,” and moved away from the discussion without even considering whether I may have actually deserved an apology. I feel like I never do deserve an apology from anyone for anything. And I know this stems from a combination of how I was raised and my own unique inclinations (my sisters, for example, knew they were angry with our stepmother and let her know it many times as things arose, even though this sort of expression was not permitted. I never once got openly angry with her. I judged her and made fun of her behind her back when I was a teenager, but those are different aspects of the emotional spectrum). Lately, I’ve been noticing the edges of anger here and there, anger that is not directed at me for a change, and I believe this is healthy, but it’s also very new and strange to me.
Laura,
Anger is a BIG one that has huge mysterious overtones when writing memoir (or just living life). When we have anger for being treated unjustly, especially by people in our immediate families, and were never allowed to express it, I believe it eats away at the psyche until we find an avenue to let it out. It sounds like, through your work, you are learning to redirect it and beginning to look at things from a new perspective.
Thought you might find a connection with Marie, a TellTale Soul, who wrote her Mother Memoir for my collection, through her words, “Telling this story was a good experience for me, and I’ve since done much soul searching and writing, exploring the negative experiences in the relationship between my mother and myself. I now realize that the pain around my relationship with her is gone. What I’m left with today is called health!”
Lynn, It sounds like it was a very good process for Marie. I believe the memoir journey is rarely easy, but it’s always worth the effort.
Hi Laura,
Just have a minute to respond to your thoughtful comments (and they deserve more). I did share a similar repression of anger for most of my life as did my older brother. We could not risk showing anger as abused children. It was not until I was able to express my own true anger that I could begin to finally heal and fully embrace that child self who survived. My older brother still is repressed; my younger brother was abusive and angry, was beginning to heal at age 62 when he suddenly died.
I’m wondering right now how to incorporate anger into mother memoir in an appropriate way. Thanks, Laura, for giving voice to that justified anger. BTW, I’m still angry at my mother at some primal level.
Thank YOU, Lynn, for supporting this discussion and so many more about mother memoir.