Four Local Women Reflect on Their Relationships with Their Mothers

In an interview with the authors of Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance with Our Mothers, four women explore their relationships with their mothers, their relationships with their own children, and the lessons they learned.

A memoir is not a factual recitation of history, though history is part of the story. It’s a recollection, a musing and merging of images, dreams, reflections of moments in your life’s journey,” says Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., author of The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story. In the collective memoir Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance with Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing; $15), four local writers explore their memories of their mothers—and in a group interview just prior to the book’s March release, it is clear that the act of putting pen to paper helped them remember details. Perhaps more importantly, it also helped the authors come to terms with the relationships they have had with their parents.

The perspective afforded by time, the contrast derived from filtering memories through a new lens (each woman is a parent herself now), and the community of sharing their perceptions during regular memoir-focused get-togethers, has resulted in a series of introspective and revealing vignettes that readers will find both familiar and fresh. Each author—Vicki Addesso, Susan Hodara, Joan Potter, Lori Toppel—shares unique experiences, but they all converge to reveal something of the universal about parenthood.

Of Intentions and Secrets

Susan, you describe moments when your mother was silent at a time you were craving a response. Did you come to understand that your mom’s silences meant something different to her than they did to you?

Susan: My mother and I have talked about her silences, and I know she regrets a period of passiveness as a mother…. When I was younger I felt her silences as neglect or passivity, but now I see them differently. I see now that her evenness, her lack of judgment, and her acceptance of some of the more demanding emotions I laid on her, gave me a sense of self and the freedom to develop a self-sufficiency that I might not have developed so soon, had she been more nurturing. In fact, I hope my own daughters have a similarly strong sense of self despite my very deliberate attention to them.

Did any of you have similar moments—realizing that something your mother did which hurt you was really the result of good intentions you couldn’t understand at the time?

Vicki: When I think back on some of the incidents I wrote about in the book, one of the ones that comes back to me is the slap in the face [in the story “Outside of Her”]. It’s after I was in the hospital and I came home and I threw up on the floor again. At the time I thought she was just angry with me, and I thought she was being mean—but at some point as I was growing up…I realized she did it for other reasons. First, I do believe she was just simply exhausted and frustrated after my illness, but I believe she also did it to shock me out of my fear. She knew I was nervous about eating, about going back to school, and about having to be away from her after all the time we spent together, her caring for me. I’m not saying I agree with slapping children in the face—what I’m saying is that I understand my mother’s intentions, and that has made the memory of that moment soften. I don’t see it as so mean, any longer.

Lori: When I think about my teenage years with my mother, she was extremely angry and her rage against my father was a big presence in our house. Now, I realize that she was protecting us from trusting him completely, as she didn’t trust him. She was very frightened he wouldn’t act in our best interest. In fact, she must’ve harbored so much pain over losing him—and felt that he was personally attacking her in the divorce courts—that she redirected her anger at us. Maybe thinking in some way that that would be a shield so we would not see her despair and her fear. Now that I know, as an adult, how difficult and painful divorces can be (and theirs was eight years long), I wonder if there might have been a way to sympathize with her fears and frustrations, with the lawyers and all the money spent. If she had expressed herself with sadness, maybe my sister and I would have moved towards her, rather than against her.

Susan, you write of your mother: “She was not only protecting my father, she was shielding her children. Only now do I recognize how alone that left her.” Was the revelation that your mother shouldered a great weight to protect you a new one during your writing?

Susan: I didn’t take the time to consider this idea until I started writing about my mother. Fleshing out the circumstances and the consequences brought the weight my mother shouldered into focus. In fact, I remember writing that sentence that you quote, and that realization came hand in hand with finding those words. That was happening at the same time that my mother was caring for my father, who was declining into Alzheimer’s. In this role, her strength of character became more evident and I saw the burden that it had been for her to stand between her husband and her children.

Were there similar things that were complete revelations to each of you as you were writing about your mother?

Joan: Growing up, there were many secrets in my mother’s life that she sometimes alluded to but never explained. I was able to uncover many of them [when, after my mother died,] I listened to a tape she’d made. I knew her father had died when she was young and had heard rumors that he had killed himself, but I didn’t know the whole story until I heard the tape. I also didn’t know that my father had run off with another woman soon after their marriage, and that she’d taken him back. So many of these secrets that had been lingering beneath the surface, that I had suspected, came to light as I worked on the memoir.

Vicki: As we were sharing our stories in the writing group, it became a gateway to the revelation that a good and loving mother can come with many and varied blemishes. I’d always felt that a family only reveals the perfect aspects about their members and hides the faults. In my home there were many secrets, things that were simply ignored or never spoken about. Those were the things that I assumed never happened in other families. It gave me a sense that somehow my family was defective but, as Joan, Susan, Lori, and I wrote about our relationships with our mothers, and by extension the dynamics of each of our families, I realized how that secretiveness existed in all families. And I saw how isolating and harmful it could be. For me to be able to tell the story of my mother and myself, for it to be valid and real, it had to be open and true. I learned to let go of shame and see the bigger picture of why some things were not always perfect, and to know that it was okay.