Our Mothers

We turned twenty-two and grew critical of our mothers. Before that, as teenagers, we were often angry, but less critical. Those of us who were allowed to yell, yelled. Those who weren’t allowed silently seethed, or wrote poetry, or called friends on the phone. 

Now, as adults, we became analytical. We thought about our mothers’ choices. Who they married, and why. What kind of wives they were. And what kind of mothers—forget it. We had higher degrees in our mothers’ mothering. 

We mostly lived in cities—big and small—and we became busy with our own lives, or tried to be busy (sometimes we were busier worrying about our lives than living them, but in our twenties it was hard to tell the difference). Meanwhile, our mothers called us on the phone. They wanted to get dinner. If not dinner, then lunch, breakfast, even coffee. Even just a coffee our mothers wanted! Some mothers offered vacations, or shopping sprees. Some mothers wanted to spend time with us, but wouldn’t offer, and went about it with another tack: guilt. You never visit me, these mothers said. You don’t even care. After all I’ve—

We daughters finished that sentence, a refrain some of us had heard all our lives. After all I’ve done for you! we shouted. We shouted about our mothers everywhere: in our cubicles at our office jobs, in dimly lit wine bars, on the deep sofas in our apartments which we shared with three other girls. We shouted in swimsuits, tanning on the beach, or on the subway, muffled in scarves. We shouted in the grocery store, in our therapist’s office, into microphones at open mics. We loved to complain about our mothers, though we often lied, and said we hated to complain, but we had to—we had to. 

It could become a kind of competition: whose mother did what. Or didn’t do. Those were the worst mothers, or rather; the mothers that stumped the rest of us: Mothers who didn’t even try. Trying was something. Wasn’t it? 

Also, in our twenties, we began to make our own strange choices. We injured people who loved us in ways that kept us up at night, made it difficult to fall asleep, our pulses oceanic in our ears. We let people hold us when we didn’t want to be held. We let people fuck us when we didn’t want to be fucked. We fucked someone while picturing they were someone else. We’d said things that were untrue, or worse, were very true and therefore cruel. It was easy to blame our mothers for this. They’d shown us how to make mistakes. And we studied those mistakes. Oh god, did we study. 

Our twenties flew by. We climbed corporate ladders, made art that thrilled and embarrassed, fell in love, moved, fell out of love, moved, fell in love again. Of course, for some of us it was harder. Wires got crossed. Some of us had trouble falling in love, or trouble getting jobs. (Was it our mothers’ fault?) Still, we turned twenty-five. People disappointed us and then we forgave them. People forgave us. Some people didn’t forgive us, and there was nothing we could do. We turned thirty. We were still worried. Then we turned thirty-five. We worried we were in the wrong place—geographically, existentially. We needed a baby, or a better career, or someone different to hold us at night. 

We neared forty and tried to explain our lives to other people. Some of us would have to explain our lives to our daughters. Some of us already had to. We worried about our daughters growing critical of us. If only those daughters knew, we thought. If only they’d seen what we’d seen, lived what we lived. So we called our mothers. Maybe they could tell us something. At the very least, we could take them out for coffee.