Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [52]
In junior high I grew irritated with her. She had a big stomach, thin hair and wasn’t as pretty as my friends’ mothers. I wanted her to stay home, bake tuna fish casseroles and teach me to sew. I wanted the phone to stop ringing for her.
For a high school graduation gift, she took me to San Francisco. We went to a coffeehouse in North Beach where beat poets read. I was sure that everyone was staring at my mother, and even though I liked the poetry, I insisted we leave early.
As an adult, I traveled with my family to her house for holiday dinners. She fixed my favorite foods—crab cocktails, vegetable soup and pecan pie. She gave my children too many sweets and presents. At midnight when I tried to go to bed, she offered to fry me a steak, go for a walk, anything to keep me talking for another hour. When it was time to go, she walked me to the car and held on to the door handle. “When are you coming back?” she asked.
The last month of her life, I sat by her in the hospital. She liked me to read and tell her stories. I brushed her hair and her teeth for her and fed her grapes one at a time. One night when she was out of her head from all the medicines, she imagined she was fixing spaghetti for twelve. “Hand me those tomatoes. Chop that onion quick. They’ll be here soon.” Another night she was delivering babies. “Push, push now,” she said. “Wrap that baby up.” When I slept beside her, she could sleep.
My relationship with my mother, like all relationships with mothers, was extraordinarily complex, filled with love, longing, a need for closeness and distance, separation and fusion. I respected her and mocked her, felt ashamed and proud of her, laughed with her and felt irritated by her smallest flaws. I felt crabby after twenty-four hours in her house, and yet nothing made me happier than making her happy.
Western civilization has a history of unrealistic expectations about mothers. They are held responsible for their children’s happiness and for the social and emotional well-being of their families. Mothers are either idealized like the Virgin Mary or bashed in fairy tales and modern American novels. We all think of our mothers with what Freud called primary process thought, the thinking style of young children. We have trouble growing up enough to see our mothers as people.
Western civilization has a double standard about parenting. Relationships with fathers are portrayed as productive and growth-oriented, while relationships with mothers are depicted as regressive and dependent. Fathers are praised for their involvement with children. Mothers, on the other hand, are criticized unless their involvement is precisely the right amount. Distant mothers are scorned, but mothers who are too close are accused of smothering and overprotecting.
Nowhere are the messages to mothers so contradictory as with their adolescent daughters. Mothers are expected to protect their daughters from the culture even as they help them fit into it. They are to encourage their daughters to grow into adults and yet to keep them from being hurt. They are to be devoted to their daughters and yet encourage them to leave. Mothers are asked to love completely and yet know exactly when to distance emotionally and physically.
Daughters are as confused as mothers by our culture’s expectations. Girls are encouraged to separate from their mothers and to devalue their relationships to them. They are expected to respect their mothers but not to be like them. In our culture, loving one’s mother is linked with dependency, passivity and regression, while rejecting one’s mother implies individuation, activity