Status Updates From What My Mother and I Don't ...

Currently, i think i like the book. I've related to 1-2 essays so far. It reminds me that every woman has a different relationship with their mother.

everyone move this to the top of your tbr. if you have a mother, if you don’t, if you love yours, if you don’t, or if it’s complicated. i need you to read this. the first story made me ache, the second made it worse, and the third made me cry along to a metaphorical comparison of demeter and persephone.

“here is everything that keeps us from talking. here is my heart. i wrote this for you.”

I was not anticipating the number of stories of abuse and violence throughout these stories. Otherwise I would not have picked this up

“Storytelling is a fight against forgetting, against loss and even mortality. Every time a story is told about someone who’s dead, it’s a resurrection. Every time a story is told about the past, we’re doubly alive.”

You can’t be wholly yourself there. You have to hollow yourself out, like a husk.
In high school, I’m the opposite. I’m too much myself, because the too muchness is a way of saying, I’m still here. The me of me, and not the me he wants me to be.

“Later, she finds me curled up in the fetal position in my room. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He was only joking.”

🤬 🤬 🤬 🤬

“I shrink inside of myself, stacking sadness on top of anxiety on top of daydreaming.”

If they weren’t willing to save their own lives, I wasn’t going to drown with them.

this book is even better than i remember

I think ultimately other people aren’t real to us until they are suffering or gone.

Hands speak more intimately than words.

“She is the perfect example of how i dont want to live a life” 💀

started reading on jul 29, 2022

So I had hidden myself inside a lesser disaster to survive this one.

You can’t crawl up to your mother from hell and not look like it.

I love you past the sun, the moon, and the stars she’d always say to me when I was little. But I just want her to love me here, now, on Earth.

Silence is what fills the gap between my mother and me. All of the things we haven’t said to each other, because it’s too painful to articulate.

I’ve spent enough time in Catholic churches to know what it means to sweep things under the rug.

His hands are worms, my body dirt.

oh carmen🥲

from one mommy issues book to the next

Xanadu by Alexander Choi so far is my favorite story. How he describes his hardships and how he felt we’re just… idk it just made me better understand the pain although I never will. “No one could believe so many bad things happened to one person” that so not true you never know what people have lived through

Done with 2 essays and I need a break lol

Naomi Munaweera

Six out of seven chapters are narrated by Female authors. Lots to unpack!

i like how they’re all not sad. different family dynamics for each essay

10 pages in and i’ve already cried. this shit is heavy

"I love you past the sun and the moon and the stars," she'd always say to me when I was little. But I just want her to love me here. Now. On Earth.

This quote 😫

Introduction already gave my chills.