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

“I was afraid that if I called her, she would talk and it would be too hard for me to love her after that.”

“Look, as a kid, I knew that what I was experiencing day in and day out wasn’t the whole truth. All kids sense this. I was being protected from something. My mother let me glimpse behind that insulation. It was a comfort to have someone acknowledge that the rosy childhood that our culture clings to isn’t real. She showed me that life is complex and rich— dark, yes, but also stunningly beautiful.”

“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.”

“My mother could sense a depth within him, a longing. ‘I imagine all the things that he could have done if his life had allowed it,’ she said.

My mother’s side of the family seemed to believe that stories could save us. They were cautionary tales, medical wisdom, and lessons in love and loss.”

This one is gonna hurt

Relationships with moms are so layered and complicated.

“It’s not that Persephone ever gets to come home. She is already home. The story is used to explain the cycle of seasons, of life. Her time spent in the dark is not an aberration of nature, but its enactment.”

“It used to scare me that I wanted things my mother wouldn’t understand. I think we both feared our difference.”

“I pulled the front door shut behind me and something tore inside, like a cloth that still hasn’t mended… I imagine that this is the way a man feels leaving his family for his mistress. I did feel part father, part husband. Maybe every daughter does. Or just the ones whose fathers have gone.”

“Imagine Persephone loving him. Is it so impossible? We often love the things that abduct us. We often fear the ones we love.”

“A daughter is wedded to her mother first.”

Febos understands her relationship with her mother through two analogies— the first is the story of Demeter and Persephone. The second is the comparison of her withdrawal from her mother at twelve years old to that of a failing romantic relationship. She describes the torture that must have been to her mother, as she [Febos], in her pain and anger, rejected tenderness yet still depended on her mother.

“The attachment styles that define our adult relationships are determined in that first relationship, aren’t they? I have felt more than a few times the shock of losing access to a lover; it doesn’t matter who leaves. It feels like a crime against nature… It must have been how Demeter felt as she watched Persephone be carried away in that black chariot, the earth broken open to swallow her.”

“The psychologists have a lot of explanations for this. The philosophers, too. I have read about separation and differentiation and individuation. It is a most ordinary disruption, they tell us, necessarily painful. Especially for mothers and daughters. The closer the mother and daughter are, they say, the more violent the daughter’s work to free herself.”

“It is so painful to be loved sometimes. Intolerable, even.”

“I don’t know how it feels to create a body with your own. Maybe I never will. I remember, though, how it felt to be a daughter of a daughter, the distance between our bodies first none, then some.”

“The dread I felt did not rise from my thoughts but from my gut, from some corporeal logic that had kept meticulous track of every mistake before this one. That believed there was a finite number of times one could break someone’s heart before it hardened to you.”

“What were her dreams— or did she not have any, beyond the comfortable, practical, admirable life she was living?”

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them. To know what it was like to have one place where we belonged. Where we fit.”

“Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to give this book to my mother. To present it to her as a precious ft bed a meal that I’ve cooked for her. To say: Here is everything that keeps us from really talking. Here is my heart. Here are my words. I wrote this for you.”

“My hope for this book is that it will serve as a beacon for anyone who has ever felt incapable of speaking their truth of t their mother’s truth. The more we face what we can’t or won’t or don’t know, the more we understand one another.”

“Kiese Laymon tells his mother why he wrote his memoir for her: ‘I know, after finishing this project, the problem with this country is not that we fail to ‘get along’ with people, parties, and politics with which we disagree. The problem is that we are horrific at justly loving the people, places and politics we purport to love. I wrote ‘Heavy’ to you because I wanted us to get better at love.’”

“Leslie Jamison writes: ‘To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is.’”

“Mothers are idealized as protectors: a person who is caring and giving and who builds a person up rather than knocking them down. But very few of us can say out mothers check all of these boxes. In many ways, a mother is set up to fail.”

“There’s something deeply lonely about confessing your truth.” — Michele Filgate

“Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels…” — Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway”

First essay slayed, second was good too, very exited for the rest

Found the book I will keep going back to. Found my writing style too.

I wanna finish this so bad but my sister and I have the worst schedules and can’t get together at the same time often enough lol

every where i turn i’m just being emotionally destroyed