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

So far so good! Very interesting

“I was used to being spoken to like an adult. I hated it when other grown-ups treated me like a child.”

“your mother never knew when to let things go. You said she never hit you, but you wished she had—because you would have preferred a slap to the nagging.”

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

newest iwl book club pick

The last essay is ridiculously and disproportionately long as much so that it makes me wonder what the author did to bribe the editor.

Two chapters in and I’m already going, “Why did you marry this man?” If a man treated me the way these men treated their wives and kids, I’d be SMILING in the mugshot.

“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.”

“The closer the mother and the daughter are, they say, the more violent the daughter’s work to free herself.”

“it also frustrated me, the constant claims on her time. I’d think, ‘What about me?’ Though sometimes I also thought, ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to hang out with me.’ After all, I can be intense, talky, opinionated”

“‘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.”

“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.
What I want to say: I need you to believe me. I need you to listen. I need you.
What I say: nothing.”

“I can play with existing and not existing inside my bedroom; my room is a place to be myself and not myself.”

“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.
My mother is hard to know. Or rather, I know her and don’t know her at the same time.”

“It felt like the whole world was burning. It felt like I had set fire to my own life. To live with the pain of my strained relationship with my mother is one thing. To immortalize it in words is a whole other level. There’s something deeply lonely about confessing your truth.”

So far the best stories are Are You Listening?, Mother Tongue, and Thesmophoria

Not enjoying 😐

Not sure how I’m feeling about this book

This ended up hitting hard, this is going to be a longer read than normal for me because some of these essays are deeply vulnerable and sad

audiobook!

con mi mamá no hablamos de la vez que me dijo que yo no sabía amar 💀

ALMOST THERE!!

Brother can I spare some change?

105

There’s a lot to unpack. It’s not bad. It’s just not what I expected. Given that information, I am pleasantly surprised with the turnout.

Loving it so far!! FIFTEEN is one of my faves.

every essay so far has been a banger

man this book makes me depressed

sad and really relatable

just finished Her Body / My Body oh my glob im near tears