Your idea of women who look toward their daughters to take care of them – and whose expectations are understandably unmet – is fascinating. Is it common for women to feel this way about their daughters? What effect can these kinds of expectations have on the emotional development of the child?
Originally, I was going to write at length about this type of maternal expectation, which I think may be hidden in many women's wish to have a child, and particularly, of course, a girl child. So many of us have not been mothered properly; it seems only natural that a part of our fantasy about having a daughter would contain the wish to receive from her the mothering we've always lacked. This is not surprising and need not be disturbing if the woman is aware of her wish. There's so much reciprocity in the mother-daughter bond that, in fact, many needs for physical closeness and tenderness and mutual regard are naturally met for the mother by the daughter. The problems arise when the mother is unaware of needing the daughter to be her mother and wants her to have no other role, a situation that is likely to turn the little girl into a premature little mother, sacrificing her own needs for nurturing and dependence in order to meet those of her mother. Daughters of this type are often very responsible, hard-working, highly accomplished, as well as being loyal and devoted friends and partners. They are frequently the world's earth mothers and caretakers, with a strong sense of social responsibility and a concern for those less advantaged than themselves. But they may also often experience a profound sense of inner emptiness, a hidden sorrow, that bears testament to the fact that their own needs were not met when they were children.
Obviously, finding a good therapist is an ideal step in helping a woman work through her mother story. For those who are not able to find or afford therapy, how would you recommend they best carry out their storytelling?
The wonderful thing about storytelling is that it requires only a good listener. Even a shy or awkward storyteller will become good enough over time if listened to properly. Therapists are trained listeners, but not necessarily good listeners, because of a tendency to give the story a shape that matches their theoretical orientation and training. If women take seriously the quest for the right listener who may be a friend or a member of the family, an aunt, an older sibling, a neighbor, they are likely to find or create the right circumstance for the telling of the mother story. I've recently been told of women who have formed circles to meet and do this regularly, taking turns telling and listening to the mother stories. I know of some friends who have devoted one day a week to walk in the woods for the purpose of telling stories about their mothers. And of course there is the journal, a woman's truest and steadfast patient listener – always there, never too busy, willing to devote its entire attention to whatever she has to say. It is possible to keep many kinds of journals simultaneously, so I love to imagine the ones devoted entirely to mother stories, carried around in the woman's purse, in her backpack, in her back pocket, increasingly worn and rough at the edges, with bits of paper on which notes have been scribbled, or entries originally scrawled on napkins stuffed between the pages; this journal is a listener who always perfectly matches the teller and, of course, grows more insightful, more accomplished as a listener as the teller unfolds her tales. The stories are always there. The task is to take them seriously, to devote great attention to them, precisely because one understands their transformative potential.
For the book's epigraph you chose a quote from Jung about mothers and daughters. What makes this relationship so distinct and special? How do men's mother stories differ from those of women? What do you think men can get out of your book?
For both boys and girls it is, of course, the relationship in which life begins. But what does this really mean? To begin with, it means that all the first experiences of what life means come through the mother and her body. It is obviously the most intimate of relationships, the most continual, involving constant interaction through the day and the night, as the infant's needs are met. Through the mother we learn about hunger and cold and fear and comfort and soothing and missing and needing and getting; we learn about closeness and how to tolerate it, about distance and how to endure it. The relationship continues to be important for girls simply because they are not instructed to renounce it, turn away from it, in order to become members of another gender, which is of course what typically happens for boys. Boys, you might say, are in a constant struggle from a young age as they are socialized to diminish the importance of their bond with their mother so that they can take on characteristic aspects of male identity: independence, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, control and mastery over their physical and emotional needs. Girls are not censored in this way, and their stories reflect this. Men more often, in my experience, tell stories about their fathers; when they talk about their mothers, the stories frequently emphasize moments of rebellion and separation. On the other hand, men have been fascinated by this book because (as I found out during readings) many men are deeply puzzled by their wife's or sister's relationship to her mother. They can't figure out why it's so important, why it takes up so much time, why the daughter's so concerned with it. Sometimes they are jealous of the bond; sometimes just baffled by it. Many seem very eager to understand it better, and certainly a book of this kind will help them with that.
You've done extensive work in the field of women's obsessions with weight and self-image. How have these studies aided or led you to pursue the subject of women's experiences with their mothers?
Women's obsessions with weight and self-image are always, in every instance, a coded form of mother story. During the many years I was studying eating disorders I discovered that a principal theme hidden within the symptoms and obsessions was the daughter's relationship to her mother. The eating disorder gave us invaluable information about how she was nurtured as a child, how her needs were regarded, whether she was taught to gratify or control them, whether they were recognized and correctly named, whether needing was something to be accepted as an inevitable part of the human condition, or was rather a shameful confession of inadequacy. These attitudes reflect the history of the early relationship to the mother, which the daughter is trying to work out in her relationship to food. Why food? Why eating? Well, there was, of course, a time, a prolonged period from the moment of birth, when the mother and food were simply indistinguishable – a time when one's most consistent relationship to the mother involved eating, often from her breast or against her breast or in her arms. It makes sense that a daughter's relationship to eating and food will continue to carry the dramas and urgencies, the soothing and frustrations of the first bond. I honestly believe that you could set up a profound meditation practice entirely around the way you hunger and feed yourself, the attitude you have toward yourself as a hungering person, the feelings you have when you are eating. In those attitudes, through those very feelings, one could discover the entire early history of a daughter's relationship to her mother.
You are also a fiction writer. How did creating these stories differ from writing fiction? How do these two disciplines complement each other in your life?
I sometimes find myself thinking that there is no such thing as fiction, and sometimes I find myself thinking that there is no such thing as fact. Stories are stories, they all have some basis in truth and reality, and all of them undergo a process of change as they are being composed. There is no "true" story and there is also no "false" story. The point of a story, whether it calls itself factual or fictional, is to render emotional truths, truths of human life, realities of human existence, depths and complexities not easily glimpsed on the surface of life yet there if one learns how to look for them. A story is a way of looking for what's there beyond the obvious. So to me there is almost no difference between writing fiction and writing clinically based stories about women's lives. This was an exciting discovery for me as a writer, when I realized that to tell a clinical tale I had to disguise the person whose story this was. Once disguised, of course, they no longer were the same person but something new and created by me to carry that original person's story. The story too had to change in its detail while sticking as close as possible to the core of emotional truth. I learned to create stories that even the original client could not recognize as her own, although inevitably, having read one of them, she identified with the story and its character and thought she had found a person "just like her," without ever thinking that she had actually found herself. What matters is the intention to tell the truth. In the face of that intention, the question of fact or fiction simply falls away.
When does a woman know she has succeeded in "giving birth to her mother"? Is the process of telling these stories ever really over?
Every profound psychological event gets repeated. There are no "one time only" happenings in the psyche. The energy of change moves in a spiral, which means that along with progress (moving up, moving down) there is also repetition (the same number of steps that complete the turn of the spiral). The process of telling stories is never over, or at least not until life itself is over (if then). Nevertheless, "giving birth to the mother" is a distinct moment in the cycle of change, and each time it occurs one can recognize it by certain characteristic shifts in attitude. Above all, there is a wonderful feeling of liberation, as if one has just been pushed forward out of the past. All the conflicts and turmoil and resentments and bitterness and frustrated longings seem not to have vanished, but to have eased in some way, not to matter quite so urgently. Sometimes, along with this, there are moments of radically changed perception. Suddenly one sees the mother as herself, a woman in her own life, struggling with her own issues, a contemporary living here in the present, aging, sometimes dying. She has, for the first time perhaps, become a woman and is no longer only the mother. Oddly enough, although the "giving birth" experience happens again and again, it is frequently accompanied by a sense of newness, as if one were seeing the mother as a woman "for the first time," even though one remembers distinctly having seen her like this before. Since we are marking steps in a continuing cycle, it makes sense that this moment of "giving birth" does not last; we pass through it, discover new stories and meanings; new details arise and ask for our comprehension; we go on telling old stories and through them reach again that extraordinary moment of giving birth to the mother, in which, once again, we see our relationships to ourselves and to the mother dramatically changed.
- In each of the stories, Chernin presents a scenario in which a woman comes to terms with her relationship with her mother, a process Chernin identifies as "giving birth to one's mother." Why is this a fitting term? What sorts of ideas and images does it evoke?
- Each of these stories offers a different interpretation of the idea of giving birth to one's mother. How would you apply this term to your own experiences? What does it mean to each of you individually?
- Chernin identifies women's experiences resolving their mother issues as a series of seven stages: idealization, revision, blaming, forgiving, identification, letting go and giving birth. Discuss individually which stage best describes your present state and why.
- How do you think it is possible to move from one stage to another? What sorts of revelatory experiences or emotions can trigger this movement?
- Which stories did you find particularly meaningful? Discuss why.
- Not everyone experiences their relationship with their mother as a troubling one, but, as Chernin points out, each of us has a mother story. If you were to contribute a story to this book, what would it be?
- How do you think women who have experienced motherhood might reconcile their mother issues differently from women who have never been mothers?
- How does the story about the wedding differ from the other stories in the book? Why do you think Chernin positioned it after the series of seven stories but before her own? Given Chernin's own experiences as a mother and as a daughter, what do you think might have motivated her to write this book?
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Penguin Young Readers Group
