Mother as Perfect, Mother as Prodigal

Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature. ~ Marguerite Duras

and flowers, as enormous

as they are to children, gazed back

~ Rainier Maria Rilke

Existential fuckery: the pull of all the if-onlys. What is this death urge that whispers, trying to kill me and my passion? I am a tender one who finds it hard to write while other people’s stories shape me into something else—cast me as a demon or an angel, but never wholly myself.

And I wanted things women weren’t supposed to want. ~ Amanda Montei

My legacy is carried in the bodies of two daughters. As a teenage solo mama, I practiced alchemy, trying to sort the lead out and leave the gold. Tried to melt the dross, a supernova, and turn the molten weight of ancestry into an elixir of love.

They have their own stories.

Let’s imagine. Children of a wild girl. Water sprites above the river currents surging with generations. Sins of the fathers unto the third, and to the fourth. Their fathers absent.

Overheard:

Your daughter will live the life that you give your wife.

When I was thirty and my daughters were thirteen and eleven, I began the long journey of reinventing myself into someone sober. One morning at dawn, as we all slept—my daughters in their beds and I in mine—I left my body.

I found myself floating down the long hallway between our rooms, hovering above their beds.

Then, a vision split me in three. I was no longer myself but my daughters, walking through our neighborhood streets with their bodies and seeing the world through their eyes. My consciousness inhabited theirs, leaving my form behind, supine and sweating beneath tangled sheets.

Through their vision, the familiar street transformed. The old neighborhood homes, built in the fifties, grew grander, and the towering elms and ash trees stretched higher than any childhood memory might conjure. The ground felt closer, my perspective recalibrated to their smaller, limber bodies—vital, electric, and alive.

I wasn’t merely observing them; I was them. I moved through their essence, their thoughts, and their feelings. The world loomed vast above me, a kaleidoscope of color and texture unfurling from their vantage point. Leaves scattered across the street—golden, maple, falling. The air touched their skin, luminescent, verdant.

For a fleeting moment, I understood what it was to be them: to be small, to look up at a world so immense, and to feel the endless possibility and wonder it held.

They have their own stories, my children.

The landing back in my body and bed was a soft one. I floated back in; something effervescent and soothing permeated my skin, lingering like a rainbow’s end. The sun’s light leaked in through the window’s glazed panes. It was early, and the magic of experiencing my daughters’ singular beings held me, reverent, for hours. I rested in the recognition of my daughters’ own separate persons, absolute difference. Unnoticed tears on the damp sheet.

What was not me. What was other.

What is love.

There are glimpses.

Before becoming, what life did you live? There’s a second birth for many. Mine came with recovery. Sober, a new world opened.

Playing catch-up, growing alongside my children, I could never get out in front. In hindsight, I see my failures—the myths of perfection linger, haunting. Madonna or Magdalene. So far from the ideal, so far from the myth. Few mothers reach it.

“He saw the girls, their faces pale and drawn, working in the laundry, the so-called 'fallen women' of the Magdalene asylum, and it cut him to the core.”

~ Clare Keegan Small Things Like These

Being a mom on any terms comes with a story centuries old.

What do we do with that?

As moms. As daughters.

What if we broke that story and told our own?

What if we shattered the archetype?

What if we untethered from it and gave each other permission to be?

What myth of motherhood do you live by? By what measure?

What story do you carry?

Daughters become mothers too. They will try to outdo you. My mother turned to religion to save us from her mother’s alcoholism. I turned to twelve-steps and psychology to save my daughters. Neither of us realized we were trying to save ourselves.

Children belong to their own world.

I caught a glimpse of my girls’ worlds. I wanted to give it all to them. The whole world of themselves.

A new world.

38 years of recovery later, packing memory into boxes, I find no rain like a daughter’s pain, no healing her absence. The boxes stacked against the wall. Without her, there’s no home.

I had a dream she shared her pain and let me hold her.

I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. ~ Ada Limon

I had so much more to learn in those years. I was sober, but I had barely discovered myself.

They’re grown now.

And I’m still learning.

Sometimes, as I learned in my relationship with my own mother, we have to drop the story, release the myth to find our mothers. To see the woman. To be the woman.

Sometimes, that’s how we find ourselves. Sometimes, it’s the bridge to each other.

Sometimes, we wait. For her to find us.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met. ~Marguerite Duras

My maternal grandmother, Madolyn, was an alcoholic, a secret so well-kept by my mother that I might never have known were it not for my DNA or the way my mother sometimes said, “You’re just like my mother.” I had not known my grandmother. She died when I was five. I wondered what that meant, that I was like her.

There was something in my mother’s voice that indicated to be like her mother made me special. A sort of pride, almost. A hint of shadow.

“You’re not domestic,” my mother would say, grabbing the dust cloth or broom from my hands. “Just like my mother.” She’d push me away from the sink where I might be washing dishes and mutter, “Go on. I’ll do it myself.”

I’m not, it turns out, domestic.

Madolyn was a musician who once sang backup for Peggy Lee at the Powers Hotel in Fargo, North Dakota. She played piano, wrote songs, and worked at a nightclub beginning in the 1930s —the same decade Alcoholics Anonymous was founded. Women in AA were rare in those days, and I wonder if Madolyn ever dreamed of a different path.

After I got sober, I started seeing her—out of the corner of my eye, always just out of reach. In the supermarket, pushing a cart. Or as a tiny, shrunken old woman behind the wheel of a car that dwarfed her. She was everywhere and nowhere, haunting me in flashes — the sightings assured me she approved of my recovery.

My mother held onto the story that my grandmother’s debilitating migraines required my great-grandmother to live with them. It wasn’t until her sixties, as she sat at her sister’s deathbed, that my mother realized those “migraines” were likely hangovers. Her older brother confirmed it: Madolyn had been an alcoholic. She always carried a little purse, my mother said, where she kept her bennies.

My grandmother’s early death at fifty-seven had been an alcoholic one.

A slur on the divine. Is that why my mother never told us? Hid it even from herself?

“You’re just like my mother,” my mother would say. “You should never get married.”

Maybe she meant, you should never be a mother.

If being a mother means conforming to the myth, then I agree. I never should have been one.

I am a whole human being, not limited to the stereotypes or roles assigned to me based on gender.

For women, those stereotypes and roles create a cage lined with yellow wallpaper. Yellow wallpaper¹ enclosed me in a world where my actions would be judged and a story made of me I did not author even as my agency to act did not exist. I had to strip away that yellow wallpaper with my fingernails on my hands and knees to reach autonomy and choice.

Cast as a mother, a demon, or angel, but never myself.

Mother and Daughter

. . .I wanted to be a good mother, the mother says.

Sometimes you weren’t, the daughter says.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter either, the mother says

and the daughter says, I wanted to be good. . .

~ Hayan Charara

Don’t defend, explain, or justify yourself as a mother.

This is a tall order.

I am wont to throw myself under a bus if that would satisfy an unhappy daughter. I’ll take the rap. Raised as a scapegoat and a woman, of course! I learned to fawn, not fight.

Someone once told me guilt is frozen rage. Anger turned inward.

Get mad. Get mad at a world that oppresses women and blames them for any deviation; get mad at the world that made women responsible for the fall of mankind and made her the helpmeet to child-men who keep her hostage and harm her children.

And don’t save yourself through your daughters.

They have a right to self-determination and agency. Stand aside. Let them find it.

But so do you.

…What if this is the last thing I say to you, she says

and she says, What if this is the last thing I say to you.

She says, I cannot hold on much longer.

Please, she says, hold on longer.

The water is at my mouth, she says,

and she says, Even if it is at your mouth.

~ Hayan Charara

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Daughter of Mine (Clare’s Song)

Original Music, Lyrics, and Vocals by Wayne

Reading Orderly Chaos: The Mandala Principle with my grandchildren, newborn triplets.

One Thing

I read the New Yorker piece “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” which centered Munro instead of her daughter. It made me ill.

If you are a Laurie Stone, you will take none of this personally, and if there were Gerrys or Harveys (and mothers - or daughters)  in your life, you will see instead what you made of it. This is why I love

Laurie Stone

. 

As mentioned above, I recently saw this statement on Instagram:

Your daughter will live the life that you give your wife.

My father died recently on Thanksgiving Day. My life seemed so different from my mother’s; nevertheless, I see now, in ways, that I did live the life he gave my mother.

But what did I make of it? 

That’s the story. 

On Repeat

Shout Outs: More Thoughts on Mothers

We don’t all have the same experience of motherhood, and we don’t all have the same freedoms. ~ Amanda Montei

Follow and subscribe to Mad Woman with Amanda Montei, the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. Amanda writes at the crossroads of misogyny and motherhood, illuminating a path toward a new consciousness of consent that mothers can pass on to their children.

I stumbled on this way outback take on Mills Constable of Qualia’s relationship with his mother. Mills Baker writes, designs, and other things on Sucks to Suck with David Cole and Omar Khalid

Mother

And more randomly, Mills’ review of Mulholland Drive spared me the ordeal of watching it, thanks to his mother—who I’m positive is my spiritual twin in at least a million ways, but especially in her uncanny talent for deconstructing meaning so thoroughly that the room is left stunned into eternal silence.

Check out this article in the LA Times: What’s the secret to motherhood? How 20th century scientists got it wrong by Emily Van Duyne, who also has a SStack. Subscribe to Emily at Loving Sylvia Plath, and read her book, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

This is a new era for literary publishing. We have the freedom to choose what gets shared and heard. Let’s embrace this opportunity to bring bold, unconventional voices to light—many of my stories and ideas would never find a place in traditional publications or reach the readers they deserve. You have the power to make it happen.

1. Thompson, K. (2022). Yellow wallpaper. Mom Egg Review, Vol. 20, 103–105.