Mothers, Sons and Others
Hello,
I came across the phrase ‘the humiliations of parenting and of being parented’ in a review of Gary Shteyngart’s new book Our Country Friend and I can’t stop thinking about it. When I read this review, I was also reading Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, a novel about a mother and daughter travelling in Japan together. It’s told from the perspective of the daughter and I found it to be one of the truest accounts on the subject.
Yesterday I read an advice column. The question was: What Do I Owe My Difficult Mother-in-Law? Kwame Anthony Appiah’s note on dependency in response to the question stayed with me
When you provide people with ongoing assistance, you tend to assume ongoing obligations. In ways I’ve discussed before, when a helping hand is dependably there, it’s only reasonable that we come to depend on it.
No doubt plenty of confusion lies ahead, but you can do your best to steer clear of ruin. Dependency is not an irrevocable condition. It’s just that if you choose to reduce your involvement, you shouldn’t do so suddenly and without making alternative arrangements. However things work out, you and your husband have plainly been enormously helpful to her, and I hope you’re able to take some satisfaction in that.
Mothers-in-law have a terrible reputation in my culture and while the sentiment might not be as strong, it’s certainly universal. It got me thinking of something Javed Akhtar mentioned on mothers and sons within the Indian culture and how it impacts the next generation. The topic of discussion is love and near the end of this insightful chat, Akhtar is asked to explain a statement he once made about mothers. He said that a society that worships mothers will no doubt be a society that ill-treats women. The talk is in Urdu (fittingly, as the event is part of a festival celebrating the language) and my translation skills are not at all great but below is my humble offering. The answer is long so I’ve cut a few frivolous bits out, and while it isn’t a new thought, I think it’s worth pondering over together.
When a child is born, he is not able to tell the difference between his body and his mother’s body. You might notice that we gently sway a baby or pat him loudly to help him fall asleep. If you do this to a grown man, it’s going to disturb him instead of making him fall asleep! So how can a child fall asleep? When the child was in his mother’s womb he heard his mother’s heartbeat and floated in the amniotic sac in motions similar to gentle swaying. When we sway a child or pat him, it reminds him of being in a womb, he feels safe, he is able to fall asleep.
Much later, he realises that he and his mother are two different bodies, two different people. And to reduce the sorrow of this realisation, he seeks comfort in things that remind him of his mother, like teddy bears, blankets, etc. He always picks things that are supple, soft and warm, just like his mother.
When this child grows, he observes that his mother is being ill-treated by the world. She is humiliated by his father, she is scolded by his paternal grandmother, she is taunted by his paternal aunts. In his house his mother gets humiliated daily and this small child (because he still believes his fate is joined to his mother’s) thinks that he needs to protect her. He has boundless compassion in his heart for his mother and he is motivated by his desire to make her life better. He worships his mother.
When he grows up, while still being his mother’s son, he is now also a man and hence is driven to humiliate other women. To do this he turns even his positive emotion of respecting and loving his mother into a whip and uses it on other women. He says things like, ‘you can’t cook like my mother’ and ‘you can’t keep a home as well as my mother’. He turns his mother into a carrot to dangle in front of his wife who then spends the rest of her life to win that carrot but never does.
Every mother-in-law in our society cooks better daal than her daughter-in-law. Which means that for the last five thousand years the standard of cooking in this country is consistently dropping! When you keep repeating that mothers should be worshiped, that there is heaven under their feet, that she is flawless and cannot make a mistake then who is it that you think should not be respected? All the other women? No one says anything about fathers! Have you heard anyone say that fathers should be respected a lot? That’s because we all know that if we don’t respect our fathers, we will be kicked out of the house! You have to respect him, there is no choice.
So this whole ‘respect your mother’ really is a license to respect your mother without caring about any other woman. This also brings up the question: which mother is it that you are respecting? Your own mother, yes. What about your children’s mother? Should she not be respected as well? And when should your mother be respected? Only after you were born? Did she have no respect before your birth? If she didn’t, then how can she be respectable? It’s you who is respectable, for being born to her and hence giving her that respect of being a mother. It means she is living in reflected glory of you!
This is why it’s all rubbish. Every woman must be respected, not just mothers. So in a society that insists on respecting their mothers and making them a goddess to worship, all you are saying is that she is not a human and doesn’t deserve human rights.
This reminds me of a book I read many years ago called Mothers by Jacqueline Rose. When I was searching for a link just now, I came across this bumper LRB review on books about mothers by Rose. This is like catnip to me!
I’m reading a collection of short stories titled Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated by Frances Riddle. Ampuero explores relationships between parents and children from a very dark place and one without any boundaries. Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, none of them make it out unscathed. In an interview for this book, she said ‘I don’t want the reader to be able to escape this book unharmed’ and I truly think she has achieved her goal.
Another book I enjoyed recently is Strong Female Lead: Lessons from Women in Power by Arwa Mahdawi. I think this will make a good gift for men and women in your life who hold any amount of power. This could be in their careers or within their families.
A few of the books I read since my last letter to you
Second Place by Rachel Cusk took my breath away! The book is about many other things but it was satisfying to read a mother’s perspective on her daughter’s choices. I know this book wasn’t for everything but for me it was one of her best yet. I’ve now got a copy of Arlington Park and look forward to dipping into her mind soon.
After reading Second Place I hunted down a copy of Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan and gulped that down too. It was so refreshing to read the words of a woman who did what she wanted to do and dealt with the consequences of her action head on and with grace. What an inspiration!
In between these two I read Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel and enjoyed it a lot. I thought I was done with books about white women in their twenties making bad decisions on drug fuelled night outs, but you know what, I had it in me to read one more and I’m so glad I did.
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez is another excellent book. I lost myself completely in the lives of the dynamic duo siblings and would highly recommend you get a copy of this one in January. It’s also going to come to our screens soon and I honestly can’t wait to watch it.
Send Nudes by Saba Sams is a beautiful debut collection. Each story is more exquisite than the one before. There is a lot to love here, but what I love most is the freshness of it all, familiar scenes presented in new and genius ways. An alluring look at modern living and the many ways we fail at it.
Wreck: Gericault's Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea by Tom de Freston is an immersive experience. I learned so much about art, love, history, politics, father-son relationships and human emotions. It’s out in the UK in March 2022, please make sure to add it to your reading lists.
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney — I loved the email bits! What about you?
The Years by Annie Ernaux was my first book by the author and there is no looking back. I am intent on reading everything by her and will be reading Happening next. Such compelling writing.
I’m taking a break from social media this month and thinking about what Kaveh Akbar said about social media in his Paris Review interview
And between writing the two books I had gotten off of all social media. I don’t mean to speak prescriptively but, for me, it was really insidious how that shit colonized my mind and colonized the algorithms of my thinking and hijacked my rage. On social media, the same rhetorical language was being used about the casting of some Marvel movie as about the leveling of a village in Syria. The same exact rhetorical algorithms of outrage were used to talk about one as the other. Our brains haven’t evolved enough to differentiate between the two. Language is language. And so I was just not in command of my compassion, the distribution and focus of my rage, and it took a while to recalibrate. I think I still am recalibrating.
Which brings me to this excellent essay in The New Yorker by Chris Hayes titled ‘THE INTERNET, WE’RE ALWAYS FAMOUS’. The bit I keep coming back to:
There’s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous. But I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone. Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.
Back to books, on my bedside table are the following waiting to be read:
The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye
Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King
Free by Lea Ypi
Mothers, Fathers, and Others by Siri Hustvedt
Arrival by Nataliya Deleva
And in my audiobook library:
Paul by Daisy Farge
Lote by Shola von Reinhold
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
I hope you are well. You didn’t hear from me these last three months because I was busy writing my novel. It’s lovely to have something to focus on, to pour my energy into. I am very grateful that this novel now exists in a partial draft form and that I get to keep working on it for the coming months/years. I relate to Lily King’s protagonist in Writers & Lovers who thought to herself ‘I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.’ While on the subject, I am finding Writing a Novel by Richard Skinner to be a comforting and helpful companion.
I want to end this letter with a poem that beautifully and aching captures the evolution from daughter to mother. I’ve reproduced it in full below.
Zeba
Brown Circle by Louise Glück
My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don’t
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.
I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.
I must learn
to forgive my mother,
now that I am helpless
to spare my son.