The memories of years of lunches with my mom at The Green Tea Room after arduous shopping sprees at A&S in downtown Brooklyn, remain alive as if they took place only yesterday. I had no idea those ordinary lunches of a grilled cheese sandwich, French fries and a coke would have become such memorable rituals. Like most daughter/mother relationships, mine was complicated but I didn’t realize at the time that my conflicts with my mom were more universal than I thought.
My mom died in 1984 and a year later I became a licensed clinical social worker counseling dozens of women in distress, anxiety, depression, anger, guilt and shame in their relationships with their moms. I took some comfort in this feeling seeing that I wasn’t alone in all I had suffered in my own relationship. In 1995, I sent out questionnaires to dozens of women asking two questions: How did your relationship with your mother effect your relationship with men? and how did your relationship with your mother effect your relationship with women? The answers to those questions were published in Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters, which launched in 1995, eleven years after the death of my mom. I noticed how deeply the lives of daughters are formed by their relationship with their mothers. And I noticed that the death of my mother did not put our discord to rest.
After her death, my relationship with my mother seemed to get more intense. Not only had I lost my mom, but now I lost the hope and chance for any reconciliation. I was shocked at how much my grief deepened. What daughter wants her mother to die before they get a chance to bond and heal? I wrote prolifically about my mother hoping to resolve within myself what we couldn’t resolve together.
In 2017, I decided to start an ongoing letter to her so I could have a place to take my grief. I lived 3,000 miles away from her grave and couldn’t sit and talk to her. Decades later I was still bleeding onto the pages and burning myself out. This letter clearly wasn’t working in the way I hoped it would. I wrestled with not writing anymore but that didn’t help either.
In 2021 I took a writing class that focused on memoir and in that workshop I wrote about my relationship with my mother. I realized that with all my writing, what I really wanted my mother to know was what it was like to be her daughter. I just needed to tell her how I felt, how she impacted my life and how much I loved her. I wanted her to know ‘me’. When she was alive and we talked on the phone or I went home for visits, we seemed to get into a competitive argument about whether my mother had the say in my life because she was my mother or whether I had the right to make decisions because I was the one living the life. In the process, neither one of us felt heard. We wound of negating each other. I had so much in my heart I needed to say to her but I also wanted to hear that I was loved and that she was proud of me. I never heard those things.
I remember the many stories my mother told me about how she was a dutiful daughter and her expectations were that I be one too. I thought I was one and I ached to hear that she saw that, but it seemed nothing I did was enough and then we spiraled into our out-of-control arguments. So much love, so much devotion to each other, all gone astray. I couldn’t unravel it. It was maddening and we seemed doomed to never get along.
I wanted to write myself into visibility. I asked myself: What is it like to be my mother’s daughter? This was what I really wanted to tell my mother. I wanted to share what it was like to have her as a mother, good, bad, an
d everything else. I wanted to share with her how having her as a mom formed my life. Maybe the answer to this question would bring us both back into the light. Our relationship had become so tumultuous there was never space or room for such an intimate discussion. We seemed to become more competitive with who was going to be visible so that we each hung up feeling unloved and unimportant. The question: What is it like to be my mother’s daughter? formed the leitmotif for my memoir: Lunch with Mom: A Daughter’s Soliloquy.
As I stare at the published book on my wooden kitchen table, I can only hope that the breadth and scope of her powerful force in my life now , in print, is a worthy tribute to the woman who formed and guided me to become the creative, loving, kind, empowered, and compassionate woman I have grown into and I only pray that wherever she is, she is finally able to hear my voice and that I have praised her enough. If nothing else, we each know what it is like to be a loving daughter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J
Jan Marquart LCSW, author has been in the counseling field for 55 years and has written over 140 daily journals and 28 books. Her articles have been published in California, New Mexico, and Texas. She has taught journal writing for Life Learning Institute in Austin, Texas and writing and healing for Story Circle Network, an international writing community for women. You can check out all of Jan’s books on Amazon.com