{"id":39,"date":"2025-04-22T15:06:43","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T15:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/?p=39"},"modified":"2025-04-22T15:08:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T15:08:36","slug":"when-your-daughter-refuses-to-be-in-your-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/2025\/04\/22\/when-your-daughter-refuses-to-be-in-your-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"“When your daughter refuses to be in your essay”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Prose faculty member Beth Alvarado on the boundaries of memoir.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This essay first appeared in LitHub <\/em>on 10 May 2019 and has been reposted here with permission from the author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A week ago, my daughter had opened to a random spot in my new essay collection and read a passage where she and I were having a conversation. Although she\u2019d been angry, she\u2019d said nothing for days, finally taking me out to lunch to tell me that I was no longer allowed to quote her without her permission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this particular instance, she was right. I shouldn\u2019t have quoted her. She had told me something in confidence and I\u2019d betrayed her. She was worried that what she\u2019d said would hurt someone else. There was no way, since the book is out, to undo what I\u2019d done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said, \u201cI\u2019ll bet it didn\u2019t even occur to you.\u201d She was right. I was just trying to get the scene down as accurately as possible. \u201cThe essay didn\u2019t even need that quote.\u201d She was right about that, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, often, she has these pithy sayings about motherhood\u2014while on the phone with me,for instance, she might say, I\u2019ve got to get back to crushing my children\u2019s souls, or when she\u2019s exasperated by her twin boys, she\u2019ll say, will everything with a penis please behave?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just that you\u2019re so quotable,\u201d I\u2019d told her, \u201cAnd I\u2019m writing about writing about motherhood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTame your impulses!\u201d is another thing she says to her toddlers. She could be speaking to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wants me to tame my impulse to write about her life. But my life is so bound up with hers right now as I help, daily, to care for her boys. My impulse is to write about those toddlers, about her mothering, and about the memories that rise up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is it so hard to write about children? For the same reason, I think, that it\u2019s so hard to write about being a mother. One: it just hasn\u2019t been done that often, not realistically, not honestly, and not by mothers\u2014until recently. Rivka Galchen, who calls her infant daughter \u201cthe puma\u201d in her book Little Labors<\/em>, notes, \u201cLiterature has more dogs than babies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So many personal essays are about parents or partners, but there\u2019s a lot to say about trying to write about children and grandchildren. About the balance between difficult subjects and personal relationships and protecting privacy. About the dance of anxiety in truth-telling and not making caricatures of our own grown children and their children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, consider this: both babies and mothers are idealized in popular culture. Mothers are self-sacrificing, nurturing, wise, honored for putting others\u2019 needs before their own. If they have conflicts, they swallow them. Or, there\u2019s the other extreme: tomes have been written in which mothers are over-bearing, devouring, all-powerful beings who deform their children and are responsible for their every short-coming. My mother\u2019s generation was that of the \u201crefrigerator mother\u201d and my daughter\u2019s, the \u201chelicopter.\u201d These two extremes are myths that we, as mothers, have to somehow counter before even getting to the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And babies? They are round and sweet, cherubs all. Innocent, yet precocious. Of course, these are only our own babies. Other people\u2019s babies are hungry, pooping blobs of flesh. If we\u2019re honest, they barely interest us at all. Our government, especially lately, seems to want fetuses to be born, but is not interested in legislating a living wage for their parents, parental leave, child care, medical care, good public schools, or protection from gun violence. Our indifference to the children of others reveals itself most dramatically in our willingness to separate immigrant children, even infants, from their parents. The pictures of two-year-olds in court? Empty strollers outside of detention centers? Children housed in dog kennels? They seem emblematic to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this to say: writing about motherhood and about children is a radical act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is also one that has caused me extreme conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was conflicted when I was young, of course, because children take so much time, time I often wanted to spend on my work, which made me feel selfish. Then, in graduate workshops, it was apparent that no one was interested in stories about women and children. Even the few feminists in my class asked questions like, \u201cWhy can\u2019t you write about independent women, women who don\u2019t have children?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because, I wanted to say, I am not nearly as interested in dysfunctional heterosexual relationships\u2014which is what they were writing about\u2014as I am in mothers and children. Later, when I finally was brave enough to write about my own life, I was asked, \u201cHow can a woman who used to be a heroin addict be a good mother? This just isn\u2019t believable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Believable or not, it was what I needed to write\u2014and yet that brought up another conflict. I wasn\u2019t worried about my parents or siblings or students (etc) reading about my past; I wasn\u2019t even worried about my own children, since I\u2019d always been honest with them, but I was worried about my nieces and nephews. I was worried about white perceptions of Mexican Americans, since my husband was Mexican American. I felt responsible, not only to my own children, but to their cousins, and to the family I loved and had adopted me. Was I perpetuating stereotypes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now, 30 years later, with the latest book, I worried about my grandchildren. The oldest child, the twelve-year-old, I figured my son could explain my past drug abuse to him, but the nine-year-old? I asked my son. He said, \u201cOh, he knows that his tata\u201d\u2014my husband\u2014\u201cdied from liver cancer because he did drugs. He\u2019s sad about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the family tradition of truth-telling lives on. This is good. After all, if we present ourselves as infallible, then what happens when our children fail? To whom can they turn?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, to present ourselves as flawed, is one thing, but to write about our children\u2019s flaws? Or our grandchildren\u2019s? That seems a betrayal. I had to scrap a whole essay on anger because to talk about the anger I\u2019ve felt toward my son\u2019s sons was too complicated. Yes, my grandsons were misbehaving. Yes, I tackled one on the stairs so he wouldn\u2019t hurt his brother. Yes, I did threaten to break the older one\u2019s fingers when we were lost, and he wouldn\u2019t give me my cell phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, yes, that night, when I apologized to them and asked if my anger had scared them, the older one said, \u201cNo, but it was a little surprising,\u201d and the younger one asked me if I needed to hear \u201cthe patience meditation.\u201d As if my anger had been completely unwarranted! I didn\u2019t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt guilty for months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remembered going into the bathroom when my children were little and holding a hand mirror parallel to the floor so I could see my face as they saw it when I said the things I said in anger. Was there something wrong with me? I didn\u2019t remember my mother ever getting that angry. When I\u2019d called her to confess, she\u2019d said, \u201cOh, you know what your Auntie Sue always said. It\u2019s damn hard to kill a kid.\u201d Of course, she was joking. It was a bad joke. Still, even though I\u2019d worked with children whose parents had harmed them, it somehow made me feel better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, when I hold the little boys, I feel such tenderness for them and such horrible regret for my impatience with my own children and my older grandchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder why those we love most can light a match in our hearts. So easily. So quickly. Sometimes several times a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMotherhood,\u201d my daughter said to me, \u201cis humbling.\u201d And here she let me quote her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connect with Beth online at <\/em>https:\/\/www.bethalvarado.com\/<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo credit: by Beth Alvarado<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prose faculty member Beth Alvarado on the boundaries of memoir. This essay first appeared in LitHub on 10 May 2019 and has been reposted here with permission from the author. A week ago, my daughter had opened to a random spot in my new essay collection and read a passage where she and I were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,7,2],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-writing","tag-daughters","tag-memoir","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cascadesmfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}