Sunday, October 28, 2012

relationship

If you are a woman who has given birth there is a good chance you have a daughter or two, but if not, you for sure have a mother, or did at some time in your life. These relationships bind us and lead us through life on a certain trajectory whether we realize it or not. We are all products of those women who came before in an almost supernatural way.

We tend, as adults, to finish the unfinished and even unconscious desires of our mothers and/or fathers. Mine was an artist who never considered herself an artist. Coming from an upper class family she rode horses, competed in Madison Square Garden. She married my father when she was just twenty-two. She died when I was thirteen and so I never knew her as an adult but strangely I had a career as an artist, fulfilling a dream that I know intuitively she had.  Her generation came to age in the late 30's and early 40's when women's role was to take care of their men. And although she came from an affluent background she was ground under the heels of my career-driven army officer father. I'm not saying they didn't love each other, only that times then were very different for women and few were able to assert themselves as real people who existed separate from their husbands.

These themes fill books both fiction and non-fiction and psychologists love to expound on them in session and in writings of their own. It is the fodder for their careers, filling notebooks with the anger and frustration coming from their clients. If you're lucky you've come through these sometimes volatile relationships without need for therapy but there are many who have not. I've known women who haven't spoken to their mothers for years. Even my own daughter didn't speak to me for an entire year. It isn't until fairly late in life that we begin to understand the intricacies of our life and the family members in it and even then we can become lost, without the ability to differentiate ourselves from our mothers.

I lost my mother at an early age and that single event set me on a certain course. For years I grieved her loss, not in an outward way but inside where even I couldn't see it. Through writing Wolfmoon Trilogy with its themes of loss and re union between mothers and daughters I've managed to come to a greater understanding. When I started the first book, The Moonstone, I didn't realize the connections to my own life. After all it was a fantasy with lots of other themes at work. It was my fun writing while I worked on another more serious manuscript. And yet these same threads follow from one book to the next, begging to be explored. All three books center around the generational connections between the women characters, and in Saille, the Willow the protagonist struggles to understand her own place in the unfolding drama around her.

There are many many books that deal with these themes, both fiction and non-fiction. Writing tends to be therapy for those of us who are so inclined and it is through writing that I've finally come to know my mother.