Her Mother's Daughter Read Free

am egotistic, although I may be. It’s because I figure that the lines of thought that are already developed are those that are acceptable, and if you want to change things, you have to look for what is illegitimate—in subject or in approach. This tendency has caused me great difficulty in my life: it is always easier, whatever your line of work, to fall in line behind those who have gone before, and add your little tot, than to say the hell with what’s gone before, what about what hasn’t? Such an attitude can keep you poor.
    But I never felt I had a choice about this. I couldn’t bear to look at anything as it presented itself to be seen. I didn’t even really see the damned rocks but only what lay under them. And this is because of my mother, I know that even if I don’t quite understand why or how. All those hours I spent at her feet. “Tell me about when you were little, Mommy. What was your mommy like? What was your daddy like?” I never stopped asking, not even when I was fifty. As if under the rocks that were her stories, there was something buried, something hidden, something I could discover if I persisted that would make all the difference.
    All what difference?
    As I said, my life is fine. Couldn’t be better. Oh, well, could be, I suppose, if we lived in a different world. It would be nice, I suppose, to be able to love someone who loved me. I’ve gone beyond love, romantic love, all that stuff. Need and power struggle, that’s all it is, and I have no needs. Truly. That is, I have no needs I cannot satisfy by myself. I don’t know any successful woman with love in her life. Men can manage it, but not women. Disproportion in numbers, and besides, men are too threatened by independent women. They can always find one who will build up their ego. And I, we, independent women, can’t find a man who doesn’t need continual bolstering. Enough already. I’ve had enough.
    God knows I’ve known enough men, had enough lovers, friends, and acquaintances that the sex is not unfamiliar to me. I even have a son, rotter that he is. You think I shouldn’t say that, shouldn’t speak so about my own child. Blame it on my mother, she brought me up to be honest. He’s a conniver, what can I say? I didn’t raise him to be a conniver, but on the other hand, I can’t blame him for being one. Unlike me, he sees surfaces, sees them and understands the power lines so visible to those who look carefully. Why not? you say. Character sets itself gradually, like gel. His gel isn’t completely set yet, it can still be melted into another shape, but at the moment he does not make me proud, even if he’s fulfilling mothers’ dreams and going to medical school. I feel like my own mother when nice smiling ladies hear what my son is doing and turn on me in a gush of praise: “Oh how wonderful! You must be so proud!” I want to bite their lips right off their mouths so that when they smile in the future they’ll look like the sharks I feel they are. And to tell the truth, my daughters aren’t any better. Everything seemed okay until they grew up. Now, everything seems wrong.
    So when I’m not bursting into tears at the sight of a motherless child, a childless mother, or a dead father, I’m snapping around the house like a wet towel. I can’t seem to find a quiet heart, except when I travel, and nowadays I don’t get commissions that often. I can’t even get any sympathy. Last time I visited my mother, I came to feel very low as we sat around talking, and I told her about a fight I’d had with Arden. She’d been awful for a long time, hanging around the house smoking, glaring at me; playing the piano at its loudest, banging her way through every book of music in the house without bothering to correct the mistakes in any one piece; and refusing to help clean up, even to clean her own room. Not that the house