Bechdel: The prodigious daughter

There's a lot to talk about with this book, Are You My Mother?: Dreams, Freud, Winnicott, the highlighting of text, writing a book about writing a book/meta-memoir, the changing of the seasons during therapy sessions, the self.

To analyze this book is to further analyze the self, the self of the author, but mostly MY    SELF. Why do I pick what I pick to focus on? Is psychoanalytics its own pathology?(150). Through analyzing, does something salient become more salient or fade and integrate into the self?

At peace with either result, I'm going to focus on Bechdel's inclusion of Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child.

At the risk of sounding like just another narcissist surrounding Bechdel, Are You My Mother? spoke to me. I saw my mother in December for the first time in five years. It'd been four years before that. During her visit, she said, "I love you."
"I love you too," I responded. Her response then was, "Mission accomplished." Like many of Bechdel's exchanges with her mom, including when Bechdel's mom asks, "Do you love me?"(86) this statement, "Mission accomplished" sounds simple and innocuous, but in context it's unsettling. My mom was implying that her life's work was to have me love her, and now that that was affirmed, she could rest. My mom's mom didn't love her. As a kid, anytime I complained about the abuse in my family my mom responded with gory details from her childhood to show that she'd had it worse and that I was lucky. Decades later, I've come to realize it must've taken a lot for my parents to not beat me nearly as much as their parents beat them.

On page 208, Bechdel quotes Miller saying, "The child, an only one or often the first-born, was the narcissistically cathected object. What these mothers had once failed to find in their own mothers they were able to find in their children: someone at their disposal who can be used as an echo, who can be controlled, is completely centered on them, will never desert them, and offers full attention and admiration." Certainly my mom's parenting style fits into this description. I wonder if her mother (my grandma's) did too.  I know my Grandpa beat my Grandma, but was my Grandma beat by her mother? What are the alternatives to this behavior, especially for women abused as children like my mom, and all the women in my family besides me, women without access to birth control, let alone therapy?(Like Bechdel, my sex life with women has served, among other things, as good birth control.)

Both Bechdel's mother and my mother talk to us about all the details of their lives without asking us about ours. I have been known to set the phone down for a minute or two to take a breather from my mom talking about the new color she painted a room or what she had for dinner.

Even after ten years of therapy (or maybe because ten years of therapy) this book made me feel like if I was going to keep reading, I needed to have Jocelyn on speed dial. Or in my case, Luana Rodgers, my therapist from 2002-2005. Luana stood in for my narcissistic parents. When I published my first piece of Creative Nonfiction in 2004, which told my truth about the poverty I was raised in, I told Luana I was afraid of my parents reading the essay. She was never afraid to tell me things straight.
"They don't care enough about you to find it," she said. And she was right. Until 2007, when my mom found the internet. She read the essay and proceeded to tear each line apart, in a less civilized version of Bechdel's portrayal of her mom's reading of Fun Home.

And maybe still, underneath her rage and shame, my mom can feel a sense of being witnessed, that her kid survived something she herself is still unwilling to name.

If there were one panel in this book that meant to serve as a key, it is the last panel on page 233. Bechdel has just described to us how babies look into the face of their caregiver to see themselves. "When I look I am seen, so I exist." -Winnicott. Bechdel says, "The day I hung up the phone on mom was the last time she made me cry." We see Bechdel hunched over her desk with her hand on the phone. In the last panel, the banner says: "Things got easier after that" and we see the same image of Bechdel hunched over at her desk, presumably the same moment, but there's a camera that she's set taking a photo of her. Those who know about her artistic process know that she is saying that she took the image-making of herself into her own hands. She sees herself; she doesn't need to rely on her mother to see her. BRILLIANT.

Gloria Steinem says on the back cover of Are You My Mother?, "Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers." I didn't internalize this quote until writing this blog post. "Unlived"/living doesn't have to mean your mom was a housewife and now you are an astronaut. I think Steinem means inhabited. That my life is solely mine to inhabit. Bechdel shares this inhabitation with her mother (she cohabitates with her). I wish for the courage and patience to model this possibility with my mother while there's still time.