Mean Mothers

As Western fairy tales make clear, cruel or uncaring mothers are never biological mothers but interlopers or stepmothers instead. “Real” mothers neither hate nor envy; it’s Rapunzel’s jealous stepmother who locks her in the tower, just as Cinderella’s rapacious one would consign her to a life of servitude.

Writing about her own mother, feminist writer Phyllis Chesler suggests that an envious mother diminishes her daughter to save herself from feeling diminished: “Once, long ago, I must have been my mother’s little girl, someone she dressed, whose hair she braided—but then she left me, and I left her, and we kept leaving each other. No matter what I did to try to gain her love or approval, it was never enough, because all she wanted was me for herself, me, merged, me as her shadow, me, devoured. She loved me, but in this primitive way. I failed this love.” Chesler recounts that her mother simply wanted her to be more like her—to make the choices she had, as a woman who had always put her family, not herself, first.

The crisis finally culminated with Lisa’s nervous breakdown in the tenth grade. For Lisa, it was a life-changing event: “I checked out of childhood and, in a real sense, out of the family. My mother’s response to what I’d done was all self-referential; she kept saying, ‘What did I do wrong to deserve this?’