I've never really wondered what my mother thinks of me. This is probably due to the fact that she has always tended to inform me (mercilessly) of her opinion on myself. I distinctly remember leaving for school late, and being about to jump in my car, obviously out of time to change my clothes, and having my mom stick her head out the door and call after me in a shocked (and might I say, disgusted) voice "You're wearing THAT?". I mean, you'd think I was dressed up like Ugly Betty, or something, the way she went on about it.

She always gets mad when I remind her of these instances, and is quick to point out that for every negative "honest opinion" she dolled out, there was at least 20 positive opinions.

The way my mother said it, you'd think I'd walked out of the house looking like Ugly Betty.

http://www.jaunted.com/files/18788/ugly_betty_161206.jpg

Well, yeah mom. I know you said nice stuff to me too. But my self esteem is on a strict point system, here. Let me try to explain it to you:

A on a test? Plus 10

Positive opinion before leaving for school? Plus 10

Negative opinion before leaving for school? Minus 1 million

See how it goes? I'd need like... 10,000 A's to get my self esteem back in the positives after a negative opinion. You've heard about my high school, haven't you? Yeah... that wasn't going to happen.

How was I supposed to have self-esteem as high as this hot dog when I was getting minuts 1 million points all the time?

http://www.billboardmama.com/images/categories/self-esteem-is-awesome.jpg

I'm exagerrating, obviously. I wasn't a tortured teenager or anything. And I knew not to take my mom too seriously; half the time she would laugh after criticizing me, like she knew she was being ridiculous. But after reading this most recent section Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, I started speculating as to how my mom sees me, as a person. Not as her daughter that she loves unconditionally, but as a human being, full of imperfections and like everyone else on the planet.

Kingston sort of presents two sides to her mother. In the second half of her chapter entitled "Shaman," she includes a segment of herself back at her parents house for a visit, interacting with her mother in modern day. Her mom seems kind of confused in this section, like she wants to say something but just keeps talking in circles, unsure of where she's taking the conversation. The mom goes from scolding her daughter like a child for "eating too much yin," (Kingston, 100) which she blames for her daughters colds, to revealing she things this older version of her daughter "charming with words" (Kingston, 101) but absent, unfaithful, too long gone. The whole experience is presented like a bizarre dream, something that no one ever talks about again. But there was also something heart-wrenching about it, and, though I hate to admit it, something familiar. I feel like the climax of the conversation is when the daughter admits that "when [she's] away" she doesn't "get sick... go to the hospital every holiday...[or] stand at windows and watch for movements and see them in the dark" (Kingston, 108). I know what the daughter was trying to say here. It wasn't an insult to the mother, or to her upbringing. She was trying to explain that she had built a life for herself, apart, and that when she came back to the house she felt like she was going backwards. But after that long, late-night conversation with her mother, she sounds ungrateful, doesn't she?

I can relate. I think we all can. It's like... we're away here, at college, and we're constantly changing, but our parents aren't necessarily around to see it happen. So you go home, and you're this new person, right? But they don't know the new you, and they treat you like the old you, and you find yourself regressing, acting like a child again. You come back for summer break not being able to wait to see all the things you've missed and you leave eager to get away from what you had forgotten you hated.

Sometimes when I go home I feel like a little kid, but not as cute as this one.

http://images.buycostumes.com/mgen/merchandiser/34203.jpg

So I could relate to this first mother-daughter exchange, but I kind of cringed at the chapter entitled "At The Western Palace." The mom is SO ANGRY at her kids, it scared me. It seems like partially, she's mad at them for rejecting traditional mannerisms and attitudes. She expresses contempt for their "wandering feet" that keep them from "understanding sitting" (Kingston, 113). She also gets angry when they "play with presents in front of the giver," (Kingston, 121) after Moon Orchid gives them, offering them rock candy in an effort to distract them. But it seems like she never says anything TO them about their bad behavior. She watches them grow, tries to steer them, and then sits back and fumes as they don't turn out in the way she imagined. And I couldn't help but wonder if my mother ever feels that way about me: like I'm not quite what she expected, or something.

The mom in Kingston's book doesn't think her kids understand how to sit in a chair, or rather, how to wait patiently.

https://people.ok.ubc.ca/lgabora/research_files/chair.jpg

I wrote an essay last year on Snow White, and part of my research involved the psychological implications of the tale, most of which centered around the interaction between Snow White and her Stepmother. As many of you may know, in the original version of the Grimm's adaptation of the tale, Snow White's stepmother was actually her mother. Joan Gould, in her book Spinning Straw Into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About Transformations in a Woman's Life, asserts that though a daughter is, biologically, the “flesh of [the mother's] flesh” (Gould, 12), a daughter is also her own person, something that often appalls the mother. Hence, in the fairy tale, the mother is awful to her daughter, and Snow White calls her a stepmother just to separate this new, evil mother from the tender, loving mother of her childhood. Luckily, my mother didn't turn evil when I started becoming my own person. But both Gould and Kingston seem to think that children are often disappointing to their parents as they grow up, and it's gotten me wondering (now that I've encountered this idea twice) if my mother is ever "appalled" by me.

http://www.readjunk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/snowwhite_image2.jpg

It would be nice if she wasn't. But as my high school counselor hinted (probably much to the chagrin of parents of seniors), if children were perfectly content at home, if parents and their kids never rubbed each other the wrong way, the youth of the world would never leave the nest, never go out and become grown up, contributing citizens of the world.

Citation for Woman Warrior: Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Random House Inc., 1976.