One of the major themes in my middle grade/young adult novel, The History of Hilary Hambrushina, is mother-daughter relationships. Like several of the other young characters, Hilary has a turbulent relationship with her mother. Writing this book has caused me to reflect on my own relationship with my mother and its evolution.
With the exception of one year when I was fifteen (a year in which my mother struggled with working at a job she disliked and I struggled with being fifteen), my mother (whom I call Mommole) and I have always been close.
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For me, the biggest challenge in our relationship has been my finding a way to maintain that closeness while forging my own path, sometimes in a different direction or using different building materials to what my mother had envisioned for me. Although I had a few moments of open rebellion as a child and teen, I never had the type of combative relationship that Hilary has with her mom. Quite the opposite: I wanted to please my mother and felt anxious at the thought of her disapproval. So I didn’t engage in the typical tween and teenage misdeeds: drinking, smoking, shoplifting, or cutting classes. The fact that my introverted, cautious, and independent personality—bearing no small resemblance to that of my mother—left me with little to no interest in sampling these activities facilitated my choice.
Rather, my revolution took the form of advocacy for following the trail that I believed to be right for me. The first battle came when I was twenty and was offered the chance to travel to the homeland of a friend from the Middle East. My mom made her concern known. I calmly explained that this trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that I was an adult, and that I had made the decision to go. Once my mom knew that I was serious and that I had thought carefully about this choice, she became reconciled to it and even eager to hear about my holiday planning.
The second battle occurred several years later, when I decided to move away to pursue a second graduate degree. This meant leaving a contract government job that had the possibility of becoming permanent. My mom could not understand why I would choose to leave a potentially steady and lucrative job to study for a second master’s degree in the same subject area. But I knew that leaving was the right decision for me, and again, I forged ahead despite the objections and pursued the goal of applying to various master’s programs.
By the time I was accepted with a scholarship to the University of Windsor, my mom was fully on board with my plan. I believe that the form of my revolution allowed me to maintain my tight bond with my mother. I wasn’t rebelling for the sake of testing boundaries, but rather out of a deep conviction about what was best for me. When my mother realized this, she respected my choices, and we were able to move past our differences and on to a more adult relationship.
For me, the most striking part of this reflection is the realization that, just as my mother has seen me as an adult for many years, I now see her as one. By that, I mean that I see her as a unique individual whom I don’t fully know, as someone who is capable of surprising me by revealing hitherto-unknown aspects of herself. Two occasions stand out.
The first happened thirteen years ago, when my parents were on holiday in the Dominican Republic. At the resort in which she and my father were staying, my mother recognized several women whom she’d previously seen only in pictures: the editors of a popular Canadian women’s magazine to which my mother had been a subscriber for years (the subscription continues to be my annual birthday gift to her). Knowing that I was unhappy in my current job and that I was looking for a new editing position, my mother marched up to the editor-in-chief, complimented her on the magazine, and presented my credentials to her as a potential job candidate.
The editor expressed interest in hearing from me and then asked how old my mother was. When she responded, the editor explained that she was looking for women of varying ages to model swimwear for a spread showcasing bathing suits for “real women.” To my great surprise when my mother called me a few days later with the news, she had become a senior citizen swimsuit model. Today, people of different colours, shapes, sizes, and ages are finally being celebrated for their uniqueness. My mother, in her quiet way, was a trailblazer who veered off the well-trod road of ageism.
My second surprise occurred a few years later, when my mom told me that she and my father had attended a lecture given by Irshad Manji, the prominent Canadian Muslim feminist. I paused, then pointed out that Manji is of a different faith and sexual orientation than my mother. How could my conservative and traditional mother be interested in spending an evening listening to such a radically different perspective, I wondered. Yet the perspective was perhaps not so different. “She’s so wise and such a good speaker,” enthused my mother. “Someone in the audience said that there are no Christians today who are challenging narrow-minded interpretations of their faith, and she responded, ‘Oh, but there are. There are people with whom we’re working towards peace.’”
I was moved at the notion of a collaboration between two faith groups portrayed in the media as almost always at loggerheads with one another. But I was even more moved at the thought of my mother, again in her quiet way, showing openness, compassion, and a rebellion of her own against being boxed into a stereotypical way of thinking or acting. In both these moments, I was as proud of my mother as I hope she was of me for forging my own path.
Marnie Lamb is a Gemini incarnate: half writer and half editor. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Windsor. Her short stories have appeared in Journey Prize Stories 25 and various Canadian literary journals, including filling Station, The Nashwaak Review, and The Dalhousie Review. Her first novel, a middle grade/YA book named The History of Hilary Hambrushina, is published by Iguana Books. She pursues her other love, editing, as the owner of Ewe Editorial Services. When she is not writing or editing, she can be found cooking recipes with eggplant or scouting out colourful fashions—preferably ones with polka-dots—in boutiques across Toronto.