Growing up without maternal love is a wound that, as we all know, leaves a lasting mark. Literature and audiovisual media have been extensively involved, and by chance, I have approached them from two different and complementary perspectives in the same period.
Hal and Harper (Movistar) is a series about two siblings—a boy and a girl—who lost their mother when they were very young. The story, aside from having good performances by Lili Reinhart, Cooper Raiff, and the great Mark Ruffalo playing the father, is told with skill and originality.
The two siblings' transition to adulthood coincides with the announcement that their father and his new partner are expecting a child. As if that weren't enough, the father tells them that, to begin this new stage of his life, he's decided to sell the house where they grew up.
The three characters maintain a relationship of interdependence that can be considered unhealthy, especially between the two siblings. Harper has never been able to shake the role of protective older sister, and the series makes this explicit by occasionally intercutting frames with her brother's face—a baby—when he was orphaned. It's an excellent and moving series. As a curiosity: the actor who plays the younger brother, Cooper Raiff, is also the screenwriter and director of the series.
Almost at the same time I read Wine of solitudeIrène Némirovsky's impeccably edited novel by Cal Carré, with a formidable translation by Anna Casassas. They are both subjected to a French governess while suffering the indifference of a frivolous and unmaternal mother.
It would be very difficult to know which pain is more excruciating: the death of one's mother during childhood and the total absence of this figure, or the bitterness of living with a mother who doesn't love you. Hal and Harper and Wine of solitude make it clear that, in both cases, this experience is highly traumatic.
If anything, we can confirm that in the series, despite the conflictive relationships between the brothers and with their father, these characters have each other. In the case of the protagonist of Wine of solitude, Hélène has no emotional support. That the word loneliness appears in the title is, therefore, no coincidence.
Both the series and the novel end up providing us with a thread of hopeful light that makes us sense that Hélène, Hal, and Harper will all eventually make it through. Not having maternal love is a significant handicap, but not an insurmountable one. However, in both cases, learning the liberating process is difficult and maddening.
We feel so sorry for Irène Némirovsky, who after making her way through life, when she was already married and the mother of two daughters, was arrested in her home and deported to Auschwitz, where she died when she was only thirty-nine years old.
One of her daughters, Élisabeth, wrote the book A landscape of ashes, published in Spanish by Nocturna Ediciones, which was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize. Another story of the absence of maternal love.
