We put an end to the urban legend that says the relationship between mothers and daughters is complicated.
BarcelonaMy mother is eighty-six years old and lives in a nursing home. She's been suffering from severe dementia for years, and the woman who read Tolstoy has become a three-year-old girl playing with a doll. She no longer remembers who she is. She no longer remembers who I am. She no longer remembers that I write, or that I appear on TV or the radio, and she can no longer boast about it because she no longer knows what "boast" means. She also no longer remembers what she thought of Anna Karenina, that it was absurd to fall in love with Count Vronsky, with the man she should have been. So much for the bad news.
Now the good times begin, and I warn you that they're not politically correct. Now, every time she sees me, my mother smiles. She doesn't do it anymore because she's been able to tell her colleagues at the senior center that she's seen me on Melero's show. Or because someone has told her they've read one of my books or articles, or because they've seen my name in the credits for the midday soap opera. She smiles because she's happy to see my face. Okay, as one of my sisters says (I won't use her name, I won't say it), she smiles at everyone. So what. At me too. Because in the AAN era, or rather, Before the Neuronal Apocalypse, my mother would sometimes smile whenever she saw me, but mostly she would sigh. One of those dramatic sighs that had a thousand meanings, none of them good. She loved me. A lot. But in a complicated, patriarchal way. And it pissed me off that that shitty urban legend that says the relationship between mothers and daughters is complicated was actually true, point by point.
When I got pregnant for the first time, I asked all the goddesses of Olympus to grant me a daughter so I could rewrite the family curse. And so it was. And for twenty-six years, I've been trying to build a different, much freer relationship between my daughter and me. Let no one think we have the typical symbiotic relationship you see in movies where mothers and daughters are and act like best friends (we already have friends, yeah). And I can't say it's been easy either. But I'm happy to explain that we have a mature and deep relationship. And that we respect each other. That I respect her.
She recently made a decision that caught me by surprise. We see life in very similar ways, but not always. And I know that when she told me, she was worried about how I would react. The trail of so many years of toxic relationships between mothers and daughters leaves its mark, and even though it isn't like that for us, the past weighs heavily.
One day, as she told me details and rushed to justify herself ("Mom, I know that doesn't apply to you..."), I cut her off. And I promised her with all my heart that whatever she decided, I would be by her side. That the important thing was for her to be happy. And to please forget about giving me explanations. It's funny that we're so different in some ways, but it's actually a great blessing, a gift from the Universe, because now I can prove that family history doesn't have to repeat itself. And that curses on mothers and daughters can be erased with light and love.
