Mothers and Daughters

The phone call went badly, again - the old arguments about ego & neglect and how you didn’t love me, not really. And the weeping. At 50, she was still stuck, repeating the same accusations. “The damage, the damage you caused.” She didn’t want her mother to think she’d come through it unscathed. Not ever. She’d worked too hard to become something she wasn’t, someone must be to blame. She was so clever, so clean, so intelligent - how could she be so unhappy? The unformed artist weighed down by someone else’s baggage. When her artist/mother said: You have to work with it, use it, create with it, she howled: “Stop talking over me.” It was like saying get rid of yourself. Knowing herself that well, she hardly knew what she was.