I open my eyes, disoriented with what feels like lead eyelids. After a two hour nap, my boyfriend reaches up to turn the lamp on — covering us in a familiar warm light I’ve seen plenty of times before. But this time, the yellowish light felt golden. And if I stare at the walls long enough, I could convince myself they’re the four walls of my late maternal grandmother’s bedroom. Suddenly, there are little pools occupying my lower lash line, and I’m somewhere between my sleepy 6-year-old self, wearing one of my grandmother’s faded t-shirts; and my sleepy 21-year-old self, with tear-soaked guilt over how long I’ve gone without thinking of those t-shirts — or of my grandmother.
This guilt demanded answers: I wanted to know why I had not actively thought about my maternal grandmother in years. While some of that absence is a product of time passing, there was an eeriness to how little I had thought of her. My grandmother, with all of the warmth and French toast and movies on Sundays and quilted comfort she brought into the formative years of my life, existed almost exclusively in absence. As I’ve grown older, my perception of my grandmother has evolved with me.
My memory of her has become almost entirely overshadowed by the qualities she had that I’d like to perceive as being entirely separate from my own. Instead of remembering the hours she spent working on crafts with me, or the letters we’d write back and forth to each other in a stickered notebook or her seashell pink sink, I remember how she let my grandfather walk over her. I remember how she made sure he and my mother’s siblings had routine doctor appointments — even into adulthood — and how she went 15 years without getting a mammogram before being diagnosed with breast cancer.
In attempting to understand my willingness to overlook the memory of my grandmother, I can’t seem to look past my visceral fear of becoming her daughter — my mother. Just as my mother promised herself that her future wouldn’t take the apron-clad shape of my grandmother’s, I’ve committed to similar refusals — promising myself, for instance, that I won’t end up with the same wordless nights on the couch watching the news my mother has sat through. I come from a long line of female pushovers, each thinking they are better, stronger, more independent than their predecessor. My mother and I would both prefer to relegate the passive, excessively giving parts of ourselves to the prior generation, but, in our own ways, we continue the twisted traditions of our elder female family members. Just as my mother has stared out the window above the kitchen sink, with her soapy hands, with her overthinking mind berating her for decades-old mistakes that have gathered more dust than her wedding china has, I stare out of my living room window as I remind myself why I’m horrible, fixating on that regrettable comment I made five years ago or that letter I never responded to three years ago. Just as the only time I saw my grandmother come undone was on a Wednesday afternoon as she yelled at my grandfather for complaining about the food she had made, releasing years of tension and apologizing after, the first time I heard my mother scream was after she slammed the door on her hand as she sat on the garage doorstep with me, vocalizing feelings she’d never share if her fingers weren’t bloody and apologizing after. With so many people-pleasing, self-loathing tendencies to unlearn, with so many choices to avoid, the future that has been modeled for me looks more like a hazard zone than a blank canvas.
However, these “anti-models” of womanhood that I’ve justified my lack of remembrance are flat, and don’t tell the whole story. Somewhat akin to a pro-con list on a yellow legal pad, they condense my understanding of myself and the female family members who have come before me (notably only on my mother’s side of the family) into easily digestible but hollow inevitabilities: Because my grandmother was always the last person to sit down at meals that she alone had prepared, I feel like my food will get as cold as hers was too. Because my grandmother allowed the needs of everyone else to take precedence over her own, I think that I am destined to feed into that same self-prescribed negligence.
While the perception that my grandmother and mother’s less desirable traits still somehow maintain an inherited quality — just waiting to manifest one day in my own insecurities — is more fear-informed than it is based in reality, the concept of undesirable traits being passed down from mother to daughter is well documented in popular culture. With the wealth of jokes about turning into our mothers made available to us, it’s easy to understand why the idea of resembling our mothers or their traits is interpreted as an inherently bad thing. These fears are often extended into parents in general, but, given women’s disproportionate fears of aging (which are intensified by constant reminders within America media that youth is the most desirable trait in a woman) and an increasing interest in not conforming to traditional femininity, the ones that are easiest to reach out for are often those focused on mothers.
From “Freaky Friday” to “Lady Bird,” modern depictions of the oh no I’m becoming my mother phenomenon represent a long-standing critique tradition of passing down negative traits matrilineally (through the mother’s line). On the other hand, with systems of heritance such as primogeniture, wherein a person’s property and belongings are passed down to (most commonly) their first-born son, patrilineage has historically been celebrated and valued.
I had never seen this dichotomy of patrilineage and matrilineage as strongly until reading “Beowulf” for ENGLISH 350, Lovers & Fighters in Early English Literature. In the epic, which was likely composed in the first half of the eighth century, making it the oldest surviving Germanic epic, Beowulf’s heroic future is ensured by virtue of being Ecgtheow’s son: His father’s legacy and reputation indicates that he is to be revered and honored without having to prove it. Although the Anglo-Saxon society that comprises the backdrop of Beowulf predates the formal inception of primogeniture, the epic glorifies patrilineage while demonizing matrilineage and establishes this dichotomy’s historical significance within English literature.
Grendel, the antagonist of the first half of the epic, is characterized as animalistic and violent — and also fatherless. While the great warriors in the epic are all described in relation to other great male warriors in their families, Grendel’s lack of a father figure leaves him without goodness or renown to inherit. In speaking with U-M lecturer Gina Brandolino, who teaches the ENGLISH 350 class, she noted of Beowulf’s characters: “This is especially vexing because Grendel’s dam seems like she’s reasonable and can ‘hang with’ the people at Hrothgar’s hall — she plays by their rules when she goes and kills a single man in retribution for the killing of Grendel.” Despite this adherence, Brandolino pointed out, “the poem is unwilling to acknowledge that she too is a warrior,” asserting that she has nothing to pass down to Grendel other than malice. Of course, Beowulf is only one example of how the notion of inheriting good traits from our mothers is largely presented as unimaginable. However, it illustrates how pervasive the longevity and depth of this notion is within English literature.
These depictions of parasitic mother-child relationships exacerbate my already complicated feelings toward my mother and further necessitate my desire to be so different from both my mother and grandmother. Truthfully, I don’t think I would suppress my memory of my grandmother if I didn’t struggle so deeply to see myself as an extension of my mother. Regardless, my grandmother and her legacy deserve better than the one-sided, 1950s housewife caricature that, since her passing, I’ve made her out to be in my mind.
My grandmother was undeniably selfless to a fault, but she also viewed the world with a softness I have yet to see in anyone else. She introduced me to spaghetti squash and taught me what it is to miss a moment before it’s gone. One of the last memories I have of her being so full of life is when she bought me a gold ring with a rose-colored stone for five dollars at a vintage store my junior year of high school. I wear that ring almost every day, and it’s somehow only slightly tarnished from years of wear. Her love might have been too beautiful for me to keep, but I have this small piece of her on my right ring finger.
No matter how much I try, I never will be able to capture my grandmother in a way that feels complete. And yet I know with certainty that becoming her — or becoming my mother for that matter — wouldn’t be wholly negative. I’ve watched my mother fear making many of the choices her mother made, often just to create more modern iterations of those choices. Through my mother, I’ve seen how fear can be blinding, how fixating on the mistakes of the women who have come before her has distracted her from not only her own shortcomings but also her own strengths. Just as men have historically been presumed to inherit greatness from their elder male family members, my elder female family members have virtuous traits to pass down, too. While the media I’m surrounded by makes it easy to want to push them away, declaring myself an entirely self-asserted, confident woman who would never make the same mistakes they did, their lives are more than just cautionary tales.
Statement Columnist Olivia Mouradian can be reached at omouradi@umich.edu.