Motherhood and Mildred Pierce
In the postwar middle-income housing project I grew up in, everybody knew, or thought they knew, everything about everyone who lived in our building. It was the late 50s/early 60s Brooklyn, and the mix of Jewish, Irish, Italian families was a reflection of economics and culture.
There was the fireman married to a woman who hated the color red.
There was the paraplegic couple with a daughter who looked like her father and had the nosy ways of her mother.
There was the girl who wore a wig. No one (except her sister and parents) ever saw her without it and the reason for her baldness was vague, maybe congenital, maybe some early childhood infection.
Then there was the girl who could be heard screaming at her mother, a very sweet woman with MS and a sweetheart of a husband.
It’s this girl (Isabel was her name) I’m thinking about as my husband stops channel surfing and tunes in to the last forty-five minutes of Mildred Pierce.
It’s a turning point in the movie, the scene in which the secret marriage of Mildred’s daughter to a wealthy man is about to be dissolved. The price for agreeing to this is extortion: Veda, the daughter, wants $10,000 from his parents, claiming she’s pregnant. In the next scene, when Mildred and Veda are home and Mildred learns that the pregnancy was a ruse, she pulls the check from her daughter’s purse and tears it up. Veda laces into her. She doesn’t just say I hate you. She appears to hate everything about her mother — she calls her a common frump, not the worst thing you can say except when the characterization is comically off-base (Mildred is a very stylish woman) and is used in a vituperative attack on her mother’s background as a waitress and her lower-middle class roots.
Never mind that she built an empire her daughter should be proud of.
Never mind that she supports her daughter’s extravagant tastes.
“Get out before I kill you,” says Mildred.
I am not especially a Joan Crawford fan though I’ve seen the movie that earned her an Oscar for best actress more than once. It was her first starring role and she accepted the Oscar at home in bed.
Somehow this viewing has me feeling as if I’m seeing it for the first time. Maybe it’s that mid-movie focus, which has the effect of a freeze frame in the way it brings magnified attention to a particular scene. Or maybe in the years since I last saw the film, Mildred Pierce became overshadowed in my mind by the ‘Mommie Dearest’ Joan Crawford who brought her own brand of infamy to wire hangers. What I’m looking at here is simply a sympathetic mother who would, in the end, do anything for her daughter. Even after the verbal abuse she endures, she eventually finagles a way to get her daughter back.
All of which has me thinking about motherhood and mother love, not to mention how a scene from a movie can so powerfully evoke the memory of hearing a girl screaming at her mother for no reason I could comprehend.
Motherhood has the ring of something conferred. Like knighthood. Membership is automatic, dues paid in perpetuity.
Mother love tells a different story. It’s something both earned and given. It encompasses much more emotional complexity than a hashtag can convey. At its purest, it’s unconditional, a story played out again and again in those thousands upon thousands of #motherlove Instagram reels. More often than we like, it needs to be tough.
There is no substitute for the word ‘mother,’ just variations on a theme — mama, mom, mommy, along with a string of distinguishing terms — stepmother, biological mother, adoptive mother. As a verb, there’s more to the picture: mothering suggests nurturing, pampering, indulging, spoiling. Even the very act of giving birth to a child and raising her is subsumed in mothering. The antonym of mothering, says my thesaurus, is to neglect.
Then there’s love itself, which also encompasses caring for and doting but is also a word reminding us that tenderness and warmth, sacrifice, maybe even devotion, are within a mother’s domain.
Motherhood has all the weight of a collective noun. It happens to be an adjective as well, defined as “having or relating to an inherent worthiness, justness, or goodness that is obvious or unarguable.” If you belong to that collective, this has to bring a smile to your face. And here’s how it might be used in the way adjectives do their magic: legislation pushed through on a motherhood basis.
Mother love is something we grow into. We dole it out by choice or on an as-needed basis. It makes us gush with pride, offer advice, refrain from saying what may better be left unsaid.
If you’re lucky, like I am, you had a mother who dished out mother love in small and big ways — containers of leftovers from holiday meals for me to take back to my Manhattan apartment, inspirational notes and cards sent along with lottery tickets, a diamond pendant she spontaneously removed from her neck one day and gave to me. What she said was I don’t want to die for you to have this. I want to see it on you. I knew better. It was a talisman. I had recently had oral surgery that turned into a nightmare. I was single, I lived alone, she worried.
The diamond she gave me would become my daughter’s when she and her fiancé were looking for a ring. It was the perfect size and hue. I believe it was meant to be an engagement ring.
If you’re lucky, like I am, you have a daughter who tells you, without screaming, to back off. Sometimes I just can’t help myself, though I’m learning.
Sometimes I’m still the mother in Margaret Wise Brown’s classic children’s book, The Runaway Bunny. Doesn’t a young child, or even a grown one, finding her way in the world feel a little better knowing that whenever she veers off on some adventure, her mother, in tangible or intangible ways, is looking out for her?
Which might explain some of my empathy for Mildred Pierce. For all her business savvy, she is ultimately blindsided by the lengths she is willing to go to keep her daughter nearby. She wants to protect her at all costs. Whether Veda deserves this is beside the point. Ultimately, Mildred is forced to reckon with the places even a mother cannot go to save her child.
May, Isabel’s ailing mother, did not deserve the constant verbal abuse. Isabel’s father did what he could to defuse it but he was not a mother. He did not belong to the collective that kept an eye on all the children in our building, especially those of us whose mothers worked and were not always around when we got home from school.
If you’re lucky, like I am, you have a daughter who dishes out the daughter love in big and small ways. It was her idea to take a family trip to Iceland in September 2019, two months before I would turn 70 and comfortably before pandemic shit hit the fan.
A struggling writer in Hollywood, her days are currently spent picketing against the studios and streaming services that devalue the creative minds behind the shows and films responsible for their profits. I marvel at how she manages her anxieties about the uncertainty the strike adds to a career choice particularly riddled with uncertainties.
When she sends me an opinion piece about waste in the fashion industry and its impact on the environment, I pay attention. I count on her for advice on clean beauty products that are cruelty-free.
When she buys me a pretty Stella McCartney bra and bikini set following a breast biopsy that was negative, it brings new meaning to the turning of the tables, daughter taking care of mom. Another time, another health scenario, she reminds me that I need to tell her about things when they’re happening, not after the fact. How can she help but suspect that something’s up when I’m mysteriously unavailable by text or phone for hours? Don’t I know that? We laugh. Of course I do.
We both know the value of indulgence as distraction.
A text comes in from my daughter while I’m writing. She wants my input on a pair of jeans she’s thinking about buying.
I’m hungry, I text back. Need to eat.
Don’t worry, she responds. Code for it can wait or I’ll figure this out myself.
I text back: Funny you should say don’t worry when I’m smack in the middle of writing an essay on motherhood.
