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With little risk of being wrong, I'll say, "Most women have an issue with their mothers." They may not have a big Oprah-show-worthy issue with Mom, maybe not even a priest or therapist-worthy issue, possibly not even a sleepless-night irritation, but somewhere deep in her soul, a woman has some kind of matter about mother that pricks her with questions: What does my mother's womanhood teach me or not teach me, and what does my mother's womanhood say about my womanhood?
Paraphrasing what I said to novelist and blogger Carleen Brice in a Blog Talk Radio interview, I think that even if our mother is ideal in our eyes, we may still have a problem: the fear we'll never be as perfect as we believe her to be or that she seems to believe herself to be.
Brice's first novel, Orange Mint and Honey (One World/Ballantine, 2008, paperback, 324 pp.) is about a mother-daughter relationship, one with a painful history and uncertain future. It's a story of a woman in her twenties growing up after she thought she was grown as she learns to forgive so she can move forward. It's a compelling tale that's gone from book to film. It is now the movie Sins of the Mother, starring singer and actress Jill Scott, and it premieres Sunday night, Feb. 21, at 8:00 p.m. ET and 5:00 p.m. PT on the Lifetime Movie Network.
Scott plays Nona, a recovered alcoholic who's busy being a better mother to her three-year-old daughter than she ever was to her adult daughter, graduate student Shay Dixon (Nicole Beharie). And there's the salt in Shay's wound. She remembers not having a mother, resents raising herself. After sinking into a depression that put completing her graduate work on hold, she returns home. There she discovers that she is jealous of her little sister, Nona's child by a man Shay doesn't know. Shay doesn't have minor mother-daughter issues. She has epic mother-daughter drama.
Brice says she doesn't believe she consciously chose the mother-daughter conflict theme when she wrote Orange Mint and Honey.
(It's possibly) from my upbringing. My parents were teenagers when they got pregnant with me and got married and like a lot of people, I had some issues with my mom even though we were very close and there was a lot of love there ... there were also some issues. So, I think how you choose a subject ... I really suspect that it's the other way around. The subject chose me.
She was nearly 43 when she finished Orange Mint and Honey, and yet, while the book is not about her relationship with her mother, it was this archetypal conflict that surfaced in her work, and Brice thinks she knows why.
(The mother-daughter tie) is your first relationship. So much of growing up is separating from that person, from your mother and individuating yourself. So, I think what a lot of women end up doing is saying in order to be myself these are the parts of where I came from, of my mother, that I'm going to take with me, and then these are the parts that I'm going to be different from.
It becomes sort of struggle, very subconsciously, to try to model yourself based on what came before you but also have your separateness too. It's such a primary force between you and the person who carried you in her womb and gave you life. Then you have to spend the rest of your time trying to be like and different from that person. I think a lot of women spend a lot of effort trying to balance all that.
To find that balance, Shay must overcome her resentment, and Brice says she relates to the need to forgive and overcome negative emotions, not because of what she experienced with her mother as much as what she experienced with her father.
She is a child of divorce who says she held anger toward her father. But after her mother died of breast cancer, Brice made a decision to forgive him and let the only parent she had be the parent in her life. She said her father came to her and her sibling, apologized and asked forgiveness, but she was not willing to grant it for a long time. Finally, however, she did.
You can listen to the full interview
