The first time I wrote about my mother was while I was pregnant with our eldest child. I wrote a one-act play about our relationship and entered it into a local contest, winning a staged reading.
I remember sitting in the audience with my husband, waiting for the play to begin and not knowing what to expect. When I wrote it, I’d included as many real things my mother had said to me as I could recall. Mom was never one to pussyfoot around criticism, at least not with me, her only daughter. If she thought I was being stupid, she told me I was “bakatare,” slang for “idiot” (literal translation: ‘sh*thead). At various times, she also told me I looked fat, that my neck was unattractively wrinkled, and that my breasts were so large I’d soon look like my grandmother, who’d had six children and was in her 70s at the time.
Sometimes, my father would tell Mom she was being too hard on me. She denied it. “I’m her mother,” she replied. “A mother has to tell truth.” Somehow, she might have thought she was being helpful, probably more helpful than her own mother had been. I’m sure she thought I had it pretty easy compared to the life she had had; after all, I never had to live in a house with a dirt floor. Nobody ever shot at me or dropped bombs on my family.
While I wrote this play, I realized I was keeping quite a laundry list in my head of things she’d told me, things I’d replayed over and over in my head, a record that had not ended even with her death.
So there I was in the audience, her first grandchild kicking my stomach, waiting for my childhood to be purged onstage. Wondering if I’d burst into tears.
The lights came on and the actors began speaking.
“When I your age, I had 22 inch waist,” the actress playing my mother said sharply. “Not huge like you.” To my surprise, instead of crying, I laughed. Everyone laughed.
The words held no sting. Instead, it was hilarious. I did cry, but it was from laughing so much. It was like watching it happen to someone else altogether.
I was new to playwriting, and the scenes shifted too abruptly, ended before it needed to, which I could see when it was onstage. I knew I had to do more with the material, and eventually (two kids and one unsold other novel later) I decided to write, HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE (linked to Nancy’s review).
Here I was really able to dig into the mother-daughter relationship. Not just into the words, but into the character’s inner lives. Fiction writing made everything even more distant. I took the kinds of situations that had happened to me and reworked the, exorcising those demons of my relationship. The mother and daughter in the book became representations of me and my mother, not our actual selves. In their conversations, I tried to show the messages underlying their words. I don’t think the characters say what they actually mean until the end of the book, the end of their journeys.
For the first time, I slowly and seriously considered what my mother’s life had been before she had her family. I thought of her as a person. I imagined what it would have been like to come to this country, to teach herself the language. To be alone, stuck in the deep suburbs with no car and a serious heart defect.
At last, I was able to lay all our problems to rest. To stop dwelling on all personal hurts and think about how much she really did care for me.
Margaret Dilloway was inspired by her Japanese mother’s experiences when she wrote this novel, and especially by a book her father had given to her mother called The American Way of Housekeeping. Dilloway lives in California with her husband and three young children.