During a talk for my senior class about colleges, my English teacher said that he was tired of reading college essays about mothers as students’ role models. The typical essays about how hard mothers struggled to provide for their children made him bored. They became a cliché for him. He told us that we need to write more unique essays.
I’m an aspiring fiction writer. That is how I consider myself. I, more or less, chose to be this. I cannot envision myself as anything else. I wouldn’t be the best doctor. Nor baseball player. Nor lawyer. Nor plumber. (Even though there are occasions when my underwear is noticeable when I bend down.)
Writing is cathartic. Whenever I have to grapple with a difficult concept or feel a troubling emotion, I write to explore these feelings. In my African Science Fiction class, I read the afterword of Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild,” a story about insect-like aliens using men as hosts for their children. She wrote about her paranoia of botflies, an insect that can lays eggs inside wounds and then the larva can eat the flesh of the host, while she was doing research in the Amazon. While I read it, I realized that I related to Butler’s reaction to the botflies. Except, my emotions were the botflies.
Anyway, I’ve been writing stories for some time, and I noticed a distinctive trope that plagues my writing. In most of my stories, there is always a mother. That’s not necessarily strange. Characters usually have a mother or some type of maternal figure. That’s nothing new. But the mothers in my stories are my mother. My mother has become my model for struggling, immigrant mothers.
When I imagine my “mother” character in my head, I can see the same bags from lack of sleep above the same eyes that can glare with contempt. I can see the same wrinkles on the same forehead. I can see the same arms covered in scars and damaged skin. I can see the same lips can form into smiles or frowns.
I saw the characteristics of the mothers in my stories: a mother who migrated to the United States, usually Dominican, leaves her unfaithful husband, and struggles to be a mother and provider for her children. My mother has been a McDonald employee with a teenaged son. She has been a taxi cab driver who used to fly with a daughter who is in college. She has been a maid with a daughter and son. She has been jealous of her more Americanized, successful sister who is engaged to a white man. In the end of these stories, there is a melodramatic climax. Her children project their anger at her for being emotionally unsupportive. She hits them. They have a stare down. But as a final resolution, my mother and her children make up in a warm, teary embrace. The story always ends on a hopeful note.
That does not seem far from reality. My mother and I fight all the time, usually about trivial things. We’ll remain furious at each other until we make up in the end. And the cycle continues.
Most people say write about what you know, but I have become weary of writing about what I know. My mother appears again and again in my stories. I cannot get rid of her. Even when I plan that she will not appear, she does. Subconsciously, I project my feelings about my mother in my writing. After some time, this has become annoying. As a writer, I want to evolve and change, but I feel like I am stuck. Stuck in a theme. Stuck in the past.
Am I forever trapped writing about my mother or can I break free someday?
