A Woman Unto Herself
Exploring the raw nerved vulnerability of the late Gena Rowlands in her lesser known 1979 TV Movie "Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter".
The hardest lesson I learned as a girl was in realizing the mother I have will never be the mother I need. In many ways, this gap is the source of one of my original wounds.
As a child, I couldn’t fully know — or grapple with even if I did know — what it meant that my mother was barely in her thirties and was just coming out of her second marriage to my father that had curdled into physical abuse with two very young children, a lot of debt, the loss of her father, and the recent knowledge that she was adopted within the maternal side of her family. I couldn’t understand the reasons behind why mother’s taste shifted by the time I entered adolescence from science fiction and horror to the pablum meant to keep us all under the lull of romantic mythologies so sweet and frictionless they’re saccharine. I couldn’t grasp that the reason she was so emotionally selfish, so willing to test my loyalty to her, so eager to press the wounds she gave me around body image, self-worth, and abandonment was due to her own maladaptive response to a series of heartbreaking incidents in her life she was ill-equipped to handle. She was always desiring center stage even when the pain was mine to hold — my mind always goes to my second mental hospital stay at 17 where she visited me every day when visiting hours opened crying profusely every time. I never had a chance to speak.
All I knew in my youth was that I felt unloved, disrespected, and emotionally manipulated by her which has stretched into adulthood. For my mother I have been many things, but I have rarely felt like her child because she has long struggled to fully make room for the more prickly particulars of my humanity and relies on me to be the adult she should be. Too many people work out their wounds on and through their children. At least I had my grandmother, who would have been 101 this month if I hadn’t lost her a couple years ago. I think of her rough hands and I know for at least one stretch of my life I understood what it felt like to be unconditionally and wholly loved.
It took my mother becoming a caregiver for the last six years of my grandmother and Great Aunt Zeze’s lives for her to gain some self-awareness enough to start reckoning with her role in our now intimate but still barbed relationship. After closing a long conversation earlier last week my mother immediately called me back to say, “I really like the evolution of our relationship.” Even then, there are things she has done I have yet to forgive her for. Maybe, I never will. The evolution of a woman’s relationship with her mother is a ragged, unwieldy beast who has no master but its own beating heart. It’s rich psychological, aesthetic, and historical terrain that I wish more films would plunge into. When the passing of the titanic talent of the American independent scene, Gena Rowlands, was announced on August 14th my mind immediately went to her lesser known TV movie from 1979, Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter, that explores such terrain.