“I will never be like her”
I don’t remember the exact moment I looked at my mother and thought: “I will never be like her.”
But I know that these six words have long constituted a secret oath, like a parchment rolled into a tube and buried underground.
“I will never be like her”: the foundation of my relationship with my mother.
However, before those words, there had been childhood. Games, cuddles certainly, since there are still photos of them. There had been days at his work, spent drawing on bound printer sheets, in his orange-carpeted office, waiting to eat at the cafeteria and hesitating deliciously in front of the refrigerated appetizers. There had been afternoons in the forest, races at Du Pareil au Meilleur and La Clef des Marques, birthdays, certainly stories and songs. These memories resurface while writing and I found traces of them in my childhood notebooks. But normally, in the wild, they are submerged, almost inaccessible.
It was during adolescence that everything changed. When I noticed that my father talked a lot at the table and she said almost nothing. When I started thinking the words “strength” and “weakness” while looking at them. When I started to consider the outside as freedom, to leave my house like one catches one’s breath when emerging from water. It was then that the oath appeared: “I will never be like her”sitting silently in the kitchen, turned off at family meals, crushed by my father. “I will never be like her”: my emancipation would draw a straight line, which would distance me from the apartment, the family and the model offered by my mother.
Even in this era of speed and chaos, when my deepest motivations often remained obscure to me, I knew that I resented her all the more because she sent me back to my own constraints.
At 18, I left my parents’ house. At 20, I discovered politics, from the perspective of class struggle and not feminism (it was the time when people said: “I’m not a feminist but” and where the internet listed a total of four feminist groups in all of Paris). In a café, a Trotskyist friend said to me: “I always take the side of women, I believe that they do what they can, they often have no choice.” I had thought: “I will never take my mother’s side, she has given up, she is weak.” I was lost in just about every aspect of my life except one: I would never be like her.
Then that same year, my father died. Everything went adrift, my mother, me, our family structures and my relationship with my mother reared like a snake.
I remember a dream from this period: at the edge of a clearing, a rigid, tall and hieratic figure advances inexorably towards me, draped in yellowed lace. The face has the fixity of a mask, it continues to approach in the murky light and suddenly I recognize my mother. The threat from which we cannot escape: this is how my relationship with my mother appeared to me in these undermined years.
I didn’t tell him anything about my life: when I had an abortion at 22, I only told him once the operation was finished, for fear that his anxiety would infect me. I never had the idea of turning to her for advice or protection. In my eyes, she embodied anguish, worry, learned helplessness. Even in this era of speed and chaos, when my deepest motivations often remained obscure to me, I knew that I resented her all the more because she sent me back to my own constraints. To scream, to lose patience, was to scream at a desperate repetition from which I saw no way out. Very often I said to myself: “No relationship hurts me more than this one, but it’s the only one I can’t break off; I no longer have a father, I can’t no longer have a mother either.”
There were particular circumstances, forces working beneath the surface: an illness not yet diagnosed, anxieties not yet channeled. But the result was the same: a relational field bristling with broken glass. Our relationship revealed continents of rage and fury in me. I alternated between the duty to take care of her and the fierce desire to put as much distance between us as possible. His anxiety and fear sometimes took up so much space that in my diary, I began to call him “the obstacle”.
Often when we spoke on the phone, I would lose control, become obnoxious, react like an out of control teenager and a wounded beast. I hung up, trembling with rage and exhaustion. But no matter how much I went around in circles in this anger like a wild beast, I couldn’t get rid of it. “I have this image of two iron hands gripping my heart, I would like them to open, but I can’t”I said to a dear friend, after a particularly trying telephone discussion. Thoughtful and compassionate, this friend answered me: “She’s your mother, you have to forgive her everything.” I had thought: “In the name of what?”but I was silent.
If I had known that there were many stories of painful daughter-mother relationships that did not result in transgenerational sisterhood, I would have understood that I was neither alone nor above the fray.
My childhood friends mostly seemed to have enviable relationships with their mothers, capable and present mothers, attentive without being intrusive, to whom they could turn for help if they had problems. I didn’t envy them: we only envy what seems accessible and these relationships belonged to another world. My relationship with my mother was my hidden continent, my secret, the most sensitive and raw area of my being. It was my greatest vulnerability but also, I told myself, the source of my strength. In the hardest moments, I repeated it to myself like a mantra: “I am a warrior, warriors are forged in fire. This pain gives me access to knowledge and strength that those who have not gone through this ordeal will never be able to know.
Obviously, I was wrong. Today, I have less fascination with strength and I no longer believe in the myth of exceptionality. Thinking back to the young woman of the time who drew the strength to hold on, I tell myself that silence has perverse effects on our experiences. If I had read more stories at the time about the complexities of the relationship with our mothers, if I had known that there were many stories of painful daughter-mother relationships that do not lead to the celebration of transgenerational sisterhood, I would have understood that I was neither alone nor above the fray. Because if these feelings offer momentary armor, they provide no weapon, either to understand or to resist.
My relationship with my mother is better. These last few years have sometimes been difficult, but they have also brought peace. Some are surely due to the birth of my son, to the progression of an ongoing conversation between her and me, about the origins of her illness, the family structures she inherited. The moments of calm are getting longer and longer, even if I can’t yet settle in, take them for granted. It doesn’t take much to cause violence to resurface, but we can now manage to defuse it. Not always, but sometimes. And that in itself is a victory.
Contrary to what I thought for a long time, my story is very common, it embroiders a common motif in the lives of women. Feminist literature is full of these liberations won against mothers, which we measure intimately by the distance we have put between the life of our mother and our own. This tearing rarely takes the form of a clean cut, rather an uncauterized tear, a wound which always threatens to reopen. What the psychoanalyst Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, following Lacan, calls “a devastation”1. The term evokes ruined landscapes, jagged cliffs and burned houses, relentless destruction. But we also hear the word “shore”. In the devastation are combined infinite pain and the hope of arriving on solid ground, where we could finally rest.
I would like to question this “ravage”, look for how to explain it, but also how to get out of it. This is why I chose the word “forgive”: it is imperfect, I will talk about it in the section dedicated to it. But it resonates, I have observed it on numerous occasions, and it has the advantage of clearly stating, in terms as old and loaded as those of “mother” and “daughter”, the question that many women ask themselves: what to do with one’s relationship with one’s mother?
Each daughter-mother relationship is unique and this book does not imagine delivering turnkey solutions to resolve them. He hopes, on the other hand, to offer breathing space and open avenues.
When I began to want to elucidate this story, I was surprised to find few feminist texts on the difficulties of the daughter-mother relationship. This is what pushed me to write this one. I believe in feminist theory as something that helps us to live. I wish I had read this book twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, ten years ago, five years ago. I would buy it again in a bookstore.
To tell this collective story, the idea of a call for testimonies quickly emerged. With Victoire Tuaillon, we imagined a questionnaire. (…) We launched it in spring 2024 and we received more than 150 responses. (…) Of course, these testimonies contain obvious biases. (…)
This book does not claim to speak on behalf of all women, even less to exhaust the issue. It’s not a master key that could open all the doors, just a key in a bunch. If it seems incomplete to you, if it does not sufficiently reflect your experience, I hope it will make you want to write down what is missing.
It’s obvious, but let’s say it anyway: each daughter-mother relationship is unique and this book does not imagine delivering turnkey solutions to resolve them. He hopes, on the other hand, to offer breathing space and open avenues.
Naming an affect is like trying to lasso a wild beast: we try to immobilize it for a moment to have time to observe it, hoping that it will not devour us. We go around it, we try to understand how it works: we cannot yet tame it, but we calm it down a little. And when the time comes to let it return to its wild life, we hope to have learned enough to have developed weapons. In the hope that the next time he attacks us, the attack will be less violent and his claws will cut us less deeply.
I believe that liberations are acquired slowly, that they are woven with advances and setbacks, that they develop like lines of tension rather than escapes. But in my experience, incomplete and intermittent repairs are better than no repairs at all.
We publish an extract here.
