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Twenty years ago, when I was 10, my mom died of colon cancer. That’s how I like to tell people: as quickly as possible. I say it before I know them. I say it as fast as I can, usually shoving a second topic into the same sentence. My mom died when I was 10 — what have you been reading lately? My mom died when I was 10 — do you want to order another round? I’ve said it on first dates and in job interviews. I say it as fast as I can because I can’t stand the face people make. Their eyes get a little wider, their eyebrows raise and reach toward each other, their mouths tug down just the slightest bit. They pity. Their faces say, “Oh, honey,” and I want to bolt, so I bolt past that part of the conversation. They always make the same face; I have learned how to make that face disappear as quickly as possible.

But there is another face, sometimes. I recognize other “dead mom kids” almost instantly. They don’t pity — they laugh. They raise their hand for a high five. They respond with, “Mine too!” and my whole body relaxes. 

In writing, I have found more and more dead mom kids. (You’re a dead mom kid no matter how old you were when your mother died, by the way.) I was in a slam poetry club in college and performed pieces about my mom’s death, hoping that I wouldn’t have to tell all my new college friends individually. Ideally they would come to a slam and get the information they needed but they couldn’t ask any questions, and I wouldn’t be able to see their faces. But in the poetry group, I was one of many who had lost a parent. I didn’t have to talk about the loss with them — I could just talk about the writing. Years later, I attended a writing conference and read part of an essay about my mom after a poet read a dead mom poem and before a fiction writer stood up to say, “I guess I’ll do dead mom stuff, too!” 

With writers, I can laugh about grief. There are so many of us, and we are so used to searching for the right words for it, a shorthand comes easily. No grief is alike — even when I meet people whose moms died when they were young, of cancer, our griefs are completely different. I have never read anything that got it exactly right, but I have read plenty that reminds me that I’m not alone. That it is, really, a club, and no matter the specifics of our loss, we all share a language. 

The essays in this list attempt to answer questions or explain something about the feeling of being a dead mom kid. If you’re not in the club, may they function as an interpreter. If you are, I hope you recognize something of yourself somewhere in here. I hope you know we speak your language, too.

Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead? (Sarah Boxer, The Atlantic, July/August 2014)

Too many times to count, I have been in the middle of watching a children’s movie with a friend who turns to me to say, “I never noticed how often the mom dies in these movies!” Perhaps they only noticed because they’re next to me. I never notice it; I just expect it. I anticipate it so well that if I’m in a movie theater, I try to spot the other members of the club: who drops their M&Ms, who carefully searches for the perfect kernel of popcorn for as long as the mom is dying on screen. In “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead,” Sarah Boxer deep-dives into the history of dead mom narratives. In fiction, dead moms go as far back as 9th century China. Boxer traces the dead mother plot through animated movies of the 2000s, offering a why for this constant assault of dead moms. She notices that in many of these dead mother movies, the single father becomes an almost supernaturally perfect dad, and reminds us that in 2014, only 8% of households were led by single fathers. Boxer’s analysis is wide-reaching and thorough. She treats the dead-mom-in-movies phenomenon as questionable instead of a given, a choice instead of a necessity in the genre, and flawed instead of natural.

And yet, in this medium where the creators have total control, we keep getting the same damned world—a world without mothers. Is this really the dearest wish of animation? Can mothers really be so threatening?

Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner, The New Yorker, August 2018)

Our mothers are often our introduction to food: They feed us first, and they choose what kinds of food to put in front of us. Michelle Zauner explores the connection between food and grief, and how certain foods connect her to the memory of her mother. Zauner is a writer and musician who fronts Japanese Breakfast and “Crying in H Mart” is the opening essay of her 2021 memoir of the same name. Zauner is half Korean; her mother was and is her connection to her Korean identity. Food is the bridge between Zauner and her mother: “I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.” Zauner captures the sometimes illogical nature of crying over loss: She can calmly describe her mother’s cancer but cries wandering the aisles of H Mart, the supermarket chain specializing in Asian foods. At H Mart, Zauner is removed from her life in Philadelphia, partially because these stores are far from city centers, but also because she is surrounded by reminders of her mother and by others searching for a reminder of people and places that are far away. She shows the power of food to connect us to the people we have lost, especially our mothers, who feed us from the start and shape our relationship to food.

H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.

Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

Messages (Morgan Talty, The Sun, September 2022)

Mothers leave notes. They leave voicemails, they slip scraps of paper into your lunchbox. When they’re gone, it seems unbelievable that their messages are gone too. My own mother tried to write me and my brother letters while she was sick, but they made her cry, and crying made her fall asleep. When Morgan Talty’s mother was alive, she recorded voicemails and wrote notes that revealed her mood, whether she was safe. He knew her by the notes she gave him. In “Messages,” Talty shows how much grief lives in the moment conversations become one-sided. He listens repeatedly to the 60 voicemails from his mother he has on his phone. He searches and searches for a final word from his mother, and then he finds it. He’s right to predict that I would be jealous of his story, but he also captures something essential about mother death: Once they’re gone, we are desperate for any trace of them at all. It seems impossible that just because they are gone, they can no longer communicate with us. Whether we find a final message or not, we search for one.

Mom could kick your ass with her words, spoken or written, but she could also heal you. I still have every letter she wrote me, and when she left this earth, I went through them all — each scrap of paper she had given to me or that I had plucked from her apartment while cleaning it with my sister — looking for something, anything, from her to tell me where she’d gone. Because she was good like that.

In My Mother’s Shoes (Meghan O’Rourke, Harper’s Bazaar, May 2012)

Meghan O’Rourke’s 2011 memoir The Long Goodbye details the death of her mother, and her subsequent realization that on a societal level, we are not equipped to properly grieve. Nothing prepares us, even when a mother is sick for a while. And then, we are on our own, with only their leftover objects to feel them close to us. O’Rourke’s essay “In My Mother’s Shoes” describes how much those objects — gifts she gave before she died, a scent she used, a scarf she wore years ago — can function as a bridge between the living and the person who is gone. Putting on her mother’s clothes is an adult game of dress-up for O’Rourke, as she simultaneously tries to wear her mother’s responsibilities, like picking up new socks when her brother forgets to pack them. She shows the weight that these objects take on once their owner is gone, and the process of deciding which objects are the ones that matter enough to keep. 

If it breaks my heart that I can no longer learn about my mother’s life by asking her questions, it helps in those moments to have touchstones of hers around me, to look at, to wrap myself in. The ordinary beauty of a pair of earrings or a scarf, the utility of these things remind me of my mom, talismans that bring me real solace.

What a Ghost Sounds Like (Maggie Grimason, Ploughshares, September 2021)

Maggie Grimason’s father died when she was 8. Years later, the news of Notre Dame burning interrupted her mother’s funeral. In Grimason’s essay “What a Ghost Sounds Like,” the fire in Paris could only be connected to her mother’s death. Notre Dame was discussed with a distinct “before” and “after,” the same absolute and irrevocable splicing of time that happens when a mother dies. Nothing could be, or sound, the same. After her father’s death, Grimason listened to a tape recording of his voice saying just one phrase. Her essay explores sounds, how sound remembered can never be exact, how the bells of Notre Dame can never sound the same again, how her father’s voice can’t be identical to that recording, or her memory of the recording. Sound is connected to the ghost she saw as a child, and to grief, and to fear. She wants to write in order to remember the people she has lost, but writing can’t help us remember what it all once sounded like.

People love to say, That’s just a coincidence. Those words try to pare down the event while simultaneously acknowledging—and brushing off—its meaning. Empty or not, the poetry of Notre Dame burning, the steeple falling—we watched it again and again.

And as I watched, heavy with the grief of losing my mother, I thought Good, or at least, That makes sense.

Claire Hodgdon is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator with an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has been published in journals Pidgeonholes and HAD and nominated for a Best of the Net award. She is working on her first book, an essay collection about the aftermath of loss at a young age. Find her at www.clairehodgdon.net or on Twitter @claire_hodgdon.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy-editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Proud, bold, feminine yet threatening, and frequently touting alcohol use and caffeine dependency, the slogans American mothers plaster on their shirts, mugs, and sweaters broadcast their identities as exhausted super-women, as well as their need for recognition and connection. For The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino explores what she calls “sassy mom merch,” which has proliferated in our era of Etsy, Amazon, and social media, but whose spirit Tolentino recognizes from her years eating at Cracker Barrel as a Texas youth. Where does the desire to wear the slogan “This mom runs on caffeine, wine, and Amazon Prime” come from? What does this #momlife phenomenon say about being a woman in America? As one successful t-shirt maker told Tolentino, “When you put out a little signal on a shirt, like, ‘I’m struggling too,’ it starts a conversation. Anytime I wear something like that, I always have people comment, or I get those random smiles. It’s sort of like when you’re nursing in public: someone gives you a smile and a thumbs-up, and you know you’re O.K.”

Social media exacerbates two competing impulses in the performance of one’s everyday self: aspiration and honesty. Women, in particular, find these impulses rewarded on the Internet, where the ever-present cultural interest in female desirability and failure—in encouraging women to balance atop pedestals in part because it is satisfying to watch them fall off—is codified in the form of public comments and likes. My colleague Carrie Battan recently wrote about the rise of the “getting real” moment for Instagram influencers, in which women who have built their public identities on meeting an ideal version of womanhood offer a moment of catharsis to their audience: all of this is constructed, they say, and it’s anxiety-inducing, and there’s so much that you don’t see. But this form of expression doesn’t seem to cut back on aspiration so much as complicate it—women are now encouraged to be both very perfect and very honest at once.

The mom-centric Internet has been working out this tension for almost two decades: so-called mommy bloggers turned aspirational honesty into a profitable genre long before Instagram existed. (Quite a few of the best-known mommy bloggers have since upended the lives that looked so perfectly-imperfect-but-mostly-really-perfect, getting divorced, or leaving their religion, or both.) Social media and smartphones have brought motherhood real talk to minimally hierarchical online spaces, such as Facebook groups and messaging apps like Marco Polo. “People ask for support, people talk about things that might be embarrassing elsewhere,” Heather Plouff, an Etsy seller in New Hampshire and a mother of three, told me. “The hashtag #momlife is this big community, where we’re all a little sassy, and we love our children, but we also know that children can be a real pain in the ass.”

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Sara Fredman | Longreads | July 2019 | 9 minutes (2,492 words)

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

Golden Age antihero plots were inextricably tied to marriage and the family. Women were often written as villains, antagonists to their husbands who were humanized by the way they loved and provided for their families, no matter the means. Parenthood in particular fulfilled another key requirement for the success of an antihero show: the perfect balance of power and powerlessness the antihero had to maintain in order to retain our sympathy. There is nothing quite like parenting children to make a person feel like a superhero one moment and dust in the wind the next.

New to this series? Start with “The Blaming of the Shrew,” which explores Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

But the antiheroes we’ve rooted for over the past 20 years were almost all dads and it is often the idea of parenting, rather than its reality, that plays such a critical role in making those antiheroes compelling despite their moral and ethical shortcomings. Children were invoked as the motivation for the bad things that antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Walter White did but those characters were rarely shown actively engaged in the mundane tasks of parenting. In this we might identify a commonality with the use male politicians make of their parenthood. “Fatherhood for male politicians,” as Rebecca Traister writes, “so far has, for the most part, worked only as a bonus. … at its best, presenting publicly as a committed father has offered an opportunity for men who otherwise cast themselves as tough and authoritative to demonstrate their tender side.” Parenthood does not serve the same function, Traister argues, for women in politics. Women running for office walk a tightrope when it comes to their relationship to motherhood: “Everything associated with motherhood has been coded as faintly embarrassing and less than — from mom jeans to mommy brain to the Resistance. And yet to be a bad mom has been disqualifying, and to not be a mom at all is to be understood as lacking something: gravity, value, femininity.” Whether a woman is fulfilling her domestic responsibilities, be they real or imagined, is applied as a key evaluation of her candidacy. For politicians and would-be female antiheroes, it is possible that satisfactory performance of motherhood is too high a threshold to successfully clear.

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And indeed, on shows about women who did bad things that aired around the same time as The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, motherhood was far from humanizing. Nancy Botwin, Weeds’ pot-dealing suburban widow, was excoriated and named TV’s worst mom. Her husband, conveniently dead when the show begins, is the saint to Nancy’s hot mess. Nurse Jackie’s Jackie Peyton is a drug addict who is very good at her job — so far, so good — but we turn against her as we see her disappoint her children time and again. It doesn’t matter that she is a more involved parent than Don Draper and Tony Soprano combined. Jackie’s husband Kevin is portrayed as long-suffering and worthy of our sympathy. Why does he stay with her? we wondered. Until he left, at which point we agreed that it made eminent sense. We didn’t so much root for these women as wait for them to finally fall apart completely. They were not privy to the precise calibration of their male counterparts and the fact of their motherhood detracted from their humanity rather than highlighting it.

I’m open to being surprised by a female Walter White but, in the meantime, we must consider the possibility that creating a difficult character who is also a mom requires a different kind of show. Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, a half-hour show in the vein of Louie, lays bare all that is expected of mothers and all the ways in which they can fail, while compelling us to root for the mother at its center. (Louis CK collaborated with Adlon on seasons one and two of Better Things; she cut ties with him when sexual misconduct allegations against him became public in 2017.) It is a show about the realities of motherhood and its difficult mom is neither beatified nor villainized. If the genius of The Sopranos was importing the mafia genre into the domestic sphere, Better Things is here to tell us that the mobsters were extraneous and that the domestic has a drama all its own.

It is hard to overstate how groundbreaking it is to portray a mother as both flawed and the protagonist of her story. The genius of Better Things lies in the way it hijacks the formula that made us root for bad men and uses it to make a hero out of a mother. As a working actor who isn’t a celebrity, Adlon’s Sam Fox is certainly a small player trying to make it in a much bigger game. We see her doing voice-overs for cartoons and pharmaceutical commercials, being passed over for a lead television role in favor of a younger actress, and waiting in line to use the porta potty on the set of a zombie movie. She is ambitious but we often see her stymied by industry roadblocks in spite of her talent.

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Following the antihero script, Adlon surrounds her alter ego with other flawed people meant to elicit our sympathy despite her “difficult” persona. There are plenty of clueless men and sexist Hollywood executives, annoying fellow parents, but also Sam’s actual family members. My husband thinks that Sam’s kids, who seem to be always yelling at her or asking her for money, are the villains of the show. I think this means that either he considers his own kids to be villains or he doesn’t spend enough time with them. Of course, what seems hideous in other people’s children is often deemed adorable or quirky in one’s own. If Better Things does have a villain, it is Sam’s ex-husband, who lives off of her money and regularly disappoints her daughters. Being surrounded by more unlikable people is important because, while Sam is not a mob boss or a murderous Machiavellian queen, she is not a straightforward hero. She is, rather, the kind of mundane version of the antihero popularized by Louis CK, the kind of woman we might call “difficult” or “rough around the edges.” She can be abrasive and antisocial; she’s not very nice to her mother. This is the way men have been allowed to be unlikable for a long time.

“Mother/Russia” and “And What of My Wrath?” examine two very different mothers in “The Americans” and “Game of Thrones.”

Better Things may have the same brand of relatable protagonist as Louie but in focusing on Sam as mother, Adlon’s show parts ways with CK’s show. Louis CK used his kids as a means of telling a story about himself; fatherhood was just one of a number of arenas in which he was fumbling and falling short. If we rooted for him, it was because we could tell he was trying, and because the stand-up vignette with which every episode began reminded us that there was a very funny man behind it who could view it all somewhat objectively and didn’t necessarily take any of it too seriously. Better Things takes Sam’s motherhood very seriously. The special skill that compels us to root for her is not, in the end, her day job but mothering, which she makes clear is very much full-time work. The show’s greatest achievement is, perhaps, that we root for her to succeed as a mother.

Sam doesn’t just mother her biological children. Better Things is a portrait of a woman who mothers people wherever she goes. Sam calls out the irresponsible director of her zombie movie for the bad conditions on set (“This is a job and people aren’t being taken care of”). When a formerly judgmental fellow mom breaks down and tells her that she “can’t do it,” Sam switches from defense to offense: “Honey, it’s OK, it’s OK, I can’t do it either. You don’t have to do it, you don’t have to. You just — you get up and you do your best.” There is a way in which this scene alone encapsulates what it means to be an antihero. Why do we care about creating an antihero who is a woman? It’s not because we need the female equivalent of Tony Soprano or Don Draper but because antihero shows mirror our own complexities, albeit dramatized and hyperbolized. But having only some kinds of complexities mirrored and not others reinforces the already strong cultural messaging about who is allowed to be flawed and who isn’t. To do this for a woman who is a mother is nothing short of extraordinary. Mothering is my superpower, Adlon seems to be saying, and it can be yours, too.

Season two featured an episode called “Eulogy,” in which Sam, fed up that her kids won’t watch one of her movies, demands that they eulogize her (“I don’t want to have to wait ‘til I’m dead for my kids to appreciate me!”). When they refuse (“Mom, you’re being dramatic”; “Mom, you’re, like, traumatizing us right now”), she storms out of the house. When she returns, the kids and two of her friends have set up a funeral complete with photos and votives. They each take turns eulogizing Sam, for better and worse. “Sam was an unhinged, complicated woman,” her friend Rich begins, “she lied a lot. … she was the rudest, most inappropriate woman I’ve ever met.” But her friend and agent, Tressa, adds that Sam is “the best mother I ever saw.” Her two older children, who had earlier railed against their mother for being a “drama queen” who “acts like a child,” are uncharacteristically vulnerable and emotionally expressive. “My mom was my rock,” her middle daughter Frankie says, “every day of my life I wake up and I feel bad, I feel like I’m not going to get through this day, just with all this stuff that’s in my own head. And as soon as I see, would see her in the morning, I would unload on her … because I needed to give her some of my pain because I knew she could carry it when I couldn’t.” “She’s my mother,” her oldest daughter Max says, “I learned from her how to be a woman and how to be a person.” On Golden Age antihero shows, children gradually open their eyes to how bad their dads are; on Better Things the revelation is that Sam is actually doing a great job with her kids.

The episode is emblematic of what makes Better Things so good. What could have provided evidence of Sam as a flawed, petulant parent and her kids as impertinent brats becomes a meditation on what we ask of mothers. When Sam brings up how many of her kids’ performances and games she’s been to, how she showers them with praise, and asks why they won’t do the same for her, we’re with Frankie, at whose retort (“Because you’re the adult, Sam, and we are the children”) we can’t help but nod our heads. But Sam’s vulnerability, her insistence that “it also hurts my feelings that my work means nothing to you,” insists on her own personhood. It reminds us how easy it is to hate on a mother because of our cultural expectation that mothers relinquish their wants and needs at the door to labor and delivery. We might think about how we would probably hate any mother if we had to watch even one whole day of her life because no one can do this job with grace 24/7.

A previous discussion of Ozark and House of Cards focuses on Wendy Byrde and Claire Underwood.

It’s impossible not to compare Better Things’eulogy scene with the (also brilliant) “Free Churro” episode of Bojack Horseman, which is 26 minutes of Bojack eulogizing his mother. He is the antihero, the flawed guy we root for in spite of the shitty things he does. The eulogy is meant to humanize him, to show us that he has not been properly mothered. This is a common complaint of the antihero. Beatrice Horseman isn’t completely villainized; previous seasons offered a number of flashbacks that suggested she herself had endured trauma and parental malpractice. But this is Bojack’s show, and the point of his eulogy is that Beatrice is a Betty Draper: Her job was to make him feel loved and she failed. It reminds us — as do Betty Draper and Skyler White and Wendy Byrde and people who want to run for office but happen to be mothers — that mothers make for easy villains when you’re only hearing one side of the story. Mothers don’t stand a chance against the antiheroes we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on television. Turning a mother into a three-dimensional character requires that we take her seriously as a person, in all of her complexity.

In its most recent season, Better Things gives us a possible metaphor for moving past our cultural fixation with difficult dads to something no less complex and compelling. In episode 11, Sam brings in a medium to help her daughters deal with their belief that the ghost of Sam’s father is haunting their house. “I couldn’t help but notice that this house is filled with women,” the medium says before noting that he nevertheless feels a strong masculine presence. “What you’re sensing,” Sam’s mom Phyllis interjects, “is the deadbeat father, Sam’s ex-husband.” When the medium advises them to move past the toxic people in their lives, Max asks, “How do you move past a dad?”

If you are, like me, asking how we move past the tortured dad as celebrated protagonist, Better Things offers a possible answer. The show is not a riff on the antihero show so much as it is an antidote to it. It transposes the premise of the complicated protagonist working hard for his family to a place where it could have flourished all along: motherhood. Male antiheroes talk about doing things for their family, but we see Sam doing the highly unglamorous work of raising one — making dinner (she’s always cooking) and shopping for school supplies and endlessly driving her kids from place to place; every season has at least one scene of Sam plunging a toilet. “I wish for one boring day,” Sam says in the pilot. Unlike the male antihero, this mom doesn’t have to go looking for thrills. Here the nagging wife and mother is not the antagonist but the hero we root for. The show doesn’t remove the nagging — it leans into it and recasts it as understandable and relatable and likable. Her flaws give her depth instead of providing the evidence we use to define and condemn her.

What would our political landscape look like if we thought of women in this way? What would the world look like if the mom reminding you to be a decent person didn’t have to be a saint herself? The truth is that Better Things does this, in part, by exiling the men. The show strips away heteronormativity in order to make a mother into a person. But the question remains: Is this the only way?

* * *

In the next installment, we explore HBO’s Succession in The World’s Tallest Dwarf.

Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards
Mother/Russia
And What of My Wrath?

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

They had a small inkling of what they wanted to do. At the time, flash-sale startups like Gilt were just beginning to make some noise, and Cavens and Vadon seriously considered aping the model for the home and beauty space (a la One Kings Lane) before scrapping the idea. “What we came to realize in the health and beauty space, there’s a lot of vendor concentration,” Cavens says. “Many of the top 50 brands are owned by three large companies. If you don’t have the supply there, it’s hard to go after.” They ruled out fashion as well because they deemed it too unwieldy. “What we felt like there is you couldn’t control the supplier dynamics if you’re going after high fashion,” he says, especially “if you were trying to get new freshness every day.”

As they tell it, they decided to focus on boutique products for young moms shortly after Vadon and his wife, who at the time was five months pregnant, made their first trip to Babies “R” Us. Overwhelmed by the mountain of crap that young parents never knew they needed, they made one loop through the store and headed for the exit to get lunch.

The experience would prove to not so much be a moment of clarity as a conversation starter. Vadon brought the ovum of his mom-driven business to Cavens, and they soon realized that the total addressable market for new mothers was both underserved and enormous: Some 4.5 million kids are born in the U.S. every year, and the only discount retailers in the space were, like, T.J. Maxx. If they could subvert a legacy diamond seller like Tiffany & Co., they could do something here. In mid-2009 they chose the name “Zulily” with the help of a branding agency because it was easy to say and just as important, it wouldn’t limit what they could sell. (Some of the too-cute runner’s-up included: ItsyBtsy, Tumble Up, Tip Toe, Katroo, Toodle, and Pitter-Patter.)

And so, two new dads began building an online retail store for new mothers.

—Chris Gayomali writing about the e-commerce company Zulily for Fast Company.

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It takes us a long time, as children, to get outside of ourselves and realize our parents have lives outside the scope of us. Not just lives before us, or lives after we move out, but wholly private lives that run concurrent with our own upbringing.

As her daughter, it took me nearly 20 years not to pity my mother’s “otherness.” She stopped pitying it herself a long time ago.

It’s taken me longer, still – until writing these words, actually – to develop admiration for the way she turned her seclusion and separation into not just a tool, but a blueprint for that tool; there were other women out there, who also didn’t have anyone to go to, and so she would use her resources to help them.

–Haley B. Elkins, in xoJane (2013), reflecting on her mother’s work helping abused women. Read more on our Mother’s Day reading list.

Photo: sidelong, Flickr