Title: My Evil Mother
Author(s) Name(s): Margaret Atwood
Published in: April, 2022
Why You Might Like This Book: Read this book if you enjoy
- family-centirc plots,
- mother-daughter relationships,
- bittersweet parent-child relationships, and
- silly and satirical humour.
Who Should Avoid This Book: Avoid this book if you are triggered by or dislike
- controlling parents,
- neglectful parents,
- alcohol addiction, or
- cancer.
This is a super-short story written by Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale. There are no names for any of the main characters, and there are not many of them. The whole story is written in first person, has many funny and silly references to witchcraft and paranormal life, but it mostly explores the relationship between a single mother and her daughter with a feminist touch (of course, this is Atwood, so that goes without saying!).
In this coming-of-age story, a daughter lives with her mother in the post-war times in Toronto, a time and a place where most families in the neighbourhood were old-style couples with children, with only their fathers being employed and their mothers being housewives. But her mother was a rarity; she had neither a husband nor a job but some means of income. Now and then some visibly distressed women would come over to see her mother, she would make tea for them, scan their faces, and talk to them.
Her mother did not have any friends either, even though she was a kind woman who would help the sick and those who needed help or pet a dog or a cat. She would often catch her mother grinding something or the other in her mortar or Mixmaster, through her good moods and bad moods, and what her mother was doing there is something she never got to know. Those women must have received some useful advice but there was more than just advice, some liquid or paste she ground from the herbs in their garden? Her mother would also get bright, strange clothes for herself and her, but how could she get those when she never went shopping, like all other mothers did? Her mother was quite a clever woman and had her own secrets, but she could never figure out what they were.
She had called her mother crazy, mean, evil, and all that, and her mother would not deny nor take hurt. She had had many arguments with her mom, she wouldn’t win any, and sometimes, she had to agree with her mom. That day, the topic was Brian – her boyfriend. Her mother had been telling her to break up with him because “the universe does not like him”. Her mother had read his Tarot cards, then confidently kept saying that she cannot be with him because he will die in an accident, and she does not want her daughter to be with him during that disaster. On the other hand, he might live if she left him.
Her mother had some influence over the universe, her mother could control things, her mother could get certain things and keep certain things away. She grew up watching and learning to believe this to be true, but also hoping none of it would be true. Her mother knew what she was doing, and she was often correct, but there were rumours in her school, among her peers, that her mother was crazy. She had to end it with Brian because her mom insisted, and this was when she was fifteen. Against her will, she did cut it off with her then boyfriend, wishing she could get him back. Several years later, not exactly like her mother predicted, but still, Brian died a sad death, so maybe her mom was right!
Later, when she was twenty-three, her father, who had deserted them when she was pretty young, turned up, and wrote a letter to her. But by this time, she had moved out of her mother’s house, managed to make a small living for herself, living with a couple of other roommates. She was angry with her father, but she did not want to contact her mother either – she had left her mom on not so good terms because her mother was “crazy”, and she arranged to meet her dad. There are unpleasant, bitter truths she learns. None of which her mom would have told herself. One of those being that he left them because her mom kicked him out. The father and the daughter met a few times without the mother’s knowledge.
Years later, when she was married and had kids of her own, her father had passed away due to cancer. The mother and the daughter did attend the funeral but she still was not on good terms with her mother. When she birthed her first child, her mother paid a visit, and she said and did her “crazy” things, which annoyed her. She knew that as a mother herself, she would do everything within her power to keep her children away from her mother. Her own father had warned her to not let her mom get the better of her.
But when her father died, she saw her mother crying for the first time. She was no longer herself. Her tough mother was growing weaker and weaker, so she would pay visits to her often. The stories would be the same more or less, about her high-school gym teacher always attempting to hurt her and her children, which is why her mom would feel the need to protect them. But the stories also got “crazier”: the mother told her that her high-school gym teacher and she have been rivals for four-hundred years now. They fought over a man, and that lady “used him” and “stole his penis”, which of course was later given abck to him when complaints were raised. This was a different level, from the kind of stories she grew up listening, about father being a garden gnome or their fridges being full of cans of weird herbs and potions.
Crazy or not, as a daughter, a loving daughter, she would keep the talk going. The more she asked and spoke, the weirder her mother’s stories got. Finally, she had to be hospitalized. At the hospital, she sat beside her mother, asking if any of that was real. her mother asked if she felt protected. She did feel protected, yes, but her mother still wouldn’t admit that any of those weird stories were made up.
Finally, in the present, one of her daughters wants to go out for a run with a guy in the dark. As a mother, she feels the need to intervene and stop her fierce, bold daughter from going out in the dark with that guy. The mother and daughter get into a fight, with the daughter refusing to listen to the mom. Times have changed, language and culture have changed, dressing styles have changed, what’s considered normal has changed, but a mother is a mother. A mother’s love does not change. She tells her daughter that her own mother was a witch, which gets her daughter’s attention. If that’s what it takes to protect her daughter, she will do it.
“My Evil Mother” is an amusing, light-hearted short story that narrates the experiences of being a daughter, in first person, as she grows up, with her mother always being there, many a times, in controlling ways, while also giving her all the love possible, in her own weird ways, and how the daughter grows up to be a mom, finding herself being just as protective over her child as her mother was with her.
