Twenty years ago, on a scorching winter night, I turned on the television and saw a scene I had never seen before. It was a mother and daughter teasing each other like sisters. Someone I shared confidence with like a friend. People who accept each other for who they are, rather than seeing their differences as flaws.
I’m talking about Gilmore Girls, of course.
“Mother” and “daughter”. Those words meant something completely different to me than they did to Lorelai or Rory. Because, as you know, my own mother bore an uncanny resemblance to Lorelai’s mother, Emily. My mother had Emily’s huge dark eyes, impossibly high cheekbones, helmet-like hair, and love of department stores. Emily’s pleated pants, tailored blouse, and St. John’s suit could have been found in her mother’s closet.
But most importantly, my mother shared Emily’s clearly defined expectations for her children and her cold, rigid ideas about appropriate behavior, dress, grooming, and occupation. Acceptable dinner conversation: School, work, and travel plans. Available fabrics: cashmere, wool, silk. When I was young, I suggested to my mother that we go camping. “Animals sleep outside,” she answered. “People sleep in hotels.” When I was in 11th grade, my mother encouraged me to drop my best friend because she wore a translucent skirt without a slip.
In other words, the world that Lorelai ran away from may have been my world, centered around social rules, with no room for even the slightest emotion.
Midway through the first season, Emily says to Lorelai, “You always let your emotions get in the way. That’s your problem, Lorelai. You’re not thinking.” In short: was my mother’s problem with me. “Mom, please,” Lorelai begs gently, asking her mother to see things from her perspective, to see her mother fall in love, be disappointed, sad, excited. I beg you to forgive me. We see that decisions can be made based on emotional inclinations rather than societal expectations. I have also heard those exact words. Not for a while though. I had given up on my mother, just like Lorelai before the show started.
That same year, as a 28-year-old New Yorker, I made fundamental changes to my life. I stopped going to dinner parties just because they were expected of me and started thinking about both my ambitions and my whirlwind. Treat your emotions as an asset, not a flaw. I also started thinking about what it means to be a mother. I’ve been married for two years and have fended off pressure from my husband, my parents, and the world to have a baby. Partly because I felt like a child still in the shackles of my mother’s judgment, and partly because I was a child myself. Unlike me, she did not understand how to be a mother.
But suddenly I realized that a different style of mothering was possible. Lorelai was a parent who allowed her children to be their true selves, responded warmly, and never lost her sense of humor even in the most difficult moments.
Seven years later, while my first child slept in his toddler bed, I watched the final season of Gilmore Girls. A year later, my daughter was born, and I rewatched the entire series from beginning to end, sometimes as I let my daughter fall asleep in my arms, thinking about the kind of mother I wanted to be.
Years passed and my children grew into teenagers like Rory. He was a precocious reader and writer, a cheerful companion, and a caring friend. One evening, as we sat on the big shabby couch, which looked like Lorelai’s big shabby couch, I thought to myself, unusually, that I had made it. I have developed a style of motherhood that is different from the motherhood that I was raised with.
Following this, I thought again. I mean my kids were old enough to watch Gilmore Girls.
So we started, the kids laughing at the similarities between Lorelai and I (coffee drinkers who referenced old movies) and my mom and Emily. But as I watched, something strange happened. I found myself feeling sorry for Emily.
Now that I have a teenage child myself, I see Emily as a tragic figure, someone who gave her everything, including all of her energy and love, yet completely cut her off from her 16-year-old daughter. I could see that she was a woman who had been beaten up. My son Coleman was 16 years old. Like Emily, I gave him everything I had. If he refused to talk to me and fled into the night, I didn’t know if I would survive. And suddenly the weight of my mother’s grief hit me. She raised me to be a part of her life, and I completely rejected that life. How did she survive?
I realized that Emily was not the monster she seemed on the surface, but a woman eviscerated by loss. My mother had already lost two children before me, and my brother and sister died in a car accident before I was born. Maybe she wasn’t the villain I’d always believed her to be, but a grieving mother who was afraid to give herself to a child she too might leave – me. .
During those weeks, I ran to my mom and told her how sorry I was, how much I knew she loved me, how much of a cord she was holding tightly to my mother’s sanity and ability to function. My heart ached as I tried to convey my understanding that he must be maintaining this.
Shortly thereafter, my 93-year-old mother was hospitalized with viral pneumonia and was immediately transferred to hospice in an unconscious state. As I sat by her bed and stroked her hair, I thought about the episode “Mommy, Please.” The episode ends with Rory coming home to find Lorelai in bed, fully dressed and frozen with grief. Rory climbed in next to her without saying a word. I had never seen my mother cry. She never let me see herself behind her perfectly applied Chanel Rouge Gabrielle. Or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to break through her surface. Maybe I didn’t say “Mom, please” often or hard enough.
Now, as I hold my mother’s hand, which is swollen from the painkillers injected into her arm, all the anger I had toward her has melted away. All I wanted was for my mother to come back. Her real mother, not the Lorelai version who gives her access to her soul.
So I spoke. And we talked and talked. I talked about the fun we had on family trips to California and Florida, the movies she loved and the books she hated, the garden she tended outside her childhood home. I remembered. I asked her all the questions I had never been able to ask before. As I spoke, I said, “Mom, I love you,” and her face moved in response and her mouth formed silent words.
“Do you think you and Grandma will ever be able to talk about everything you’ve been through?” Rory asks Lorelai in an early episode. “No,” Lorelai tells her. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried all my life. But my mom and I speak different languages.” At first, Gilmore Girls helped her feel free to be herself without shame. , I thought my life had changed. Years later, I realized that my life had changed because it taught me how to be a mother. It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since I turned on the TV and discovered two women talking, but as Lorelai slowly discovers herself, I wonder if my mother and I speak different languages. My life changed once again when I was shown that they were actually speaking different dialects of the same language. Tongue: love.
A longer version of this essay appears in the collection of essays, Life’s Short, Talk Fast: Why We Can’t Stop Watching Gilmore Girls, out this week.
Joanna Rakoff is the author of the bestsellers My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age. Her memoir, The Fifth Passenger, will be published next year. You can watch the movie version of My Salinger Year and find Joanna on Instagram.
PS Three women explain the complex mother-daughter relationships and what it’s like to raise children in different countries.
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