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R Michael Harman is the New Media Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons. As such, he has quite a few previous publications, which can be seen in our archive.
Mother and Child Re-Union
By Audra Bruno
11/05/01
My mother may be just like yours, or they may have only motherhood in common. I’m not sure, but I think motherhood is enough. It’s a binding experience, a historical marker, like a beacon in time.
My mother raised my sister and I without a partner, something that seemed to take on more significance as the decades marched forward, rather than less. Maybe it was this way for your mother, too? Have you noticed that time hasn’t healed her wounds, hasn’t dulled her sense of responsibility?
Has your mother’s watchful eye turned inward in recent years, fiercely protective of your childhood days, though they are long gone by? My mother guards her memories now, a sacred space I don’t care to go too often. These are tearful memories, shared in solitude, long distance lines their lonely conduit. Her memories of mothering—what she did right, what she did wrong, the barriers she overcame and those she didn’t.
I don’t know how your mother spent her youth, but I know mine gave hers to my sister and me. She dropped out of college when she married my father, and didn’t go back until I was a teenager and the ink on her divorce decree was well over a decade dry. Whatever free time she had, I can assure you she didn’t spend it reading speculative fiction novels.
Today, my mother is a teacher, properly addressed as Doctor, although not even her students call her that, not to her face anyway. In the classroom, she is parenting at will—an endless stream of teenagers whose problems are a luxury to her, made lighter by the sheer virtue of not being solely her responsibility. In my mind, her chosen profession speaks to a need unfulfilled, a desire to repeat the same experiences again and again until they come out right, until they are ordered, exact.
Years ago, when I first started reading speculative fiction, and I started thinking about what it might mean to imagine a future written with different expectations, my mother didn’t quite approve. She didn’t think it was meaningful or important, she didn’t see the relevance of the endeavor. I pointed to the works of my favorite authors, explaining time and again how much it meant to me that these writers could look critically at our world and transform it, make it new again, sharing their visions with anyone willing to take the leap.
As time passed I continued to recommend other authors, enthusing about both the utopias and dystopias that engaged me, the amazing science of science fiction, the relationships restructured and evolved in myriad forms. But it wasn’t until I started to talk about parenting in the future that I began to capture her interest.
How would these Wonder Women care for their children? Would they parent in ones and twos, as we do, or would they find another way? What trials would they face and how would they be overcome?
Does your mother read speculative fiction? If not, maybe it’s because she’s uncertain what she’ll find there. Maybe she’s afraid that her role will become redundant, will be phased out in the future, that just as you’ve grown up, so will the world, and in time, mothers will become obsolete. I think my mother has found assurance in speculative fiction, a certain protection from obscurity, freedom from the fear of disuse.
If your mother is anything like mine, and even if she isn’t, you might recommend The Handmaid’s Tale to her. Maybe she read this stunning novel by Margaret Atwood years ago, maybe she didn’t; either way is an excellent beginning for her journey through speculative fiction. This is a novel ripe with inspiration—a matrix of mothering, shades of surrogacy coloring the nature of parenting, calling into question the meaning of motherhood, the absolutes of right and wrong, the centrality of political versus personal—all of the great debates of my mother’s generation.
But the mother/child relationship is a theme that speculative fiction authors, women authors in particular, return to again and again. It is an internal dialogue, inextricably linked to the nature of our biology, persistent and unavoidable. But speculative fiction affords us the opportunity to confront our myths and beliefs, challenges us to reaffirm our bonds, to tear them apart and reform them in new and different ways.
You might offer your mother one of Marge Piercy’s novels, maybe Woman on The Edge of Time or even He, She and It. Both are inextricably bound to motherhood and family life, and they have the distinct advantage of being grounded in a reality many of our mothers are already be familiar with. My mother and I love both of these novels, although our reasons are necessarily diverse.
I find myself drawn to these children of the future, these daughters. I am compelled to watch them struggle—a silent observer, empathetic but twice-removed. They must find their own way, breaking down the barriers of time and class and race in many of the same ways we all are, working to free themselves from their mothers’ expectations and society’s bonds, forging ahead with their own mistakes, mistakes written bare, exposed for us to learn from.
My mother sees things a bit differently, of course—proving that the old saying, some things never change, is, in fact, true. For one thing, a daughter has certain responsibilities to her mother, to her family, to her self. And for another, a mother’s expectations are never too high—she wants only what is best for her children. In the extreme, she will kill to protect her young; she will steal to feed them; she will prostitute her morals, her intelligence, her body. It is her job, her duty, her right.
Speculative fiction allows us examine these relationships in intimate detail, from every angle, and for my mother this is its most compelling feature. The mother/child bond is a constant throughout time and place, whether we move forward or backward along the continuum, the essence of this relationship will remain fixed.
So, when I suggested Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, my mother was surprised by this choice. Sure, the author is female, but the subject seemed to her a bit off our usual line. She wasn’t more than a few chapters into this novel before our theme emerged, a delicate weave throughout the fabric of this first contact tale, despite its male protagonist, a Jesuit priest and celibate to boot. It is the nature of parenting that is exposed here—the desire to teach and protect, to shelter, to learn, to hold oneself accountable. Poignant and dangerous, a new twist on an old theme. Surprisingly, she didn’t care for the sequel, Children of God. It was too obvious for her tastes, she said; a good read, but a not a stunner like its predecessor.
I figured she would have a similar opinion about The Passion, its outcome manifest in the title, but I bought it for her anyway. This time, she surprised me! She loved Donna Boyd’s tale of werewolf lore, of love lost and found, of children and parents and responsibility. I’m planning on the sequel The Promise as part of our holiday reading this year.
My mother and I tend to stick to women writers, even when the characters are male and the children aren’t children at all. Why? Because it makes sense to us, because we have found that in general, women are more internal, more open to us. Of course there are exceptions, but are we being sexist and exclusionary? We don’t think so. Not at all.
A.I. is an excellent example. This story was written by a legendary man, and brought to the big screen by another—both of whom are famous for their speculative vision. This story should have been perfect for us—it revolves around the concepts we’ve been exploring in our reading together for years. Yet, my mother and watched this movie in horror, waiting for something—anything!—to identify with. For us, this movie never had a chance. We couldn’t get past the untenable parenting, and none of the rest of it mattered. Not the science, not the cinematography, not whatever threads of plot might or might not have been there.
We could forgive the child his singular purpose, his instinctive imprint and his failure to grow beyond it—after all, he was limited by his programming. But it was the mother character that we despised. Not for her cruelty, or not just for her cruelty, but for her disinterest, her irresponsibility, her refusal to be held accountable. She simply wasn’t real for us—not one of our Mothers of the Future. Not one of us at all.
Speculative fiction creates the space for us to step into an alternate reality, to see the world through an ever-changing lens. It gives us the opportunity to recognize the omissions, to spot the truths and the lies and the missteps in our own histories, and to alter our current course to fit a changing world view. It changes our perceptions of ourselves and each other, redefining what is possible, illustrating each thread, each revision, each possibility. It allows our present selves to address our past selves without rancor, with the future looming ahead of us, a possibility waiting to be fulfilled.