Past, Present, Future

Every Mother Is a Daughter
by Perri Klass, M.D., Sheila Solomon Klass

Mothers and daughters go through so much — yet when was the last time a mother and daughter sat down collectively to write a book together about it all? Perri Klass and her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass, both gifted professional writers, prove to be ideal collaborators as they examine their decades of motherhood, daughterhood, and the wonderful, if sometimes fraught, ways their lives have overlapped.

Perri notes with amazement how closely her own life has mirrored her mother's: Both have full-time careers (Perri is a pediatrician; Sheila is recently retired from a long career as a college English professor but goes on teaching); both have published books, articles, and stories; each has three children; they both love to read, and to pass books back and forth. They also love to travel — in fact, they often take trips together (and live to tell the tale). But in truth, the harder they look at their lives, the more Perri and Sheila acknowledge their profound differences in circumstance and temperament.

A child of the Depression, Sheila was raised in Brooklyn by Orthodox Jewish parents who considered education an unnecessary luxury for girls. Starting with her college education, she has fought for everything she's ever accomplished. Perri, on the other hand, grew up privileged and rebellious in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s. For Sheila, fanatically frugal, wasting time or money is a crime, and luxury is unthinkable while Perri enjoys the occasional small luxury, but has not been successful at enticing her mother into even the tiniest self-indulgence.

Each writing in her own unmistakable voice, Perri and Sheila take turns exploring the joys and pains, the love and resentment, the petty irritations and abiding respect, that have always bound them together. Sheila recounts the adventure of giving birth to Perri in a tiny town in Trinidad where her husband was doing anthropological fieldwork. Perri confesses that she can't tame her domestic chaos even though she knows it drives her mother crazy. Sheila rhapsodizes about the bliss of becoming a grandmother. Perri marvels at her mother's fearless navigation of the New York City subways. Together they compare thoughts on bringing up children and working, confess long-hidden sorrows, relish precious memories — and even offer family recipes and knitting patterns.

Looking deep into the lives they have lived separately and together, Perri and Sheila tell their mother-daughter story with honesty, humor, zest, and mutual admiration. A memoir in two voices, Every Mother Is a Daughter is a duet that resonates with the experiences that all mothers and daughters will recognize.

Chapter 1

Perri: This book is about mothers, but I would like to begin with my father. Since his death, sudden and unexpected, in 2001, I have been carrying on a variety of conversations with him. Some of these take place in my car when I am driving. Ever since his death, I have found myself talking to him, often out loud, while I drive, sometimes filling him in on how my life is going or chewing over a dilemma or up- dating him on the world. For the first year after he died, those conversations — well, I suppose you might call them monologues, but I find it more comfortable and comforting to think of them as conversations, to imagine him there, in some sense, listening in — usually ended with me in tears in my car, trying to drive carefully, facing yet once again the hard, cold fact that I would never again hear my father's voice.

But not all conversations — or even all monologues — take place in the spoken voice. I am a writer, and writing is what I do with my emotions, my stories, my insights, such as they are. I started writing essays about my father — an essay for a knitting magazine about knitting sweaters for my father, an essay for a newspaper travel section about travel memories of my father. I found I had many such essays in me — I still have notes for a piece about my father and food, for example, and another about my father and P. G. Wodehouse. And I think of the process of writing these various essays and articles as somewhere between tribute and conversation; the person I am really telling these stories to, I think, is the person who isn't here to read them. By writing about him, I know, I am trying to conjure him and keep him with me.

Losing a parent is a life lesson you can't learn from anyone else's experience, or even from the collective human experience of all the millions of human beings who have lost their parents before you. That my father should be gone — so suddenly, when no one was in any way ready — that his voice with all its stories and opinions should be still. That I should go on now to live my life as a fatherless daughter. And in my bleakest moments, I had to acknowledge and accept that someday I would be not only fatherless but also motherless; the lesson I had learned was that parents die and leave you. Remember that comforting false assurance we all offer our children when they're young and they first find out about death — Don't worry, darling; I won't die for a long, long time, not till you're all grown up? Well, the part we don't tell them is that no matter how many decades you've accumulated when the time comes, you don't necessarily feel all grown up, or even moderately ready to carry on alone.

What I am trying to say, and I feel some trepidation in saying it, as if it might bring bad luck, was that for the first time, I began to have flashes of life without my mother as well as my father. I began to imagine myself writing similar essays about my mother — I could easily imagine the topics. My mother and writing, my mother and food, my mother and her iconic ethnic jokes. And I found myself rebelling against the whole idea of writing about my mother. My mother is a writer, and she is still very much alive and writing. What I wanted was not a collection, someday, of articles in my own signature voice celebrating her, eulogizing her, trying my best to capture her essence — what I wanted was the real thing. My father was gone, but my mother was available, and it was suddenly clear to me that I should take full advantage of that availability, that we should try together to come at the various interesting mother — daughter life issues, in our two different and distinct voices.

In some ways, we spend our lives telling stories about our mothers, making up handy cartoon moms. In high school it's often the whine — Oh my God, my mother! The things she says, the things she wants, the way she acts! Later on, maybe you make up the story of the mother who is never satisfied, who wants you to be something you never will become, or else the mother who thinks you're perfect, the mother who blames you for ruining her perfect grandchildren, or the mother who thinks that you and they can do no wrong. There is the aging eccentric mother (or sometimes the relatively young eccentric mother), the heroic matriarch, the disappointed lonely old lady. But all of these — true or exaggerated or downright false — are stories told in a daughter's voice.

I don't want to speak for my mother; I want her to speak for herself. I want to figure out together some of the overlaps in our lives, the ways in which we echo and resemble one another, and also the ways in which we seem to come from different species. I want to know how I look to her, and rather than telling the world someday how she looked to me, I want to tell it to her and see how she reacts. I want her to let me know when I am fudging it — or bullshitting — or confabulating and creating a false mother, a cartoon mother, a Hollywood mother. And after all, though many mothers and daughters struggle with these issues and these overlaps, here we are, my mother and I, both of us writers, both of us stubborn, both of us set in our ways. We live relatively close to one another, we talk on the phone almost every day — why shouldn't we try writing it all down?

So, Mama, are you ready? I have been looking into my soul, and I have come up with some questions, which I know already that we will probably not answer — that probably no one will ever answer once and for all. But I am interested in circling round these together, worrying at them, trying to bite off pieces. And I invite you to offer up your own list for our mutual consideration:

First is a question about the past: Mama, you invented yourself. You came from a family where no one went to college, where girls were not supposed to be educated, a poor and extremely orthodox family, and you made yourself up: a college student, a young woman who lived alone in Greenwich Village, a writer, a teacher, half of a working two-professor couple. You know, travel, literature, art, culture — the whole deal. I live a life in many ways similar to yours, but I had nothing to invent; all I had to do was jump through all the hoops that were being held out to me, as I was cheered on and patted and encouraged by everyone in the world. Get good grades, go to a good college, go to medical school, have the kids, buy the house, see the world, develop a taste for fancy food. How do I understand the strength and the vision that it took for you to imagine a life that no one you knew had lived, and then bring that life to pass? Mama, I think you may be what we call in pediatrics and child psychiatry one of the supersurvivors, the one child who comes out of the devastated (and devastating) home and family and somehow not only survives but thrives. And I think that whatever I am, I am first and foremost a good girl, doing what was expected of me, doing what would bring me parental approval. What kind of life might you have lived if your parents had cheered you on and smoothed your path? Would you somehow have gone even farther, or was it the struggle and the originality that made you what you are? And if I had grown up in the family in which you grew up, would I have had what it took to change the life plan? Or would I just have been the good girl, playing by those rules?

Copyright © 2006 by Perri Klass. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Perri Klass, M.D., is pediatricians on the staff of Boston University School of Medicine. Harvard graduate who trained in pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children's Hospital, she has practiced pediatrics at Dorchester House, a community health center in Boston, for ten years. Klass writes frequently for The New York Times, and is a contributing editor at Parenting. She has written both fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Other Women's Children and the memoir Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician's Training.

Sheila Solomon Klass is the author of sixteen novels, including In a Cold Open Field, and a memoir. She recently retired from her position as an English professor at Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She lives in Manhattan.