Lynne Tillman (2023) Mothercare On Ambivalence and Obligation

Lynne Tillman (2023) Mothercare On Ambivalence and Obligation.

Mothercare is an autobiographical essay by writer Lynne Tillman. I haven’t read any other of her works. My mum had Alzheimer’s. Most conversations with others end with me reminding them, ‘Just shoot me’. The issues Tillman discuss aren’t foreign to me. She’s American with a healthcare system that is both near the best and the worst as it bankrupts many and excludes others in the way our NHS tends not to.

Her book begins: ‘To carers paid and unpaid’.

She’s been there. Done it. Wrote the book.

With her two elder sisters, around eleven years of dutifully caring for a mother she didn’t love, who was born in 1908 and died just after her ninety-eighth birthday.

She ends with, ‘I didn’t know her. What did you make of yourself Sophie Merril Tilman.’

‘The artist Kiki Smith told me, “Life wants to live”’.

‘Even if you’ve loads of money, still you don’t know how long you’ll need care…’

“Most of us in medicine don’t know how to think about decline”.

‘Mostly the elderly are treated by the medical establishment the way they are treated generally in society as if they have outlasted their welcome, time stamped…’

‘The first place we lose weight is in the gums.’

‘…the worst death is that of a parent burying their child.’

‘…dying person will die when everybody has left the room.’

‘God was a writer.’

‘Suicides are people who can’t wait to know the end, and need to control it.’

‘My wish, unconsciously mostly, was to discover what it is impossible to know. How death will be for me.’

‘The “facts”, I hoped would supply a kind of comfort, though knowledge is not always power.’

‘I felt superstitious, daring fate.’

‘In New York City, these people are not hidden from sight, they are in plain sight, if you notice them. The healthy and capable elderly…’

‘Women are caring for women, mostly women of colour…’

‘Death is always unexpected, even when expected.’

‘Each of us sisters…experience their parents differently…Winnicot’s good-enough mother, might be good enough for one, not the other.’  

Read on.  

Notes