Q: Happy Mother’s Day! Who is your favorite mom from fiction?
A: I’m going to be curious to read what everyone else has to say on this one! When I think of fictional moms, my mind immediately slips from the cliche of perfection to the cliches of evil with little room in between for raw humanity. I started thumbing back through my goodreads list muttering…too perfect, too dead, too evil, not there…
I stopped at A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Now, it has been a great many years since I read this book, but I immediately recalled a mom who spent a lot of time in her laboratory trying to cook dinners over bunsen burners. She tries to keep her family together though her husband has been missing for years, but a part of her belongs to that missing husband. It doesn’t maker her bad or neglectful, just sad and even a little scatterbrained. She loves her kids, but she has definition and personality other than as a mother. And I don’t remember her being perfect. (This could be partly because I read it as a teen through another teen’s point of view. 🙂 )
Real moms are all kinds of things, though even in the real world I sometimes feel cliches are trying to force us into a mold. If one more person tells me I’ll be going into mourning next fall when my youngest starts kindergarten… No, I’m really not! I’m looking forward to it. Why? Because I’m not a mom cliche. I’m me, and me is looking forward to a daughter who can read, write, and play better board/card games. (Hey, it’s what I’m into!)
Anyone else know of a mom in fiction who has some kind of definition outside her role as a mother? I’d love to hear about it!
(I’m just doing twitter and google+ follows now. It’s a more useful way to follow, IMHO, and I always follow back!)