{"id":2230,"date":"2019-09-18T22:03:35","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T02:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2019-09-18T22:04:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T02:04:59","slug":"an-impossible-knot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2230","title":{"rendered":"an impossible knot"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My mother, pregnant with me in El Salto, a waterfall in Azua, Dominican Republic.<\/p><\/div>\n

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My mother, pregnant with me.<\/p><\/div>\n

To be a daughter is to be inextricably intertwined with one\u2019s mother, as explained by Adrienne Rich in \u201cOf Woman Born,\u201d. As I read through Rich\u2019s logic of the all too complicated phenomenon that is the mother-daughter relationship, I came to understand my own relationship with my mother. Of course, there is only so much that can be taken from a text written by a woman whose relationship with her mother is not complicated by race or class. But nevertheless, I found myself thinking of the adolescent rage that inhabited my body as I thought of my mother. My mother is a woman born in the Dominican Republic, and having been dispossessed of her own mother as a child, she drew all of her energy into her relationship with her own children. My mother experienced the essential female tragedy, as described by Rich (237) and as a result, she nurtured us and provided a fierce, tender form of love that allowed us, allowed me to unashamedly desire this complete return to the mother. And yet, I experienced a similar distancing from the being that I am unavoidably tied to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I used to blame my mother for forcing me to stand in front of a sink and do dishes. She was unaware that the alienation from my brothers and what was expected of me made me believe I was somehow inferior, as if it to say that I was born with the purpose to serve. I hated her as she stood idly while I suffered the consequences of a rigid, patriarchal society that began in the confines of my home. And while I had not been introduced to the concept of feminism until my adolescence, I recognized the pillars of inequality, and saw her as the vessel of it. Yet, I did not understand the plight of motherhood. I did not understand the ways that my mother, too, had fallen victim to a system that rendered her a vehicle for oppression to her own daughter. I look at these images of my mother, pregnant with me, and understand Adrienne Rich as she describes the physical ties that envelop the mother and daughter. I rejected my own desire to return to my mother, but I imagine myself, enveloped in a warm, amniotic fluid that only meant to nourish me. I imagine myself, a mother to a daughter, whose own relationship to her mother is violently disrupted by her death. To make sense of my own plights, I needed to understand my mother\u2019s, and the way she was limited, not only by the harsh expectations of a \u201cmale-controlled world,\u201d but her inability to return to her own mother, aside from vignettes stored in her memory. I am still learning from her, of her, about her, and in doing so, I further tie myself to her. Yet, I don’t mind this impossible knot we’re creating.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be a daughter is to be inextricably intertwined with one\u2019s mother, as explained by Adrienne Rich in \u201cOf Woman Born,\u201d. As I read through Rich\u2019s logic of the all too complicated phenomenon that is the mother-daughter relationship, I came to understand my own relationship with my mother. Of course, there is only so much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,57,1],"tags":[430,433,216,511,485],"class_list":["post-2230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogpost-1","category-blogposts","category-student-blogpost","category-uncategorized","tag-feminism","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-mother-and-daughter","tag-of-woman-born","tag-patriarchy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2234,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions\/2234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}