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A review by cmclarabee
What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most by Elizabeth Benedict
5.0
What My Mother Gave Me completely blew off all my windows and doors. It's not just that it made me think about the many things, tangible and intangible, that my mother (who has been gone now for 4+ years) gave me, although it did do that. It's that the voices of the writers who contributed to its pages made me think about the many and varied ways there are to be a woman. All of these writers, and certainly their many mothers, have lived rich and fascinating lives. Whether I felt kinship with them over the things their mothers gave them that mattered most or not, it was a privilege to get each woman's take on this most pivotal relationship and to catch glimpses of so many different kinds of women's lives.
I finished reading What My Mother Gave Me in a fancy hotel room with a balcony overlooking the sea. My urge to come back to this east coast beach town--a place my family and I went to for the first and last time a little over three years ago to mark the first anniversary of my mother's death--grew and grew as I read. So, when the opportunity presented itself to dash off here for a couple of days, I jumped at the chance. My mother was never in this town or at this hotel that I know of, but we scattered my father's, my brother's, and, finally, her own ashes in the sea as each of them died because that way, by her reckoning, "whenever you're near the water, you're close to the person who died." That idea was foreign to me when she first proposed it when my father died many years ago, and, as a lifelong lover of cemeteries (So peaceful! So quiet! So sad!), I wasn't sure I agreed. As with so many other things, though, she was right. My mother gave me lots of things and ideas that matter more than I ever would have guessed they would at the times she gave them, but that one may be the one that matters most. That, and knowing to always go to a fancy hotel by the sea when you want to, even if you can't really afford it and common wisdom would say that you shouldn't. "You deserve it," was one of my mother's favorite refrains, and also, "Je ne regrette rien." Thanks, Mom!
I finished reading What My Mother Gave Me in a fancy hotel room with a balcony overlooking the sea. My urge to come back to this east coast beach town--a place my family and I went to for the first and last time a little over three years ago to mark the first anniversary of my mother's death--grew and grew as I read. So, when the opportunity presented itself to dash off here for a couple of days, I jumped at the chance. My mother was never in this town or at this hotel that I know of, but we scattered my father's, my brother's, and, finally, her own ashes in the sea as each of them died because that way, by her reckoning, "whenever you're near the water, you're close to the person who died." That idea was foreign to me when she first proposed it when my father died many years ago, and, as a lifelong lover of cemeteries (So peaceful! So quiet! So sad!), I wasn't sure I agreed. As with so many other things, though, she was right. My mother gave me lots of things and ideas that matter more than I ever would have guessed they would at the times she gave them, but that one may be the one that matters most. That, and knowing to always go to a fancy hotel by the sea when you want to, even if you can't really afford it and common wisdom would say that you shouldn't. "You deserve it," was one of my mother's favorite refrains, and also, "Je ne regrette rien." Thanks, Mom!