What women talk about amongst themselves
With all due respect to these gentlemen, their mothers —
Conversation in the Jardins du Luxembourg, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, 1892.
Sometimes I stop what I'm doing just to look at her. She's beautiful. She's a woman who, with time, has learned to wear her age beautifully. And I watch her undo her clip as her hair cascades down her back and it makes me think about the song:
“I am my mother's savage daughter (…)
I will not cut my hair
I will not lower my voice” ¹
Same eyes, same mouth, same hair. And that dimple we have in our left cheek and that ability to destabilise a man and the early wrinkle we get between our eyebrows as we go through life’s events. I'm my mother's savage daughter, without a doubt. So why have I been so cruel to her?
The oracle
October 2018 — At the library (France).
[Excerpt from my real diary:] ‘I can't go on. It's terrifying. It's as if this book were an oracle of my life. It's all written down in there: the constant pain, the bulimia, then the desire to hurt myself, to starve myself to death… the wish to disappear. The worst things I can't even confess to myself. (...) I'm scared. Dr M.’s office is closed and I have nowhere to go. The only thing I know: I can't go home.’
The book had fallen into my lap by accident. I was standing in the aisles, not looking for anything in particular. It just appeared in front of me — Mothers-Daughters: A Three-Way Relationship. ¹ I figured it couldn’t hurt to leaf through it. Well, I was wrong.
‘From control to narcissistic abuse
(...) Narcissistic abuse is the projection of the parent onto the child, whose gifts are exploited not to develop her own resources but to satisfy the parent's need for gratification. (...) It is an abuse of identity, the little girl being put in a place that is not hers and, correlatively, dispossessed of her own identity by the very person responsible for helping her to grow. (...)
The mother's over-investment is accompanied by a lack of real love, which the child transforms into a lack of self-esteem, an insatiable demand for recognition and an unfulfilled need for love. The ‘gifted’ child never ceases to multiply her prowess in order to merit, through her gifts, a love that is always unsatisfying because never directed towards herself, for herself. (...)
The child prodigy is torn between smallness and greatness, self-hatred and self-love, the interiority of being and the exteriority of doing, the darkness of secret suffering and the light of a glory offered in vain. Such is indeed the fate of the little girl when her mother, oblivious to her own identity as a woman, has entrusted her with the task of realizing her aspirations in her place.’ ²
It was as if the world had slipped away from under my feet. I had the feeling that someone was observing me, that it was a joke, that someone had left the damn book there, just to make fun of me. ‘This need for love can never be fulfilled because the signs of solicitude are never really addressed to the child.’
‘From there, something clicked inside my brain. I saw the truth. I was in the eye of the storm, suddenly very serene because everything appeared to me as a powerful revelation, with only one possible outcome: escape or death.’
The Wandering of the great days
The defining moments of my life have all had two things in common: at the time of the event, I was voiceless, and wandering the city like a ghost. After the library, everything became a blur. I lost my memory for about a week. I woke up in London one morning, and it was all over, or so I thought.
Later, to piece together the chronology of events, all I had were a few confused pages of diary to reread. I had spent days walking like a madwoman from one end of the city to the other. The fact that I had lost my voice? Determining. It was my body's way of somatising what I'd understood internally: what I have to say doesn't matter any more.
‘[Maria, from the movie Bellissima] would undoubtedly have become a brilliant young woman [if she had had any special gift] but nevertheless, always hungry for narcissistic gratification, alternating periods of excitement and depression, overactivity and inertia, always eager to please but generally unloved, probably bulimic as well as concerned about her figure, emotionally immature as much as sexually savvy.’ ³
Russian roulette
To this day, I'm still amazed at the way books appear in my life. They say that Providence is God governing his creation. For me, it is this mysterious force that always seems to be watching over me somehow, and ensures that I find what I need most, when I need it most. I walk down the street, for instance, listening to music, and there, all alone on a bench, it's waiting. The book that helped me understand self-sabotage. Another time, someone puts the book in my hands, without leaving me any choice, actually: you must read this, they said. And I discovered the book that gave me a taste for reading again.
And so on. It is true that it can be a double-edged sword, because even if you think you're just reading for pleasure, books transform you, they leave their mark. And some books are so liberating that things will never be the same again. Writing is a weapon, that goes without saying.
Escape or death
So think of Rapunzel, who has never touched reality, not even close. Lacking knowledge of what it is made of, she has imagined a world. And in this world, all the characters in the story want to hurt her. And she is right, in a way, because without a voice of her own, everyone is free to put words in her mouth that she never wanted. But the liberating question is not: who is on my side, really? And who has been pretending all this time?
But rather, it’s always been: Who has the most to gain if Rapunzel stays in her tower?
MARIA (to her mother): ‘You know what would actually help me? If you’d loved me less.’ —
¹ : Savage Daughter, Ekaterina Shelehova — Originally written by Karen Kahan / Wyndreth Berginsdottir.
² , ³ : ‘When women get together(...), what do they talk about? With all due respect to these gentlemen, their mothers. So argue Caroline Eliacheff and Nathalie Heinich in their book on mother-daughter relationships.’ — C. Eliacheff, N. Heinich (2010). Mère-fille: une relation à trois. Ed. Albin Michel —
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