Blanca Lacasa, author of ‘The Horrible Daughters’: “Men can say that their mother is the best because they can escape that suffocating presence”

2023-10-07 09:49:55

“The relationship between mothers and daughters is scheduled to end. When the daughter no longer needs help, another type of relationship has to be established that will be the one that the people involved decide, under the parameters they consider and that will no longer be like the one they had in childhood. The problem is that there are mothers who do not accept this situation for different reasons and there are daughters who, sometimes, do not feel like stopping being daughters. That’s where the crux of the matter is,” he says. Blanca Lacasaauthor of The horrible daughters (KO Books, 2023), an essay in which she dissects the relationships between daughters and their mothers that, contrary to the idyllic image transmitted socially, are not as satisfying and enriching as they might seem, but rather more toxic and oppressive than one might wish.

“It’s a topic I’ve been talking about for a long time with many friends. Every time it came up, there were four or five people who said the same thing had happened to them. Even people I didn’t know at all joined the conversation. in a very proud way, as if I could finally talk about it,” says Lacasa, who was aware of the magnitude of the problem after one of the episodes of La Flaneadorahis program on M21, the Madrid City Council radio station that It could be heard anywhere in the world on the station’s website until the council decided to eliminate it. and, with it, the entire file.

“Although it was a local program, suddenly there were a lot of people who wrote to me thanking me for talking about the subject and for questioning the deification of the figure of the mother, which, in reality, has many chiaroscuros. It had a lot to do with making that program the reading of fierce attachments de Vivian Gornick, a woman who is not of my generation, who is from New York, who comes from another cultural or educational tradition, but who told the same thing that happened to me or that friends had told me. “There I was convinced that there was an issue to discuss.”

Constructed as a literary essay in which references to scientific treatises, expert statements, songs by Mari Trini, fragments of works by Jeanette Winterson, Esther Tusquets and dialogues from films such as Wild Heart, My dearest mother o Marnieone of the successes of The horrible daughters is the inclusion of numerous testimonies from daughters, some of them now also motherswhich tell what their relationship with their parents has been like.

“I realized that these testimonies had something therapeutic, so it made sense to respect that anonymity.”

“At first I suggested that they appear with their real names, but many of them told me: ‘Let’s see if it’s going to fall into my mother’s hands and she’s going to recognize me.’, to which I thought: ‘Let’s see, but how many Marías are there on planet Earth? Or Irenes? Or Palomas?’ Then I realized that these testimonies had something therapeutic, so it made sense to respect that anonymity. Furthermore, I liked better that all the testimonies were on the same level because, usually, in confessional literature about mothers and daughters everything revolves around the author’s testimony, be it Alison Bechdel o Simone de Beauvoir. For me it is important that not only people who have a certain relevance can tell their stories and, in that sense, anonymity put everyone on the same level and prevented the reader from trying to make a Who is who?“.

Thanks to those testimonies The horrible daughters It breaks one of the characteristics of toxic and oppressive relationships between mothers and daughters and that is one of the causes of multiplying its harmful effects for both parties: the silence.

“Many factors are mixed in silence. For example, the fearthe culpawhich is a feeling in which we women, or the shame, for being a bad mother or a bad daughter. All of these are unbeatable tools of social control or, rather, of social self-control, because it is not necessary for someone to come and tell you to shut up, but you yourself repress yourself and say: ‘Oh, I’m not going to say this’”, explains Lacasa, who highlights how this discomfort between mothers and daughters arises from social pressure and has a clear beneficiary: men.

“In addition to shame, fear and guilt, women have been given the idea that we are in charge of care. For our mothers’ generation, those of us who have not had children are a little incomplete or, rather, we have not managed to complete the cycle of evolution. When that happens and even if you have siblings, you immediately become your mother’s caregiver because, from a young age, it is made clear to you that you were born to take care of someone. This way, if you are not taking care of someone you fathered, you will have to take care of the one who fathered you. When this happens, women don’t even have the right to be angrybecause anger is an accepted feeling in male psychology, but not in female psychology.”

“This book appeals to daughters to stop blaming mothers and consider, or consider, what we can do.”

These differences when it comes to relating to their mothers is what also allows men to not be subject to that maternal dictatorship. They are not only freer but they tend to perpetuate the glorification of that maternal figure, thereby contributing to the oppression of mothers and sisters. “They can say that their mother is the best and even get those tattoos of Mother’s Love that were done before, because they can escape that suffocating presence and even those social demands that apply to mothers but not to fathers. We all know the qualities of the perfect mother, but what is the perfect father like? In this case there is no canon and, in fact, by doing four things and taking the children out for a walk on Saturday, you became the cool father and you had fulfilled your expectations.

Despite the complexity of the situation, Blanca Lacasa is optimistic when it comes to getting the relationships between mothers and daughters back on track. “I think that the daughters who are now mothers and who have a lot of this in their DNA, are trying to change these behaviors so as not to repeat them with their daughters and, to the extent possible, fix the situations with their parents. To begin with, Mothers must be freed from that pressure that forces them to be perfect and then criticizes them when they don’t succeed. In fact, this book appeals to daughters to stop blaming mothers and consider, or consider, what we can do, since they are our lives and, therefore, our responsibility. If we do not do this, we will be doing as daughters the same thing that we criticize in our mothers: complaining because they do not meet our expectations. Something that, deep down, is more common than it seems because Relationships between mothers and daughters are a permanent game of mirrors“.