02/23/2026
Helping moms self-heal.
Helping daughter self-heal.
So the next generation of daughters are wiser and can thrive beyond basic surviving.
That has always been my mission in life.
Too few want to make it better for their future lineage. That perplexes me. I knew at 6 this was not the best it could be. People won’t make it better now for their future grand and great grand children. Leaving your mess for them to clean up. I won’t do that to my children and grands. I’ll spend every dime I have and every second of my life to invest in a life in which they can excel beyond earning funds to pay bills and find escapes to numb out because life’s a challenging burden.
No way. It ends with me.
Because life is a miraculous gift and they will experience that side of living. Not just making ends meet. Enjoying life, not just existing.
“When Atwood writes that mothers are fabrications, she’s suggesting that our understanding of them is false. In The Blind Assassin, published in 2000 and later awarded the Booker Prize, memory is never stable. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase, an elderly woman looking back over a life shaped by family loyalty, resentment and secrets. Iris recount events, revises them, defends herself, and shifts blame. Her mother, who dies early, exists mostly as a story shaped by absence. That absence becomes fertile ground for invention.
Children don’t mean to fictionalise their mothers. It happens because children are dependent. When you’re small, your mother is either the source of comfort or the source of fear, and sometimes both. So you simplify her. If she disappoints you, you make her cold and if she rescues you, you make her saintly. If she’s distracted by her own worries, you experience it as rejection. The mind wants coherence. It can’t tolerate the idea that someone so central to your survival has an inner life that doesn’t revolve around you. So you flatten her and turn her into something manageable.
The metaphors Atwood uses are uncomfortable because they expose aggression. A scarecrow has no interior and a wax doll exists to be punctured. There’s cruelty in that image, and it rings true. Most adults, if they’re honest, have felt moments of anger towards their mothers that exceed the situation. You blame her for your insecurity, your failures, your temperament. It’s easier to treat her as a crude diagram of your damage than as a woman shaped by her own history.
This isn’t just psychological. It’s cultural. Western societies have tended to cast mothers as symbols rather than people such as the self sacrificing nurturer, the suffocating matriarch, the negligent career woman. These types make storytelling easy but also erase complexity. Atwood, who has long been attentive to the ways women’s identities are scripted by others, keeps returning to this idea across her work. In The Handmaid’s Tale she shows how the state reduces women to reproductive functions. In The Blind Assassin the reduction happens within the family, and it’s quieter but no less distorting.
There’s also something about time in Atwood’s line. We make our mothers up to suit our current deficiencies. That suggests the story keeps changing. In adolescence you might cast her as the obstacle to your freedom. In early adulthood you might see her as the template you’re trying to escape. When you become a parent yourself, you might rewrite her again, either with sympathy or with renewed anger. The fabrication evolves because your needs do.”
Motherhood often carries a tension between intimacy and invention. Most of us grow up believing we know our mothers better than anyone else does. We’ve watched them in dressing gowns, seen them tired, heard them argue, felt their tempers and their care. And yet the version of them we hold in our minds is often a construction built out of need.
When Atwood writes that mothers are fabrications, she’s suggesting that our understanding of them is false. In The Blind Assassin, published in 2000 and later awarded the Booker Prize, memory is never stable. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase, an elderly woman looking back over a life shaped by family loyalty, resentment and secrets. Iris recount events, revises them, defends herself, and shifts blame. Her mother, who dies early, exists mostly as a story shaped by absence. That absence becomes fertile ground for invention.
Children don’t mean to fictionalise their mothers. It happens because children are dependent. When you’re small, your mother is either the source of comfort or the source of fear, and sometimes both. So you simplify her. If she disappoints you, you make her cold and if she rescues you, you make her saintly. If she’s distracted by her own worries, you experience it as rejection. The mind wants coherence. It can’t tolerate the idea that someone so central to your survival has an inner life that doesn’t revolve around you. So you flatten her and turn her into something manageable.
The metaphors Atwood uses are uncomfortable because they expose aggression. A scarecrow has no interior and a wax doll exists to be punctured. There’s cruelty in that image, and it rings true. Most adults, if they’re honest, have felt moments of anger towards their mothers that exceed the situation. You blame her for your insecurity, your failures, your temperament. It’s easier to treat her as a crude diagram of your damage than as a woman shaped by her own history.
This isn’t just psychological. It’s cultural. Western societies have tended to cast mothers as symbols rather than people such as the self sacrificing nurturer, the suffocating matriarch, the negligent career woman. These types make storytelling easy but also erase complexity. Atwood, who has long been attentive to the ways women’s identities are scripted by others, keeps returning to this idea across her work. In The Handmaid’s Tale she shows how the state reduces women to reproductive functions. In The Blind Assassin the reduction happens within the family, and it’s quieter but no less distorting.
Adrienne Rich wrote in Of Woman Born that motherhood is both an experience and an institution. The institution shapes expectations and narratives. The experience is messy, individual and often contradictory. When children later recount their mothers, they often speak about the institution, even if they think they’re describing the person. They say she was strict, or distant, or devoted, but those words carry whole cultural scripts behind them.
There’s also something about time in Atwood’s line. We make our mothers up to suit our current deficiencies. That suggests the story keeps changing. In adolescence you might cast her as the obstacle to your freedom. In early adulthood you might see her as the template you’re trying to escape. When you become a parent yourself, you might rewrite her again, either with sympathy or with renewed anger. The fabrication evolves because your needs do.
Elena Ferrante, in her Neapolitan novels, writes mothers who are raw, frustrated and sometimes frightening. Daughters in those books oscillate between disgust and loyalty. They see their mothers as embodiments of poverty or limitation, and then later recognise how little room those women were given. That shift feels more honest. It doesn’t absolve anyone, but it complicates the picture. Atwood’s point sits somewhere similar. We deny mothers an existence of their own because acknowledging it would mean admitting that they were constrained by forces we didn’t see, and that they suffered in ways that didn’t centre us.
Atwood herself has resisted being reduced to a single label. Although she’s often described as a feminist icon, she’s wary of being treated as a spokesperson for all women. That tension mirrors the quote. Just as mothers are simplified by their children, women writers are simplified by their readers. They become symbols of movements, not individuals with contradictions. The public narrative can be as flattening as the private one.
What’s hardest in this idea is the admission of self-interest. We like to think our memories are faithful. But often they’re strategic. They protect our self image. If my mother was flawed in particular ways, then my reactions make sense. If she was heroic, then my gratitude defines me. Either way, she becomes a supporting character in my story.
Seeing this doesn’t mean we have to abandon judgement or rewrite every grievance. Some mothers do harm and fail profoundly. But even then, they aren’t wax dolls. They are women who were once daughters themselves, carrying their own fabrications about their mothers. And that recognition doesn’t tidy anything up. It just makes the picture less convenient and more human.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
