Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} What My Mother Gave Me Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most by Elizabeth Benedict Elizabeth Benedict, Mameve Medwed, and Charlotte Silver, What My Mother Gave Me. In What My Mother Gave Me , women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most. Elizabeth Benedict is the author of five novels, including the bestseller Almost and the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing , as well as The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. She is the editor of the anthology Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. She has written for numerous publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe , and Huffington Post and two of her essays were Notable Essays in Best American Essay Collections. Mameve Medwed is the author of the novels Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life and Of Men and Their Mothers. Her stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in, among others, the New York Times, Gourmet, Boston Globe , the Missouri Review, Newsday , and the Washington Post . Charlotte Silver is the author of the bestseller Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood. Her second book, a young adult novel called The Chaperone , is forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press. She studied writing at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been published in the New York Times . What's The Most Meaningful Gift Your Mom Gave You? Editor Elizabeth Benedict received this embroidered, black wool scarf from her mother. It was the last gift she got from her mom before she died. Mother's Day is this Sunday. While some people are racking their brains to think of the perfect way to show their love and appreciation for Mom, a group of distinguished women recently flipped that script and wrote about the most profound gift their own moms gave to them. Their essays are collected in the new book What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. The book springs out of editor Elizabeth Benedict's personal experience. The last gift she received from her mother was a black wool scarf, embroidered at each end with yellow, pink and blue flowers. "She bought it at the assisted-living facility where she lived. And as soon as I began wearing it, people started commenting on how beautiful it was," Benedict tells Tell Me More host Michel Martin. "And after she died, I wore it all the time in the winter. And I was literally confused by how I could feel this attachment to the scarf and having felt so much distance from my mother." Benedict went on to wonder about the experiences of other women, such as activist and MacArthur "Genius" Cecilia Muñoz. "I lost my mom about five years ago, and it felt like a wonderful opportunity not just to pay tribute to her, but also to reflect on what she gave to me, what she gave to us," says Muñoz. "In my case, I come from one of those big sprawling immigrant families and my mother was very much at the center of it." Muñoz is the daughter of Bolivian immigrants. Her parents married in 1950, and they planned to stay in the United States for just one year so her father could finish his engineering education. But when they decided to return home, their families told them to wait because of a poor economy and political situation. Muñoz received a wok from her mother, whose relationships with everyone in the family largely related to food. She was a homemaker and accomplished chef. She even sold cosmetics. "It's funny because we didn't see her as a working woman at the time because this is like one of those companies where you do makeup parties, essentially. . She was terrific at it, but she designed it so she could also be there to take me to music lessons and take my brothers to debate practice, and you know, be a traditional mom in the same way she managed to do all of that," Muñoz says. Now that the activist is juggling an intense job and kids of her own, she understands why her mother was washing the kitchen floor at 11 p.m. or doing laundry at 6 a.m. Muñoz does the same thing, she says. The book includes many other diverse voices, like television host and minister Lillian Daniel, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, Slate 's Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick, best-selling novelist Lisa See, and even NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg. Benedict says she wanted a real range of experiences so the book would feel like the actual world we live in. "I started with the idea that I wanted people to write about an object. And if I had said to all these people, 'Write me a story about your mother,' I think I wouldn't have gotten anything because people would've freaked out," Benedict says. "But I think being able to focus on one object and tell the sort of beginning and middle and end of that object and how it radiates and reverberates really allows people to get to the core of the relationship." The objects are not diamond rings, fancy cars or houses. They're modest: a photograph, quilt, cake pan, plant, bottle of nail polish, even a cracked vase. "These are not gifts that have a lot of financial value, but the value of the gifts accrues over time," Benedict says. "The value comes from the relationships themselves, and how people process the relationships, and how people move through their lives with their mothers in life and in memory." What My Mother Gave Me. “A single gift can easily tell the story of an entire life,” writes Elizabeth Benedict, editor of and contributor to the anthology What My Mother Gave Me . In the book’s case, a single gift has the ability to tell the story of two lives: mother and daughter. Here, thirty-one women writers spanning five generations essay their way into the stories of their relationships with their mothers, with a particular present serving as the writer’s muse. The impressive lineup of novelists, poets, columnists, journalists, and essayists includes both a National Book Award and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, a US poet laureate, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic, a television producer, and a civil rights activist. The essays exhibit varying degrees of nostalgia, grief (most of the mothers having died by the time of the writing), celebration, and revelation; together they underscore the complexity of relationships—no mother is all good or all bad , neither angelic nor beyond the possibility of redemption, either in life or in a daughter’s reconstructed interpretation. The gifts vetted for significance are varying and oftentimes mundane but serve as portals into personal histories: a boat tour, a wok, an old cake pan, a drawing, a plant, a scarf, a book, a necklace, a smiling Buddha figurine. While every female reader will no doubt hear the notes of her own story played somewhere in the anthology—no matter whether her mother died young, was devoted, withdrawn, alcoholic, highly religious, or a fashionable socialite—the best essays tap into our culture’s shared ideals for what a mother should bequeath to her daughter. In this vein, Jean Hannff Korelitz’s mother, as represented in “My Disquieting Muse,” disrupted her daughter’s unhealthy identification with Sylvia Plath by way of an inscription in one of Plath’s books. Consequently, Korelitz realized she had “inherited endless possibilities” and that she, a feminist, was not obliged to the self-same suffering Plath endured. In “White Christmas,” with the rejection of a Christmas pantsuit, Ann Hood’s mother gave her the gift of permission to “become that person [she’d] dreamed of becoming: a girl who spoke her mind, who was independent and opinionated.” What My Mother Gave Me shines where it displays the stuff a forward-thinking society wants its women to bequeath and to inherit: lessons about identity, personhood, equality, respect, and—as Joyce Carol Oates penned in “The Quilt”—the knowledge “that love endures in the most elemental and comforting of ways.” Reviewed by Heather Weber Spring 2013. Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255. The Plant Whisperer. My mother, born of Iraqi Jews who had migrated to India, married a Canadian who brought her home to a glass house in Ottawa. As a toddler, I barely noticed that most of the house was made of windows, but it wasn’t me paying the heating bills. What I did notice was that every window was always and forever mounded with plants. Delicate African violets and cactuses bloomed, and avocado trees stood sentry over the living room. They must all have been as baffled by the endless Canadian winters as my mother. But more pressing in my memory, we were running a plant infirmary at my house, in which root tipping, stem reinforcing, and plant healing happened in tiny glass jars and chipped mugs on every windowsill. It was as if my brothers and I had a whole host of plant half-siblings guiding us through our childhoods, hopping along on their little plant wheelchairs and slings and crutches. Of course when I started college, I bought plants for my dorm rooms, and I even have a vague, blurred memory of my mother once walking me through a root transplant over the phone, in the manner of Hawkeye Pierce on M.A.S.H. , talking some rookie surgeon through an amputation by walkie-talkie. When my parents finally moved to the desert, my mother’s green world exploded into the outdoors. Suddenly there was jasmine, and hibiscus, and lemon trees so fat with fruit the neighbors would come by with shopping bags. Plants outside the house! If I call her and the phone rings and rings, it just means my mom is out in her garden, snapping off dried leaves and picking out tiny weeds and doing something with something that will someday bloom into something extraordinary.* But then came the plant she gave me when my first son was being born. A painful and violent labor turned into a painful and violent delivery and then got worse. It was going so badly that when my parents left the hospital the first night, my mother tore the printed message off the top of the little card they’d stuck in the plant at the hospital gift shop that had read “Welcome new baby” or some such. A joyous welcome was no longer certain. A few hours later, soon after Coby emerged, I saw a new, flowering plant by my bed and only the torn bottom half of a card. I took out the worst of my postpartum derangement syndrome on that poor plant. I couldn’t help but wonder how my mother imagined I could take care of a tiny white flowering plant over and above the colicky, deranged, sleepless bucket-of-hair that came out of me crying and couldn’t stop for three-and-a-half months (but who’s counting?). I wanted to drown that plant. Taking care of it was too much to ask of me. My son did stop crying, but only after my mother sat up rocking him all night long, so my husband and I could sleep for a few hours and not phone the divorce attorneys. Eight-and-a-half years later, the plant still blooms in an upstairs dormer window. I forget to water it and it lives, I overwater it and it coughs up a lung and then thrives again. Tiny white flowers greet me almost every morning, despite my best efforts to forget it. I once dragged my mother over to the plant and demanded that she explain why it looked so droopy in places. “Yes, they do that,” she said. Even with its perilous beginnings, that plant is the most precious thing my mother has ever given me. Most of what I know about parenting and patience and life I’ve learned by watching it. Of my kids, I now mostly think, “Yes, they do that.” At some point, I asked my mother what this type of plant is called, and she said, “It’s a Grandma Rose plant,” because my grandmother, her mother-in-law, had loved them so much. When my son turned 3, he planted strawberries all over the backyard garden, and they produce similarly tiny white flowers that—I secretly hope, every spring— might just grow into my Grandma Rose. My second son, Sopher, was born without a plant entourage but with a green thumb in his mouth. He started popping seeds into the garden as soon as he could toddle, and the row dedicated to “peas” is still labeled “pesa” because he was 4 and couldn’t spell, and really, shouldn’t they have been called pesa in the first place? Last summer, when he was 5, Sopher and I ended up in Home Depot or Lowe’s or one of those huge wretched “home improvement” stores with no windows anywhere, and he circled four times around a rack of broken, dead, and diseased plants generously described by a sign as “lonely plants” but largely marked by their crypt-like odor. He begged for one. We now have three. He waters them and names them and tells me he is the “plant whisperer,” just like his grandmother. His sunflower grew so big it finally fell over. His tomatoes are still glorious. Even the pesa. I worry that the neighbors will come with shopping bags for the pesa. I watch him out there in wonder. Voltaire famously concluded Candide with the advice, “But let us cultivate our garden.” He understood that there is something about caring for the plant world that makes us more apt to behave well in the human world. One has the notion that things raised in hothouses come out delicate and fragile. But I think the opposite is true: I think they are raised with an understanding of how life runs deep and sure and all around. We consider ourselves a green family. Prius, check. Compost heap, check. But I don’t shiver in anticipation at the thought of splitting tubers or transplanting peonies, as my mother does. She reminds me what it is to be of the earth and to fight for the Earth, not by way of bumper stickers and committee meetings and petitions, but by just planting and tending and weeding and never giving up on even a broken bit of spider plant. I see that in my son now, too—happy with dirt in his green rubber boots and a watering can and a watermelon seed. When I go to visit my parents, my first stop is my mother’s garden. When his lonely plant goes yellow at the edges, my son asks to put in a call to his grandparents. The earth and the garden have rooted us all to one another when nobody was looking. We cultivate our garden and let life take it from there. Correction, March 27, 2012: This article originally misspelled the name of the character Hawkeye Pierce. (Return to the corrected sentence.) ‘Color Blind,’ ‘The Mermaid of Brooklyn,’ and ‘What My Mother Gave Me’ A dozen years before Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a semi-pro team out of Bismarck, N.D., boasted a racially mixed roster that included Negro League legends Satchel Paige, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, and Quincy Troupe (later Trouppe). The team, known as the Bismarck Churchills, after their car-dealer owner Neil Churchill, would win the 1935 semi-pro national tournament in Wichita, Kan.; after that, its stars found themselves wondering whether the big leagues would ever call (Troupe and Paige each got a chance, but decades after their prime). Changing times would soon dry up the rich tradition of small-town and rural ball, and before long, integration would enrich the national pastime as surely as it decimated the Negro Leagues. In “Color Blind,” Tom Dunkel revisits this landscape to spin a tale as fantastic as it is true, as American as racism and baseball. In the 1930 Census, Bismarck claimed 11,000 residents, 46 of them black (one of whom had moved to North Dakota as a domestic servant in the home of the family of General Custer). The nearest big league baseball teams were 750 miles away, in Chicago and St. Louis. But the prairie was wild for baseball (future Hall of Famer Bob Feller said of his days playing in Iowa, “[e]very little jerk town had a team”), and local auto magnate Churchill decided to get the best he could for Bismarck’s, even if that meant breaking an unwritten color line. Dunkel’s extensive research shows — there’s enough detail here to satisfy the most rabid fan — and his portraits of Troupe, Paige, and Churchill are lively and warm. But the book’s most surprising character, to outsiders anyway, is this hardy, tough region, a place of towns “so small and so fragile that they got blown away by the Depression or shriveled to almost nothing in its aftermath.” The Mermaid of Brooklyn. Touchstone, 368 pp., paperback, $14.99. Jenny Lipkin and her husband, Harry, are raising two little girls in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Harry works at the family’s candy business, while Jenny stays home to care for their daughters and mourns her former life as a magazine editor. The couple’s problems are “excruciatingly average,” Jenny realizes, but they are excruciating. When Harry goes out for cigarettes and never comes home, Jenny’s emotional state wobbles and then cracks; trying to kill herself one night, she meets a mermaid — actually a rusalka, a figure familiar to Jenny from the Slavic folktales that formed the basis of her mocked and unused graduate degree — who takes up residence within Jenny’s body. Amy Shearn’s second novel charmingly blends the magical with the real. She is especially acute in her gimlet-eyed rendering of Jenny’s tribe of Park Slope mothers. The women’s shared exhaustion, their boredom, their instant intimacy, and insecure competitiveness — it all feels stultifying and inescapable until Jenny sees it alongside the rusalka, who reminds her “in her slightly cranky way that this was nothing new, that my everyday struggles held within them an echo of the legendary.” Funny, fearless, and unexpectedly moving, this modern fairy tale is, in a word, enchanting. WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. Edited by Elizabeth Benedict. Algonquin, 289 pp., paperback, $15.95. A gift’s meaning can change as time passes, as its recipient grows, as its giver ages and dies. Gifts from mothers to daughters — advice, warning, censure, promise, comfort, memory — carry extra freight, depending on the relationship between them. Tangible objects appear among the motherly bequests in these essays, collected by novelist Elizabeth Benedict: a cake pan, a blouse, a recipe, a drawing of a dog. In other essays, the gift is an experience, a brilliant piece of advice, or an example of how to thrive in a hostile or indifferent world. Margo Jefferson sees her mother’s love of fine clothing, even before the fashion industry acknowledged black women, as an act that forged “[a]rmor that shielded me from inferiority.” For Mary Gordon, whose mother eschewed traditional feminine trappings, the gift was a trip on New York’s Circle Line: “An adventure on the water. The sight of the glittering city. The possibility of the greater world.” In this type of collection, some essays are better than others. A few of them seem a little undercooked, or rushed, or formulaic. But the best convey the elements of mystery and misdirection that so often accompany mothers’ gifts to their daughters. In Karen Karbo’s powerful “White Gloves and Party Manners,” an etiquette book in an Easter basket at first elicits confusion, then rage at a mother who’d “had the gall to die, just as I was getting around to telling her I wished she was dead.” After years pass and family secrets reveal themselves, Karbo revises her feelings about both the book and the woman who gave it to her.