Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter fourteen mother vs daughter
How does the vicious cycle of working and traveling and guilty bank transactions start? How do Laura and Joeseph Harrington become so caught up in their work that when they look up, it seems as if their children have aged years?
It's simple, really. It starts with Steve. But it's not Steve's fault, not really. His only crime in this instance is existing. They do care for their children, in their own neglectful way. They work because they want their kids to be well-off. Everything they do is for them. After all, that's how their parents were—mostly absent, but when confronted, they remind them that everything was done for them. Laura stays and works from home and takes care of the kids while Joesph goes out on a business trip. And then Joeseph gets bored—or something like that—he gets bored and the next business trip he goes on, he has an illicit affair.
No secrets last forever, of course, and Laura finds out (Steve does too because he's listening with his ear against the door as his parents argue). This should be where their marriage falls apart and a rift forms between the family. But it isn't (and a part of Alex wishes that maybe, it had. Things would've been better that way) and they work through it together, but from then on, she's with him for every business trip.
And now suddenly, Alex is angry. Alex is acting out and Steve's grades are dropping and they realize that they don't know their own children. They've done everything for them, and yet they've missed out on so much from them. So maybe burying themselves in their work and never showing their faces is easier than building a bridge across the chasm that they have formed between them and their own children. Their children can learn to manage, after all, Laura and Joeseph had to learn to manage too. And, after all, they're doing all of this for them.
It's sickening to Alex to think that she looks at her parents and knows that she wants to be nothing like them and that her parents looked at their parents the same way and their parents looked at their own the same. This is the kind of generational cycle that Alex wants to fix because genes aren't the only things that mothers and fathers pass down to their children. (But the cycle never actually breaks, because in the end, don't we all just become our parents?).
But Alex knows that her parents love them. Even if she doesn't feel particularly loved. Their way of loving is from a distance, and Alex knows that it's healthier to be loved up close, but being loved from afar is better than not being loved at all.
Some women are not made to be mothers, and some women are not made to be daughters. Alex thinks that maybe under different circumstances (in which she's less angry, in which she blooms into the prodigy she was supposed to be), in one of the infinite universes that inhabit the spiderweb, they would be Mother & Daughter and not Mother vs. Daughter. Instead, her mother's love chokes her because she tries to mold Alex into something that she is not. Mother tries to make Daughter more like herself because that's how it's supposed to be; Mother & Daughter, Father & Son. Like Mother, Like Daughter—and Daughter looks so much like Mother, so should Daughter also be more like Mother? But Laura is all that Alex could have been—pretty, respected, smart—and all that she is not.
