MY MOTHER, THE PLOT DEVICE

My Mother, the Plot Device

On dead mothers and their portrayal in media

Published anonymously to protect the identity of the author’s parents

It’s 10 p.m. on a Saturday at my house back in Connecticut. My friends and I are smushed on a couch in the middle of the summer, a dusty window fan providing white noise as we scour Netflix for the worst teen movie we can find. We’re scrolling through gold: 30-year-olds playing deeply troubled sophomores in high school, a love triangle including two men who look exactly the same, and a woman who dresses like she walked blindfolded into a Forever 21 in 2016. We bounce between The Kissing Booth and 10 Things I Hate About You (not even a bad movie, it’s just that all the characters are so easy to make fun of), but we ultimately decide on To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Within the first minute, the main character establishes that her mother is dead.

“Of course her mom is dead,” I say, throwing my arms up in defeat.

“The mom is always dead,” my friend responds.

For the rest of the movie, I think about all the stories I know that feature main characters whose mothers have died. The Kissing Booth fits into this category; so do Clueless, most Disney movies, Frankenstein, and To Kill a Mockingbird. All these dead mothers function as plot devices— they further the development of the protagonist by giving them a bit of trauma so the viewer doesn’t think they’re drowning in privilege. The writers rarely give mothers any character traits aside from being caring and maternal. A mother is not a person. She’s a swift mention in a conversation in which the protagonist says, “I miss Mom,” and their father says, “I miss her too,” *pause* “I miss her every day.” She’s missed for what she provided, not remembered for who she was.

Children in movies bring up their dead mothers when they’re looking for the support of a mother figure, not because they’re grieving over a human soul. Vague characterization carves them into outlines of mothers as opposed to the colorful personalities of the on-screen characters, often just a pair of shoes for a female protagonist to fill. In To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the main character’s older sister, Margot, is portrayed as the responsible replacement for their mother. Her mother’s death is a catalyst for her and the main character’s development and makes the audience sympathetic to the father. Ultimately, the mother is a tool used by the living characters.

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It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday at Jo’s. I’m sitting across from my friend eating a salad and fries. The air is dry, but I can feel grease accumulating on my hair and skin. As with most late nights spent with female friends, we’re talking about our horrible experiences with men.

“When I broke up with him he started crying. I had to think of my mom dying so I could cry,” she tells me.

I laugh; I think about my mom dying when I need to cry, too. Is it fair to use my mom like this in my own life? I think. Is my mom a plot device to me? I think.

In a discussion of dead mothers in movies, it was easy to second-guess myself, to tell myself, “O.K., but it’s just a movie. Obviously she isn’t a fully fleshed-out human being. She’s a character.” In real life, on the other hand, I have to face the fact that I don’t see my mother as a person head-on.

This isn’t the sort of cognitive dissonance I’m used to. I watch video essays on the misogynistic ideals that underscore the manic pixie dream girl trope. I read bell hooks. I talk to my friends about how the boys in high school were shocked to discover that we had beliefs and hobbies.

But I hit a wall when I apply this thinking to my own mother. There seems to be a difference between me going out with friends and her getting lunch with her friends. I believe there to be an air of fiction about her going to the marina to watch the sparrow murmuration, or going to the lake to paddleboard, or going to the backyard to read. It’s not the same as when I knit or go to the beach or put stickers in my journal. It’s not the same as when my father spends weeks at a time away from home, spends full days sailing with friends, and spends nights drinking with them. I struggle to see my mother as my own blood. I perceive us as occupying different spaces of the world. To me, her space is taking Zoom calls for her job at the end of the dining table. It’s going to the grocery store and cooking pasta. It’s cleaning when we have guests over. Sure, my father spends weeks at a time away from home, spends full days sailing with friends, and spends nights drinking with them, but I think of it differently with him.

I can’t tell if this is pure selfishness or pure misogyny or a mix of it all. As hard as I try, I can’t fully comprehend that my mother has a life of her own. Shouldn’t she be completely devoted to motherhood? To serving me?

In The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, Arlie Russell Hochschild explains that the women’s liberation movement, while allowing women to enter the labor force and make their own money, did not free women from household responsibilities. In a study of heterosexual couples, Hochschild and Anne Machung found that “3 percent of wives but 46 percent of husbands didn’t mention the house at all in their spontaneous description of a ‘typical day.’ Three percent of the women and 31 percent of the men made no spontaneous mention of doing something for a child—like brushing hair or fixing a meal.” The study concluded that whether or not a woman makes more than her husband, she is less likely to have leisure time, likely as a result of patriarchal standards that wrongfully assume women are inherently more caring than men.

Hochschild wrote The Second Shift in 1989, but its themes are still applicable to modern-day society and media. I knew this when I read Hochschild’s theory in my junior year of high school, but I didn’t consider the impact that it had on my own view of my mother. Sure, I felt bad for her and thought my father should pitch in more, but I never reflected on the structures that dominated my thinking.

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It’s 10 p.m. on a Wednesday in my friend’s dorm room. We’re supposed to be studying. I’m surrounded by the warm scent of her plug-in air freshener and the comfort of her mattress topper. She asks me if I want to have kids. I say, “Maybe,” but I know that I really don’t.

Setting aside all my beliefs about toddlers being gross and my fears of having a really annoying kid, I don’t want to be a mother because I know that if a woman is a mother, she will likely never truly return to the woman she was before. Once I become a mother, people will start to see my interests, hobbies, and ambitions as add-ons: they’re nice to have, but not critical to living a fulfilling life. They’ll think that having a family is enough for me and that the sacrifice of what I loved before is worth it, but the truth is that I don’t think it is enough. I want to be fleshed out. I want to be whole and human and full. I want to be happy, not just content. I want to soak in all the sunny and muddy and gross and amazing particles of this world, and maybe that isn’t possible if I start a family.

Loss of innocence is usually part of a character’s childhood. Coming-of-age movies like Ladybird and The Breakfast Club tell the stories of kids who learn that the world isn’t as perfect as they think it is, but maybe the real loss of innocence happens when we aren’t looking. Maybe, for mothers, it happens when they realize that they have to give up parts of themselves to help their family.

It’s typical for high school English classes to talk about Scout’s coming-of-age in To Kill a Mockingbird, but students rarely discuss her mother (who died when Scout was a baby) and for good reason: the novel mentions her only in passing. In one of the few mentions of Scout’s mother, a woman tells Scout, “A lovelier lady than [her] mother never lived … and it was heartbreaking the way Atticus Finch let her children run wild.” Her mother is only ever referenced when discussing how she served the family. I know she isn’t real, but my mind wanders, and I can’t help but think of who her character could’ve been if she were alive. What did she need to give up? Who could she have been if she didn’t have children? Who was she?

I attach myself to these characters who get nothing more than a paragraph in the actual story because I see my own mother in them. I wonder who my mother would be in my own story. I wouldn’t kill her off, but I wouldn’t know how to write her in as smoothly as I could with any other woman I know. I’ve accidentally created a perception of her that’s like Scout’s mother: underdeveloped, left high and dry in a self-centered story.

I ask my friend, “Do you want kids?” and she says she does. I tell her she’d be a good mom, but what does that even mean to me? Do I say that because I think she’s a kind, giving, caring soul who wouldn’t traumatize a child, or do I say it because I know she’s so kind, giving, and caring that she’d have no trouble setting the rest of her life aside? If it’s the latter, do I automatically expect that of her? I assume that every mother is like my own. I assume that they’ll quit the things they love because that’s what I’ve seen in my own life and in movies, and it’s been the standard in heterosexual nuclear families for decades.

I hesitate to say that I won’t have children at all, though. There’s a part of me that truly believes I’ll have failed if I don’t start a family—I’ll be nothing if I’m not a mother.

All women eventually become someone who chooses to have children or someone who chooses not to have children. At the end of the day, is there really such a big difference between flat mothers from books and movies and the forgotten women who don’t raise the next generation? I can either be a plot device or be left out of the story entirely.

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It’s 10 p.m. on a Tuesday in the basement of the SciLi. I take a break from rewatching a lecture to take off my headphones and stretch. I can hear people talking and laughing in the neighboring conference room. I realize that I forgot to call my mom again. I feel bad, but not just because I forgot. I feel bad because I recognize that it’s selfish to think I’m all she has to occupy herself with.

ANONYMOUS B’2X needs to go to bed earlier.