I so enjoyed Patricia’s visit to our class. I took a class with her last semester, a creative nonfiction class, and was so consistently compelled by the way she speaks and teaches. One of the first things I wrote in my notes from the visit is how the way she speaks is so patient, so thoughtful. I’m taking her class “Dreams, Visions, Rituals” next semester, and am looking forward to how some of the themes we discussed in her work are explored in that class.
One of the first things that struck me in our conversation was the way in which the main character of the story spends so much time avoiding being like her mother, just to follow in her footsteps. I see this happen often, in real life and in stories–I know some of the seniors mentioned seeing this pattern in their own relationships with their mothers–and I see it partially in my relationship with my own mother. There are many ways in which I still resist the path my mother has taken in her life, and that resistance is in line with my values, and there are many ways in which my mother and I are the same, points of connection that I can only have with her. It has taken me a long time to be okay with sharing those parts of myself with my mother, and sometimes I still balk at it, so reading narratives like these in which people, women in particular, come to terms with what they share with their mothers are really helpful in providing a guide for what that process can look like.
Another part of the conversation that I really appreciated was the conversation around “stagnancy” in the mother/daughter relationship, and the necessity of body- & healing-work to unblock stagnancy. I had chronic headaches for almost nine years and they only started to get better when I started seeing bodyworkers. A couple of them told me the same thing right away–my headaches were caused by stagnant energy. They then guided me through what needed to happen to unblock that stagnancy, to move my energy and my blood so it didn’t cause me harm. I think there is a similar quality to my relationship with my mother–I hold anger, fear, and sadness around my relationship with her and that hadn’t changed much until the last year. All those feelings have been stuck in the same parts of my body for years, and I think I can apply the same healing principles to those feelings that I did to my headaches. If I help those feelings move, and help my body release them, they don’t keep causing me pain. I am so consistently surprised by the way that talking to Patricia always helps me dig up and deal with something I didn’t even mean to look for, something I didn’t realize needed dealing with.
Coming to Age 