Mother's Day booklet | tenacity, love and insight, she is a mother

Ancient wanderers would always plant flowers in front of the window of the mother's room before they traveled, and the grass was also known as "forgetting worries grass", hoping that when the mother saw the flowers, she could forget the sorrow of missing her children. MengJiao, who wrote "Whoever says anything and has a heart of grass, repays the three Chunhui" also wrote such a poem: "Xuancao is born of the steps of the church, and the wanderer travels to the end of the world." Loving relatives lean on the door of the church, and there are no grass flowers. This is Chinese-style implication and sorrow.

On the second Sunday of May, Mother's Day, the flowers bloom, understand the mother, and say that you miss it.

"After I Left"

"After I Left" book shadow

This is a life guide written by a mother to her daughter.

On a sleepless night, Harley, the illustrator's daughter, realizes that her mother will one day be one step ahead of her. She imagined with fear the various possible situations after her mother's departure, imagining how many important moments she would miss. The next morning, she asked her mother, Susie, to write her a "Guide to Mom's Death" to guide her step by step on how to spend her days without her mother.

So, mother Susie patiently wrote a note according to the number of days to guide her daughter how to live her life, including "making Mexican chicken rolls" on the first day, "allowing people to care about you" the next day, and "combing the dog's hair" on the third day... This is a mother's guide to healing for her daughter. Although most of the content is spoken in a light and humorous tone, many places still exude the mother's deep concern and attachment to her daughter. For example, on the 2000th day, in the notes of "Have a Good Dream", the mother wrote:

I'm not peeping and don't want to disturb your life, just stop by and see you. Even if you wake up and forget what you said in your dreams and forget the details of your dreams, try to remember this feeling of mother-daughter reunion. ...... I hope my visit reminds you that Mom loves you forever.

Life is always not easy, parting is painful, and the mother writes down these little tricks that can make life better a little bit, which is the most precious gift to her daughter.

"Ping Ru Mei Tang", "Ping Sheng Ji"

"Ping Ru Mei Tang" book shadow

Rao Pingru finished drawing cuts and pasted out 18 like thin

"Ping Ru Mei Tang" is the old gentleman Rao Pingru's deep remembrance of his deceased wife who stayed together for sixty years and finally left first. Readers can see the deep affection of the couple in the slow period of the car and horse, and perhaps more, will see the mother Mao Meitang's difficult handling of a huge family with five children in difficult times.

Rao Pingru's third son, Rao Le, once recalled that in 1958, Rao Pingru was sent to Anhui Labor Re-education, and the burden of the family was suddenly placed on Mao Meitang. The girl who once "loved beauty and played, she and her girlfriend Liu Baozhen were inseparable, singing and dancing, watching movies and chasing stars, shopping and fashion" carried this impoverished family.

It is only different from the general human world that tells the suffering of the 1960s, in "Ping Ru MeiTang", the obscure life of the whole family sleeping on a straw mat and eating salt water to make rice is illuminated because of the mother.

Rao Le once recalled: "The whole family is dressed in shabby clothes. Two beds, a crumbling dining table, and a broken sofa are all the furniture in the house. On the cracked parapet panels, Grandma nailed many nails and hung some things she needed to hang. It was a quiet evening, and we sat around the dinner table, or did our homework, or read books, painted, etc. On the couch, Grandma would stroke ink balls (Grandma's cat), and Mother would roll up newspapers and sing softly. My father said that my mother's favorite song was "Flower Good Full Moon", and what I remember more was "Farewell", "Fishing Light Song", "Midnight Song", and "Soul Breaking Blue Bridge", "Cuiti Spring Dawn", "Santa Lucia", "Toseri Serenade", "Schubert Serenade" and other foreign music. I never learned it, but I remember that I should have heard it from my mother. The mother's voice is sweet, but the song is always tinged with sorrow and sadness. Now that I think about it, it was so difficult at that time, but with my mother, I still felt so warm and happy. ”

Scene sketching

"Mo Yan Short Story Series"

"Mo Yan Short Story Series"

When Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he delivered a speech called "The Storyteller", which began by introducing his mother to the world:

My mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. Her ashes are buried in a peach orchard on the east side of the village. In 2011, a railroad was going to cross from there and we had to relocate her grave farther from the village. After digging the grave, we saw that the coffin had decayed and the mother's bones had been mixed with the mud. We had to symbolically dig up some dirt and move it to a new tomb. That is, from that moment on, I felt that my mother was a part of the earth, and that my story from standing on the earth was a message to my mother.

In the following speech, Mo Yan told seven or eight stories of his mother, the story of the hot water bottle, the story of eating dumplings, selling cabbage, picking ears of wheat, being sick for a long time and always refusing to give up the strength of life, the poor family but supporting her son's insight to learn to read, pile by pile, which shows the tenacity, love and insight of a rural mother. As Mo Yan said, open the mother, open the floodgates of memory, and then get inspiration. Mother is really the most important motif in Mo Yan's writing, and unlike the earlier thick "Red Sorghum" and the "Fat Buttocks" written in a long song because of the death of the mother, the mother does not have to be metaphorically referred to as land and civilization in Mo Yan's short stories, does not have to bear the heavy history, and sometimes is just a vivid and vivid mother full of wisdom in life.

For example, in the short story "A Collection of Cat Affairs", it is written that when the "Four Qing" team came to the village, how my grandmother and mother painstakingly laid out a table of good tea and rice for Comrade Chen, and used the nested structure of "stories in stories" to repeat the many stories about cats told by my grandmother, which was really vivid and interesting.

《Autumn Garden》

"Autumn Garden" book shadow

"When my grandmother died, I went to Hunan to attend the funeral and accompanied my mother to put my grandmother's favorite clothes into the coffin one by one. In the pocket of a piece of clothing, I found a note with some year and place on it—the briefest biography grandma had ever written down, the last two lines of which were:

A lifetime of tasting sweet and sour

It ended up like this

She used these two sentences to describe her life. ”

In 2020, at the age of eighty, Yang Benfen published his first book in his life, "Autumn Garden". In this palm-sized brick red book, she records the life of her mother Liang Qiufang, Yang Benfen named her mother "Autumn Garden", and she incarnated as the eldest daughter in the text, "Yang Zhihua", and the life of Qiuyuan's suffering and stacking constantly collided with her daughter's pen and eye sockets. The author said: "I wrote the story of the life of an ordinary Chinese woman, how our family struggled to survive like driftwood in the water, and wrote about the life and death of those rural characters in the hinterland of Central and Southern China." I know that the story I write is like a drop of water that will eventually flow into the long river of human history. ”

The unique charm of "Autumn Garden" is, of course, that it writes about the ups and downs of a mother's life in a documentary, memorable stroke, and writes about people who have been exiled to the bottom of society, so small and powerless in the face of fate, as if they can be crushed at any time but so flexible. But more preciously, "Autumn Garden" is a biography of ordinary people written by ordinary people, the smallest people, in the four-square-meter kitchen with a low stool as a table to write a memoir, and the success of "Autumn Garden" also proves that every mother who has worked hard to live is worth reading and seeing.

"Mulan Gets Married"

Many classics have described the extremely complex mother-daughter relationship, and the same is true of Mulan's Marriage.

The book "Mulan Marries" contains the true stories of 15 women. They are either young or old, married or single, or in distress or have taken a long way. When dealing with their relationship with themselves and the world, they face a variety of complex and subtle environments and challenges.

The author Hu Hui said that "Mulan Marriage" is the title of one of the fifteen stories, "Mulan" is not the ancient Mulan, but a girl named Pang Mulan, the story tells how she made choices in the face of marriage, which involves some family memories, including the suicide of her mother. Rather than blindly pretending to be a mother, "Mulan Marriage" focuses on another possibility - when a mother is not a qualified mother in the public evaluation system, how should the children live by themselves, and how to establish their own tenacious spiritual world, relying on themselves to transcend the reality of the dilemma without a model to model.

Writer Zhang Yiwei said that in this era, the relationship between mother and daughter is becoming more and more diverse. Some mothers and daughters are hardly like people from the same world except for blood relations. Leaving aside the superficial questions, the serious conflict between generations may be the question of whether the daughter wants to be like the mother, "this is actually the last thing Chinese like to discuss, that is, a very subtle part of the family relationship, it involves the real view, it involves the truth." ”

The Choice to Be a Mother

"The Choice to Be a Mother" book shadow

"You will definitely regret not having children!" In 2008, when Israeli sociologist Ona Donat began conducting a social survey called "Regret Being a Mom," the phrase echoed through her mind. Is motherhood innate? Is motherhood a woman's vocation? For the next five years, these questions accompanied Donat and her investigations, which eventually developed into the book The Choice of Motherhood.

In this book, Donart interviews twenty-three Israeli women, regardless of age, education, or social class, all of whom have one thing in common: motherhood. Through long-term follow-up interviews, Donat traced the women's journey to becoming mothers, analyzed their emotional world before and after the birth of their children, and investigated how they recognized and resolved the contradictions and conflicts in the process of birth and maintenance.

For women, motherhood can be a basic and important role, and motherhood is associated with a sense of accomplishment, pleasure, love, comfort, pride, and satisfaction; we also know that mothers' tension and ambivalence can create helplessness, helplessness, guilt, shame, anger, hostility, and disappointment. We also begin to be willing to understand that mothers are human beings and may consciously or unconsciously have thoughts of hurting others, however, we still long for these flesh-and-blood female experiences not to shatter the mythical image of mothers, so we do not recognize that mothers may also regret it.

"In this book, I trace their journey to becoming mothers, analyze their rational and emotional world after the birth of their children, and outline the conflict between their feelings and the pain in their lives— a pain that comes from the gap that they wish they could get rid of their motherhood, but in fact they have become mothers. In addition, I investigated how these different women perceived these conflicts and how they handled them. The author said.

Author Olna Donas also suggests that not all mothers like children from the start, and that they may not have the desire to have children, but only do so because of social pressures. But for most people, motherhood is innate, motherhood is sacred, and the idea that "a mother may not love her children" is simply a kind of desecration of the image of a mother, and people prefer to believe that this is only because of social or economic pressures, as long as they can provide corresponding assistance to solve all problems, so for "mothers who are born with no feelings for their children", society chooses to turn a blind eye. However, maternal love motherhood is not necessarily natural, and if the superstition of maternal love and motherhood cannot be broken, it will create a mother who regrets it for generations.

"My Mom"

"My Mom" book shadow

Beginning with "Kim Ji-young born in 1982", the women shown in Korean women's theme works are suppressed to the extreme, and the sense of pathos of the Backwater War has triggered continuous echoes.

The most recent "My Mom", which won the "Korea Publishing Culture Award", is another style, this album transfers the authority of the narrative to the child, studies and records the mother from the child's point of view, focusing on the real state of the mother taking care of the baby - because of the birth, so the figure is out of shape; because of the night feeding, so sleepy during the day; because of the time not to take care of the baby, so their own life has become messy...

The glorious identity of the mother will always obscure a lot of truth, and every mother is encouraged to be beautiful, strong, and almost perfect, but as many mothers say: "Mom is also the first time, everything is very strange, very difficult." 」 "Only by clearly seeing the hardships and fatigues of raising a child, and seeing the countless small problems that need to be overcome in life, can we better understand what a mother is."

How Hard It Really Is: The Self-Redemption of a Middle-Aged Mother

How Hard It Is: The Self-Redemption of a Middle-Aged Mother

Continuing the discussion of "what is a mother", the whole story synopsis of "How Hard Is It: The Self-Redemption of a Middle-Aged Mother" is: The protagonist Kate was once a capable fund manager, and in order to accompany her two young children to grow up well at the peak of her career, she chose to quit her job and go home and become a full-time mother. But a few years later, her husband was laid off and left at home, even needing to spend a lot of money on psychological treatment, the heavy pressure of the mortgage at home, and the cost of children, which forced her to return to society to seek work.

Each chapter in the book is time-limited, writing about more specific things that happen at different points in time, such as a neighbor who lives next door to tell you about the trivial daily life of the day, and from the subtitles of some chapters in the book, "I can't lose the extra flesh", "find a thinner, more energetic and more shrewd self", "Maintain a state of elation in the earthquake of family life"... In the author's pretense of ease or complaining, it is full of the desolation and exhaustion of people to middle age.

"How Hard It Is" unabashedly exposes the cruel side of life, and women have a set of "full lives" based on the logic of male power - husbands love themselves and can earn money to support their families, children are obedient, and life is safe. The awakening of many women and the beginning of many women's stories are as described above, the quiet of the present world is broken, the protagonist Kate also found that she had to go to work when she had to go to work to find that she had not paid enough attention to herself in most of her previous lives, which is the choice of many women - when she first entered a family, she was busy taking on the responsibility of taking care of the family, and completely took the initiative or was forced to abandon her ideals, careers, and feminine charm... When I was caught by chance, I found that the years were suddenly too late.