Lucia Berlin’s fitting obituary for “Mama”

Berlin rightly understands and respects Mother, for whom she has no mercy 

“Mama”, one of the short stories of Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women”, talks about complex relationships, dysfunctional familial setups, and dilemmas with a reminder about why love and abuse cannot co-exist. 

“Mama” is mostly in the form of a conversation between an unnamed narrator and her sister Sally, who is undergoing treatment for cancer and goes through a series of mental conflicts that the author untangles slowly as the story progresses. 

There is a sense of solidarity and sisterhood throughout the story to make Sally understand their Mama, who was detached and emotionally unavailable in their lives. 

Sally is confused about what to make out of the experiences she endured when Mama was alive; her older sister (the narrator) helps her make sense of past events.

 The interesting part is how their thoughts are shared in their most honest raw form; sometimes they wonder  if that’s a trait they inherited from their mother. There is a part in the story where the narrator worries “God, Sally that sounds like something she’d say. What if I am just like her?”.

 When Sally gets lost in thought, wondering about things like why her mother shut her down in situations when she needed help, especially when Sally’s health was deteriorating, the author jumps in to tell her the complex realities that their mother had to go through. 

The narrator explains their mother’s emotional distance to Sally was a way of self-preservation. 

Through their conversation we get an insight into the mother’s personality; we discover she hated children and blamed the Catholic church for promoting procreation. Sally wonders why her thought process has gotten as complicated as their mother’s—she hates that people work and live, and she is dying. She tells her sister,  “I hate you because you are not dying, isn’t that awful,” and her sister reassures her that her feelings are valid and that it is a good thing that they can openly talk about these things. She reminds Sally that their mother didn’t have anyone to share her thoughts with. 

 As a reader one is likely to develop a love-hate relationship with the mother, like the other characters in the story.  One might even wonder whom to feel bad for in the story. It opens up the discourse on what trauma bonds can do to people, and how patriarchy can disguise itself as caring. “He was my keeper, then he became my jailer,” their mother recalled of her husband. The story, directly and indirectly, questions the definition of freedom. 

It deals with complex realities, social expectations from a mother, questionable parenting, invisible men, and the good and bad changes a man can bring into their partner’s life. This is evident in the mental conflict the sisters’ mother goes through to fit into spaces — the rich house, the intimidation, and the insecurities that led Mama to detach from her children. ; the way the author understood those issues and addressed them felt like a bittersweet obituary to her Mama. 

Sally keenly listens to her sister’s narration. It makes Sally yearn to tell her Mama how much she loves her. Her sister’s feelings, however, are a little complicated.