“My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently,” writes Double X contributor Anna Balkrishna, who goes into great detail about her mother’s exuberant attempt at happiness in an ultimately doomed second marriage. “In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover,” she writes. Balkrishna shares her Modern Love-style tale of a second chance gone predictably wrong, titled "My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal." The author tells us that 13 years ago, when she was launching her college life, her mother, now in her 50s, “would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret” to send to the mother’s inmate boyfriend, and of her own resentment of the mother who emotionally abandoned her in favor of the unworthy new love. Balkrishna also chronicles her now-twice divorced parent’s emotional recovery: “My mother is back in her house and currently renovating all traces of him away.”

I feel great sympathy for both the mother and the daughter in this story and admire my young colleague’s efforts to examine the painful semi-estrangement she describes. (“We have reached a stalemate, sometimes respectful, sometimes not.”)

It is the nature of families to know details and maintain strongly held perspectives on other member’s most personal foibles. Loving but dysfunctional relationships are practically the definition of family, and traditional roles shift as children become independent. I wrote about my son a year and a half ago in a personal essay that was published in Slate. Even though he read the final draft, and not only gave me permission to submit it, but suggested edits (sub in: “he thought his parents would disown him” for “... were going to kill him”), when it published, six pages of reader remarks, nearly universally negative (yes, I read them all), in Slate's "The Fray" suggested I had been offensively invasive of my college-age son’s privacy. I wondered if I had broken some unwritten rule of family discretion.

If there is such a commandment (thou shalt portray relatives only in the most favorable light), many essayists are guilty of breaking it. Emily B. wrote here about the fuzzy boundaries of the parent-child confidentiality rule. In the reaction to my article, one Fray poster suggested I was actually trying to send my young son a disciplinary message that I had been unable to convey more privately. I don’t agree but I admit it gave me pause. As for Anna, I hope she will able to get past whatever compelled her to write so disapprovingly about her lonely mother and can find her way to visit her for a heart-to-heart talk.

Tags: modern love column, prison, relationships

Coming from a family of writers, I am all too familiar with the delicate issue you raise, Bonnie, of whether and how to write about one’s family. But I don’t think it’s fair to assume that just because Anna aired her problems with her mother’s marriage to a con man on the web, she hasn’t also had the “heart-to-heart talk” you wish for her with her mother. Nor do I think her piece came across as entirely “disapproving,” as you called it. There’s an interesting power dynamic between this suddenly giddy and irrational mother and her skeptical, now-protective daughter, and it’s one that Anna, as one half of the duo, has the right to hash out in print; provided, at least according to my family’s rules, that her mother get a chance to approve, veto, or tweak the final draft before it’s published. (As Anna wrote in a comment on Bonnie’s post, her mother did read and make corrections to the piece.)

For me, the most uncomfortable part of having a writer for a mother isn’t when she writes about me. She always shows me those articles first, and they’re usually not surprising—I knew her thoughts on our mother-daughter book club or my sister’s and my visible bra straps before reading the drafts. The unsettling part is when she writes about herself. With those personal essays, I feel like a bunch of strangers are learning things about my mother right along with me—her struggle over whether to get tested for polycystic kidney disease; her feelings of vulnerability when she lost her sense of smell. I had a particularly bizarre experience the other day when I e-mailed my mom to check in on how my grandmother’s doctor’s appointment had gone, and she wrote back with a draft of her piece describing not just the cardiologist’s advice (open-heart surgery) but her difficulty coming to terms with her mother’s mortality.

As hard as it may have been for Anna’s mother to read a piece about her own love life, it might be even more unnerving for her to read one about Anna’s love life.

Tags: mother daughter relationships

Anna Balkrishna’s article about her mother’s ill-fated love for a convict in Double X last week was a fascinating story, compellingly told. Reading it, I went from curious, to emotionally engaged, to feeling personally invested in her mother’s hard won success.

The talented daughter’s heartfelt writing also revealed her struggle to forgive her mother for the older woman’s stumbles, and I posted an (unsolicited) suggestion that the author, whom I have not met, communicate directly with her mom as genuinely as she did with her readers. In a passionate response to my busybody post, Anna and her mother both replied they are communicating with each other honestly and openly, and the writing of her essay was collaborative. I apologize for my narrow assumption.

My concern focused on the privacy aspect of their dynamic, and my own efforts to write about my family. Samantha thoughtfully weighed in that when her mother writes personal essays (Samantha’s mother, Robin Marantz Henig is a stellar journalist), Sam is more discomforted by the revelations of her mom’s own experiences than the tidbits sprinkled in about her daughters. The thing that we all—Anna, Robin, and I and the many authors, bloggers, memoirists, and thinly veiled fictionists who excavate the rich emotional vein of our personal relationships—struggle with is not whether to write about our loved ones (we find our muse wherever she lives), but how to do it with compassion. If I were a better writer, I wouldn’t write less about my husband, mother, children, or friends, I’d just do it more artfully and with greater consideration. I’m certain I will continue to over share about my own embarrassing mistakes, but I now lament that by doing so I may make my children cringe.

Getting back to Anna Balkrishna’s piece, I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of women who are attracted to incarcerated individuals. I have made some spectacularly poor decisions in my life and am particularly sympathetic to other women’s bad choices. When I was 20, I had a boyfriend who told me we were going to Europe together, somehow persuaded me to bankroll the trip, took me with him as far as New York from Minneapolis, then kissed me goodbye in a taxi and sneaked back to our room in the McAlpine Hotel, grabbed our (my) cash, all his stuff, and took an early flight. I didn’t know I’d been dumped 'til hours later when I got back to the room and found his note. That aborted adventure wasn’t my worst bad judgment. About six months later, he landed back in Minneapolis, and I got back together with him. We did not live happily ever after. (Note to my kids: Sorry about that anecdote, I should have posted a cringe alert. —Mom)

Photograph of writer by Getty Images.

Tags: Anna Balkrishna, oversharing, women who marry convicts