HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, translated from the German by H. F. Broch de Rothermann, with an Introduction by John Banville (New York: New York Review Books, 1989, 2009)  ("Her love for me was stormy.  I do not care to call it passionate, for that would presuppose impulses and initiatives, and one failed to find anything in her being that emanated directly from her.  She lived not according to any immanent motive but by preconceptions.  She loved me as 'the mother' should, according to a fixed concept of what mother and child were supposed to be, a fickle love that depended on the submission with which I conformed to my role as child.  No other torments of childhood were so painful as the intensity of that love, which constantly required me to give something I was unable to grant.  She required more than my goodwill to be a well-mannered child, to grow and to thrive under her care.  I felt I was expected not merely to fulfill the stereotype of the perfectly educated, well-bred son, unconditionally loving his mother, but in addition to provide something lacking in herself.  In her hands, I was both tool and weapon with which to overcome her emptiness--and perhaps also some anticipatory foreboding of her own destiny, whose fated finality she refused to accept."  Id. at 58-59.).