All My Mother's Lovers

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While these behaviors are hurtful, with therapy or intervention, many daughters report reconciliation in adulthood as well as understanding.

This is not to say that these mothers are “perfect”—human beings, by definition, make mistakes—or that they don’t sometimes, at one moment or another, exhibit any of these kinds of interaction. This mystery, her sadness, and her lasting anger all come together to cause Maggie to forgo sticking around for her mother’s shiva.

Deter­mined to under­stand the moth­er who nev­er ful­ly accept­ed her sex­u­al­i­ty, Mag­gie sets off to deliv­er the let­ters in per­son and dis­cov­ers dimen­sions to her mother’s life that she nev­er imagined. Flesh and blood, with richly lived experiences; not extras in the story of your life, or one-dimensional foils who materialized the day you were born.

The lack of maternal warmth and validation warps their sense of self, makes them lack confidence in or be wary of close emotional connection, and shapes them in ways that are both seen and unseen. As Maggie wrestles with her grief, she also struggles with anger toward her mother’s “discomfort” with her being gay and the unresolved complexity that discomfort yields. There are many things for which All My Mother’s Lovers should be praised, not least of which is its cast of dynamic, complicated queer characters whose relationship problems have nothing to do with how they identify. That said, after she finds the letters, Maggie realizes perhaps she knew far less about her parents’ relationship than she thought. These insecurely attached daughters often become clingy in adult relationships, needing constant reassurance, from friends and lovers alike.Yet Masad is deft and incisive about the sometimes-fraught nature of mother-daughter relationships, around which loaded subtext can seem to twist and twine like Christmas lights. Unlike the daughter of an attuned mother who grows in reflected light, the unloved daughter is diminished by the connection. There, Maggie finds her father, Peter, helpless in mourning, so she takes on the responsibility of identifying the body and making arrangements. Now, I know she did what she felt like, without any thought of me, but I still hear her voice in my head especially when life gets difficult or I feel insecure. That was true for Eileen, 39, who has sorted through many of these issues and, as a mother herself, now has limited contact with her mother.