Mother-daughter relationships are undoubtedly complicated. It can be simultaneously the closest relationship you can have and the most fraught one. This complicated dynamic is at the core of “The Mother Act,” by Heidi Reimer.
Published in 2024, this book follows a mother, Sadie, and her daughter, Jude, as they both navigate their separate lives as actors. Sadie is a fiercely independent guerrilla feminist and performer who falls in love with Damian, an English Shakespearean actor. Before meeting Damian, Sadie is adamant that she does not want children after seeing what her mother went through as a fundamentalist Christian. When she gets pregnant, Damian convinces her that they won’t have to fall into traditional gender norms and Sadie can still be a successful actor as well as a parent. After having Jude, Sadie quickly realizes that she cannot be a parent and runs away, leaving behind the love of her life and her baby. While estranged from her now ex-husband and daughter, she writes “The Mother Act,” a one-woman show about the rage she feels towards being a mother despite loving her child. Jude finds this play and struggles with her mother’s history as Jude herself grows up and follows in both of her parents’ footsteps to become a famous actor.
The timeline of this book is quite scattered, jumping back and forth between Sadie’s childhood in the late 1980s (told through her semi-autobiographical screenplay), Sadie’s adult life and relationship with Damian, Jude’s early childhood without her mother and Jude’s adult life as she tries to understand how her mother could justify abandoning their family. But this timeline is not told linearly. The story bounces around, jumping sometimes 20 years at a time. At first, this made each chapter incomplete. I did not have enough information about the characters to understand what was happening, and it made the first few chapters confusing and uninteresting. As I pressed on, the story became clearer as I pieced the puzzle together. This style of storytelling ended up making each character feel more nuanced. If “The Mother Act” had only been told by Jude or written linearly, I would not have had the compassion I did for Sadie and vice versa.
I am not a mother, and I have a good relationship with my own mom, but this book made me understand that motherhood is complicated in a way that I could never have imagined. I felt Jude’s anger about having her mom tell the whole world how she hates being a mother, pain that was not erased by Sadie saying that she loves her daughter, nonetheless. But I also understood that Sadie needed to abandon her child to save her own life. Both of these characters were thrust unwillingly into situations where their love for each other could not outweigh their resentment, abandonment and loneliness. There was no villain in “The Mother Act.” It was just two women dealing with the societal expectations of motherhood and the immense impact all of their actions would have on each other.
This is why this book stuck with me long after I turned the last page. It made me think about the fact that there is an expectation that women will have children and love them, no matter what. What happens if that is not how someone feels? Motherhood feels inevitable, but how much of that is women’s actual desire to be a mom and how much is that what we are socialized to believe? What happens if you have a child, only to realize that this is not what you wanted for your life? Is it always worth it to give up your individualism to become a mother, and is it a debt that daughters owe to their moms?
“The Mother Act” left me with more questions than answers. It made me contemplate my own mother’s life before I was born and my future. And that is exactly why I liked it so much. It made me feel existential about my place as a woman and the lives of so many women around me. A book with an inconsequential cover that I picked up on a whim at a used book sale has stuck with me for many weeks and will hopefully keep me asking questions about womanhood, motherhood and marriage.