How to Love Your Daughter

I’ve brought myself to my favorite café this Sunday afternoon to think about Hila Blum’s How to Love Your Daughter, a novel that bears a lot of thinking about. It’s brave and disturbing; you feel like, maybe, you shouldn’t be allowed to witness Yoella’s emotional thrashing as she tries to understand and come to terms with a years-long estrangement from her daughter Leah. Clearly, something bad happened to have brought this woman from Israel to the Netherlands to stand, bereft, on the dark street across from her daughter’s house, watching the two granddaughters she’s never met.

Motherhood, along with its joys, is no doubt the most challenging, fraught, and paradoxical relationship life has to offer. It’s the most important relationship you’ll ever have because yours isn’t the only life at stake if you get it wrong.

Every mother I know loves her children, does the very best she can to give them what they need. But you get the child you get and it takes at least half of their childhood to figure out who they really are, assuming you’re perceptive enough, lucky enough to be able to do that. And there are so many wild cards—friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, coaches, any number of people or experiences, large or small—that can change the trajectory of a child’s life in ways you’d never have predicted and are helpless to divert.

Sometimes the motherhood plays out seems to make no sense at all. The kids of “bad” mothers become happy, successful adults; the kids of “good” mothers become criminals.

Given all this, What makes a good mother, what makes a bad one?

How is anyone supposed to get it right?

Or, maybe the better, more useful question is how does a mother translate her fierce love into the actions (or lack of actions) that help the child she adores grow into the person she needs to be to leave home when the time is right—without wanting to stay away forever?

Hila Blum’s Yoella fails at this task. She falls madly, deeply in love with her daughter at the moment of her birth. Besotted, she can’t think or talk about anything but beautiful, intense, precocious Leah; there’s no room for anyone else in her life. They take luxurious vacations, just the two of them; they delight in their own special brand of playful, intense conversation; Leah tells her everything.  

Then comes perilous middle school and with it, Arza, Leah’s first close friend. The girl sets Yoella on edge and makes her jealous. Leah experiences inevitable disappointments of early adolescence that her love cannot make right. Secrets, too, the humiliation at learning something about Leah that Leah should have told her—would have told her in the past.

At sixteen, Leah falls in love with Dennis, a handsome, brooding boy who doesn’t love her back. She’s heartbroken; Yoella’s heart breaks for her. No mother can make her daughter fall out of love but, trying, Yoella deepens the fracture between them.

Moving in and out of time as Yoella unravels memories in bits and pieces trying to understand what she did wrong, How to Love Your Daughter crabwalks toward the bad thing. Each new piece of knowledge brings you anxiously, deliciously closer to seeing what Yoella was blinded to as she and her daughter moved toward the rift neither of them could have imagined when Leah was a child.

Maybe it’s the cosmos that sends a teenage girl and her mom through the door of the café to offer a much-needed distraction from the sad muddle I’ve thought myself into. They get their beverages, pastel-somethings, topped with whipped cream, and sit down at the table in front of me, the girl facing in my direction. She’s maybe sixteen, with the requisite teenage long (brown) hair parted down the middle and a collection of raggedy string bracelets on one arm. She’s wearing shorts and a tee-shirt; her face is dusted with freckles. Her mom’s an ordinary-looking mom: in her forties, wearing a summer dress, her dark hair pulled back into a messy bun.

The girl sets one of those tablets school kids use these days on the table, along two books—schoolbooks, I think, straining but failing to be able to read the titles. She and her mom seem comfortable together, they talk awhile, then the girl opens her tablet and begins to type. Homework, probably. The new school year has just begun.

Her mom, who hasn’t brought anything for herself to do, picks up one of the books and leafs through it, then the other.

She picks up her phone, scrolls, taps. Sets it down again.

Then, as far as I can tell, she just sits there, looking at her daughter.

And I wonder if she’s thinking what I always think when one of my own two daughters is near, yet caught up in a world of her own.

Please let life be kind to her.

And when it isn’t, please let me know what to do.