{"id":4935,"date":"2026-05-09T14:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T18:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=4935"},"modified":"2026-05-09T14:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T18:30:13","slug":"reading-recommendations-for-mothers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2026\/05\/09\/reading-recommendations-for-mothers-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Recommendations for Mother\u2019s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I remember that my mother liked to spend Mother\u2019s Day reading in bed. My brother, sister and I would bring her our handmade Mother\u2019s Day cards in the morning, and then we would leave her alone with her book for most of the day.  My mother passed away years ago, but I still associate Mother\u2019s Day with reading. With this memory in mind, I decided to focus this week\u2019s Storied Charlotte blog post on reading recommendations for Mother\u2019s Day. I contacted Kathie Collins, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Charlotte Lit, and Mary Alice Dixon, the author of the recently published poetry collection Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild<\/em>, and I invited them to recommend an excellent book that would be especially appropriate to read on Mother’s Day.  I was pleased that they both accepted my invitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the reasons I reached out to Kathe Collins is that she recently taught a class at Charlotte Lit called \u201cThe Mother-Daughter Dyad in Myths, Fairy Tales, and Contemporary Culture.\u201d I asked her if she could recommend a book that deals with the relationships between mothers and daughters.  Here is what Kathie sent to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark, thanks for inviting me to contribute a short piece about mothers and daughters for Mother\u2019s Day. I\u2019m the mom of three thoughtful, loving, and successful adult daughters (as well as two incredible sons). Of course, I am a daughter, too, and lucky that my eighty-year-old mom is still thriving, mothering me with advice and worry as often as she can. Although I\u2019ve not followed my mother\u2019s footsteps completely, I\u2019m sometimes awed by the number of ways in which my life has parallelled hers\u2014even when, maybe especially when, I\u2019m trying to go another way, to be a separate and distinct woman. No doubt my mother feels this pushing away and pushing against, as I feel it with my daughters, as a loss. For me, this daughter loss, however expected, always comes as a surprise, and brings with it fresh grief.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Love, loss, and grief are parts of the complex and intense relationship that is the mother-daughter bond\u2014a relationship I would argue no author has captured better than Amy Tan in her acclaimed novel <\/em>The Joy Luck Club, in which she explores these complexities, particularly as they occur within patriarchal culture, through the lens of four mother-daughter dyads. The following quote is from a scene in which the character An-mei Hsu explains how mothers try to prepare their daughters for the world, try to give them a life in which they can escape their mothers\u2019 failures and insecurities, but nevertheless pass on both love and pain\u2014trauma and resiliency seamlessly woven\u2014from generation to generation:<\/em> “And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tan\u2019s novel, a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1989, just a few months before I became a mother for the first time; that is, before I knew what motherhood would make of me. Before I knew what it was to love a daughter. I reconnected with the work this spring as I prepared to teach a Charlotte Lit class on the mother-daughter dyad in classic and contemporary culture and found its themes not only more personally poignant than ever, but also just as socially relevant. So often, I hear people label the mother-daughter relationship as inherently difficult, as though women are simply wired to find fault in each other. What this book reminds us is that mothers, especially those in male-dominated cultures like our own, are forced to make difficult choices, whether conscious or not, about how to love their daughters while preparing them for a society that will rarely be looking out for their best interests. That is, they must love them while making them tough. Daughters are often wounded by that preparation. And still, love is as much a part of the story.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I reached out to Mary Alice Dixon in part because many of the poems in her collection Snakeberry Mamas <\/em>relate to maternal behavior.  After all, the word \u201cmama\u201d is in the title of the book.  In Mary Alice\u2019s poems, maternal behavior and the rhythms of nature are often interconnected.  This theme is reflected in Mary Alice\u2019s book recommendation.  Here is what Mary Alice sent to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A book to read on Mother\u2019s Day? Of course, there\u2019s Louisa May Alcott\u2019s <\/em>Little Women and Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s <\/em>The Scarlett Letter. Unconventional, and perhaps unattractive mothers, but real. Which is what I ask of fiction. Books that capture the complexity of their eras.  Surely the most searing portrait of motherhood in a novel has to be Toni Morrison\u2019s <\/em>The Beloved, in which Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her eldest daughter rather than allowing the girl to be returned to slavery. Morrison show us how the most brutal of circumstances shape a sacrificial maternal love.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

But the book I most recommend to celebrate Mother\u2019s Day is not fiction, not essay, not memoir, not psychology. It\u2019s ecology: Suzanne Simard\u2019s <\/em>Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). This is not a book,\u201d Simard writes, \u201cabout how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simard\u2019s pioneering study shows how old growth \u201cMother Trees\u201d stand at the center of a social network, sustaining, feeding, and communicating with their saplings through underground networks of carbon energy transfer. With the voice of a poet, Simard describes this \u201cflow of energy from the Mother Tree as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun\u2019s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child.\u201d  In fact, a dying Mother Tree will pass \u201cher life force straight to her offspring\u2026. Dying enabled the living; the aged fueled their young.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this age of ecological and other crises, the Mother Trees rise, the \u201cBeloveds\u201d of the forest. They show us that if humans are to survive as a species, we must remember we spring from communal roots as interconnected, as sacred, as strong, as magnolia and oak. Read this book then hug a tree. Hug a child. Hug a mother. Plant a seed.<\/em>      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thank Kathie and Mary Alice for their thoughtful book recommendations for Mother\u2019s Day. I wish all the mothers in Storied Charlotte and beyond a happy Mother\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember that my mother liked to spend Mother\u2019s Day reading in bed. My brother, sister and I would bring her our handmade Mother\u2019s Day cards in the morning, and then we would leave her alone with her book for most of the day.  My mother passed away years ago, but I still associate Mother\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[395,393,394],"class_list":["post-4935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-finding-the-mother-tree","tag-mothers-day","tag-the-joy-luck-club"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4935"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4941,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4935\/revisions\/4941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}