Mentor to women who wish to take the lead in the relationship they have with their mothers.
Local book event
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Two weeks from today! Please join me and my dear friend and fellow author Susan Ito here in Connecticut for a special event at Bank Square Books in Mystic on Sunday, April 7 at 5 p.m. Susan's memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, is a 2023 finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award and our discussion will center on mother-daughter generational rupture and repair, as well as how adoption plays a role in mother-daughter relationships, both on the biological side and the adoptive parent side. Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story. Much, much love, Karen |
Karen C.L. Anderson
Mentor to women who wish to take the lead in the relationship they have with their mothers.
Question from an adult daughter: My mother wasn't a nasty, abusive mother, but she didn't protect me or my brother from my father who (due to C-PTSD/personality disorder) was intolerant and verbally abusive. As well, she was "politely" neglectful. From age five it was up to me to get myself to school on a public bus. I went to five schools before I was 12, and when I had an eating disorder age 16, I went to the hospital alone. She was too busy to collect me after a day of grueling...
Question from a reader: I’m in an endless battle with a narcissistic mother. Despite almost three years of therapy and years of inner work, the psychological damage that I have continues to fester, and I feel I am losing control of a life I never even figured out how to live. I’m also a writer, although my work lives in the notes app on my iPad. How do I stop letting this thought – I’ll only have peace when she’s dead – paralyze me? It can’t be true. Dear Adult Daughter... You're right, it's...
Your mother probably taught you that lying is wrong... ...so why is it so hard to have a honest connection with her? Why can you just tell her the truth about what's okay and what's not okay? What you are willing and not willing to do in the relationship? Rather than people-pleasing her? If you currently people-please her, it's not because you're weak and pathetic. It's not a "you" problem. It's because you were taught, like most of us, that being pleasing is safer than being honest. Her...