The burden of a mother's unlived life

5 questions for writer, daughter, and sister Tracy Clark-Flory

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One of my great obsessions is discovering what it is that invisibly fuels our individual journeys on this hurting planet in our finite time. There is the surface level ambition in each of us—maybe you fantasized about being a lawyer since the moment you saw the quirky crew on Ally McBeal or you knew a friend’s mom who was an artist and it taught you that this was, in fact, a job. But beyond the cultural inkblots from our young lives, there is a sort of inherited subconscious, an engine of plot that we are usually not fully aware of.

My dad’s was quite obvious—he was a kid who grew up answering the door for debt collectors and he became a bankruptcy lawyer. In my case, I believe I am a truth seeker about the human condition, in part, because there were secrets in my own extended family—namely that my paternal grandmother struggled with mental illness her whole life and was estranged. In my early 20s, I went on a journey to understand who she was, and what that meant about who I was. And a lot of psychological puzzle pieces started to fall into place.

Well that is just part of why I love Tracy Clark-Flory’s new book, My Mother’s Daughter, so very much. It is about how she became a journalist obsessed with understanding our relationships to sex, gender, and shame—all the while fueled by a subconscious story buried in her own mother’s past. And how she pursued the truth of that story—not just her mother’s but a whole generations. Oh, and found a new love of her life—her long lost sister. What a story! What a revelation! This is one you don’t want to miss. Meet Tracy…

Courtney Martin: Jung, as you probably know, wrote that the greatest burden a child can bear is the unlived life of their parents. Does that resonate with you? Your mom died young, so I imagine you feel like a lot of her life went unlived, but is there any particular piece of it that you feel like you are carrying on here?

Tracy Clark-Flory: My reunion with my sister Kathy has been filled with a sense of triangulation. I am loving her as my sister. I am also loving her for our mother—and as a mother now myself, which informs my understanding of our mom’s loss. When Kathy and I first met in person, I remember this feeling of hugging her for the both of us. I am loving my sister, and loving the daughter our mom never even got to hold.

This doesn’t feel like a burden, though. It feels like a tremendous gift—not just that I get to know my sister, but that I can be an emissary of sorts for our mom. I know just what it would have meant for her to get to meet Kathy, who she thought about every day of her life. To a certain extent, it also feels like I’m able to bring our mom’s love to Kathy—because I can share who our mom was and how she longed for her first daughter. All of this feels like a true honor.

Before I found Kathy, though, I did experience the burden of my mom’s unlived life. I spent so much of my career writing about sex, as a personal essayist and a journalist covering the sex beat. In my twenties, I liked to say, “My aim is shamelessness.” It took me a while to see just how much I was stuck in shame. My career required a constant face-off with it—both in terms of the taboo places that my reporting took me, but also in terms of my discomfort with talking about my career in my “real life.” I felt I could say nearly anything on the internet, but when I came to telling friends, family members, or new acquaintances about my latest article or essay, I would turn red and stutter. In some ways, my career was like exposure therapy that didn’t take.

Of course, I saw the parallel in my mom’s past: she was sent away in shame and I turned shame into my career. But I thought it was a coincidence or poetic irony, I didn’t see a causal link. As I came to better understand the context of these homes and Kathy’s adoption, I saw that my mom’s pain from being sent away in shame was part of what drove me to my work. I was writing against what had happened to her but I was also stuck in it. It was only in the journey told in this book that I came to understand the sources of my shame, and that’s when I noticed that so much of it began to evaporate.

My addendum to Jung—if I may!—is that the unlived life of your parents loosens its grip when you are able to see, name, and understand it.

How did the reporting and writing of this book, and your lived experience reuniting with your adopted sister, leave you feeling about adoption, in general? What questions do you hold about it after this journey?

I had a very unsophisticated understanding of adoption before finding Kathy. It was only after our reunion, as I dove into research about our mom’s past, that I read deeply about adoptee experiences, including in books like Rebecca Carroll’s Surviving the White Gaze, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, and Jeanette Winterson’ Why Be Normal When You Could Be Happy?

I also read first-person testimonies from birth mothers in Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away and devoured Margaret Moorman’s memoir Waiting to Forget, which catalogs her experience of being sent away and placing a baby for adoption in the sixties, as well as her later experience of having a baby that she was able to raise herself.

These books revealed the lies that are so often sold around adoption—that it is “what’s best for the baby,” that adoptees are “lucky,” that birth mothers can “move on and forget.” They highlight the many horrifying ways that birth mothers are coerced into adoption and that adoptees have been treated as commodities. Surviving the White Gaze and All You Can Ever Know especially illuminated the troubling dynamics of transracial adoption.

As I learned about Kathy’s own experience of adoption, it added additional layers of understanding. Kathy had tremendous adoptive parents—who were Black, it’s important to note—and she was especially connected with her mom Marguerite. In her own words, she lived “a very blessed life.” As Kathy tells it, Marguerite gave her a real sense of confidence and belonging as a Black woman. I recently did a Substack Live with Rebecca Carroll, who suggested that part of Kathy’s “sense of abundance,” as well as her “graciousness” during our reunion, arises from her having been raised by a Black family.

Tracy and Kathy

You wrestle with gender, race, and class in this book a lot. It made me wonder, how have the themes you wrote about influenced the way you want to parent your White, relatively privileged son? It’s such an important calling in this moment.

We’ve tried to be very intentional from an early age about talking about systemic injustice in ever-evolving and age-appropriate ways. There is evidence that some of this has already taken root in ways that are beyond us. From kindergarten onward, my kid was very comfortable using words like “racist” and “sexist,” and now as an 8-year-old he’ll call me out for assuming someone’s pronouns. Growing up against the backdrop of Trump’s presidencies has forced all sorts of conversations—about everything from the immorality of ICE to the reality of gender-based violence to the importance of public schools.

Since finding Kathy, we’ve had to find ways to explain the profound fracture in our family’s past. How exactly do you tell a child that you’ve just found his aunt—who he didn’t even know existed—through a DNA test? That she is Grandma Deb’s first daughter, but that Grandma Deb never got to meet her first daughter? The answer is: you explain it simply, bit by bit, and very matter-of-factly. There are so many occurences in this world that, when explained in terms that a child can understand, are revealed to be patently unjust, outrageous, and corrupt. That act of translation can be a gift to adults as much as to children, because of the degree of moral clarity that it provides.

Racism and sexism are part of our family story—and I want my kid to know that, deeply. The concrete immediacy of this story and the people involved—his grandmother and his aunt, especially—offers a powerful way into talking about issues that we would have wanted to tackle, regardless. My greatest hope is that we can help him to develop this immediate and intimate understanding of injustice into a broader perspective on the wider world.

This is largely a domestic story, but you also ended up finding your mom’s Nigerian partner (the father of your adopted sister) and he has become an uncle figure for you. It made me curious about how pregnancies in similar circumstances during that same time period in other countries has been dealt with. Are “home for unwed mothers” a global phenomenon or uniquely American?

There were certainly pre-Roe maternity homes outside of the U.S. context—including in Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K. The Salvation Army homes got their start in England before spreading stateside. My research deep-dive was restricted to the U.S. context because of the setting of my family story, of course, but also because that context alone is so rich and complex.

American maternity homes in the pre-Roe era were quite distinct in how the racially-divided approach to unwed motherhood was part of a broader system designed in the post-war years to reinforce the white nuclear-family norm—and the hetero-patriarchal American dream. Shame around unwed pregnancies was hardly a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, but the way that shame was managed and institutionalized was inseparable from the culture and history of this country.

And, indeed, my sister and I were able to find her biological father, who, like so many other men in that era, was never told about the pregnancy. On meeting Kathy, he was very clear that if he had known about her birth back in 1965, he would have wanted to see her raised by his extended family in Nigeria.

If you could go on a girls’ trip with your mom and Kathy, where would you most want to go and what would you guys do together? What would you eat and drink?

Gosh, I would have to say Italy, mostly because I know that Kathy has wanted to go since she first watched Under the Tuscan Sun. I’ve never been, either. Our mom went many lifetimes ago, in her youth, but once she had me she became a creature of habit when it came to travel. She rarely used her passport—and if she did, it was to go to Canada en route to Alaska. In this alternate reality in which we could all travel together, our mom would rediscover her adventurous spirit. Our mom was an art history major, so she would school us on all the frescoes and sculptures. Mostly, I’m picturing lots of fresh pasta and wine, alongside lingering hours-long conversations. Also, probably some rascally hijinks—Kathy and I have a propensity for silliness that our mom often suppressed. I think the two of us would tilt her toward lightness and play.

Kathy and Tracy at Tracy’s book launch

Buy the book here. Listen to Tracy and Amanda Montei’s fantastic podcast Dire Straights. Oh, and don’t miss Tracy’s Modern Love episode. Such an amazing interview:

And please, tell us what this sparks for you in comments! Were you part of this generation and what did you witness and experience? What healing have you done and what rage do you carry? Or are you a daughter or son of this generation, like Tracy, and how do you carry the legacy with you? I’m all ears.