Mother’s Day arrives this year with a bit more resonance than usual. Many of us have been separated from our loved ones during the pandemic, and some have lost parents. Today, in honor of the holiday, we’re bringing you a selection of stories about mothers, motherhood, and the rich relationships between mothers and children.
In “Coming Home Again,” the novelist Chang-rae Lee recalls the Korean meals that his mother made for him and the period that he spent caring for her after she was diagnosed with cancer. (“My mother never left me any recipes, but this is how I learned to make her food, each dish coming not from a list or a card but from the aromatic spread of a board.”)
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In “The Prodigal Daughter,” Jill Lepore recounts how her spirited mother influenced her own writing on the life of Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s sister. In “Confessions of a Juggler,” Tina Fey chronicles her struggle to balance work and parenting. (When people ask how she handles it all, Fey writes, “sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.”) In “How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda,” Jiayang Fan reflects on a frightening time when she was separated from her mother, who suffers from A.L.S., during the pandemic, and on the subsequent social-media campaign initiated against her by Chinese nationalists. Finally, in “My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children,” Hilton Als considers the impact of last year’s racial-justice protests and contemplates the lessons that he learned from his mother while growing up. (“If Ma failed, then we failed, and she never wanted us to feel that. Something else Ma wanted: for black people in Brooklyn, in America, not to forever be effectively refugees.”)
Wherever you may be on this holiday, we hope that these pieces offer you some much needed comfort.
—David Remnick
She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.
What a son remembers best, when all that is left are memories.
A daughter caught between China and America, a parent suspended between life and death.
What’s the rudest question you can ask a mother?
Writing, history, mourning.
