Suspense Magazine November 2012

Mom, Whom Were we
Running Away From
The Story Behind “Escape”
A
prominent literature critic once wrote that all my books are based on
the mother-daughter relationship—how hellish they might get and
how all my young female characters are “under-mothered.”
The term triggered me: under-mothered!
If an artist is hooked on one particular topic, let me assure you their work
would be vastly autobiographic with many variations of it.
The essential problem of my life was my seesaw relationship with my mother.
So maybe all these pages, all this painstaking work is to settle the course, to selfanalyze
what I went through in life because of or with my mother.
I was deeply under-mothered; my borderline mother, at times, took me as a
sister, a best friend, or a lover. At the same time I was over-mothered, because she
was overpowering, over-interfering, transgressional, and overbearing.
While I was churning the over/under mothering issue in my mind and soul to write a novel revolving around this topic,
I went abroad, hoping to start writing there and then. One more inspiration was my own experience raising my daughter, for
I could not help but notice motherhood’s proximity to insanity.
By insanity I mean one can easily pass across the border of sanity and start doing all sorts of weird stuff in order to protect
one’s child. That is a shocking, disturbing, thin, ambiguous line, and an easy border to trespass.
The world is full of dangerous people. At best it is full of insolent, rude, and inconsiderate people. And you can be
vulnerable, weak, and exposed as a single mother. Without that shell called family to insulate or protect you against the
world, you are horrifically alone with your baby to protect.
So my childhood wounds and my own experience as a mother—trying so hard
NOT to be like my mother, and maybe going to other extremes to achieve that—
leaves me with my constant motherhood companion…guilt. There is no way of
getting rid of that pushy, disturbing, and depressing companion. Wherever you
go that feeling will accompany you.
With all this disturbing luggage tucking behind me at a hotel room, I received
a phone call from a famous Turkish journalist.
“The Turkish Army has sued you,” he said. “You are being prosecuted for
discouraging people from performing their military service. Did you hear that’
I was just learning this from him at a hotel room abroad, all alone, when I
was dwelling on these motherhood issues to write my book.
This is a scary call, I can assure you. As a columnist, I wrote many essays
questioning the omnipotent position of the Turkish Army and its effects on our
premature democracy. The Turkish Army does not believe in accountability.
They receive incredibly big chunks of money to run their war machinery, and
the Turkish Parliament does not have the right to question the spending. This
is one of the main reasons why Turkey is not accepted as part of the European
Union.
By Perihan Magden
SuspenseMagazine.com
3