There are aspects of my life I am always trying to understand better. One—what else?—my relations with my mother, but what interests me now is not the narrowly personal aspect. I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? Now I see her as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing years with courage and with dignity. I saw her then as tragic, certainly, but was not able then to be kind. Every day you may watch, hear of, a young person, usually a girl, giving parents, often a mother, such a bad time that it could be called cruelty. Later they will say, “I am afraid I was difficult as an adolescent.” A quite extraordinary degree of malice and vindictiveness goes into the combat. Judging from the histories and novels from the past, things were not always like this. So what has happened; why now? …
For years I lived in a state of accusation against my mother, at first hot, then cold and hard, and that pain, not to say anguish, was deep and genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what promises, was I matching what actually happened?
From Under My Skin: Vol. One of My Autobiography by Doris Lessing, Harper Collins England 1994
