{"id":144883,"date":"2020-05-08T09:00:53","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T13:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144883"},"modified":"2020-05-12T13:19:38","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T17:19:38","slug":"my-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/05\/08\/my-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"My Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_144884\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/mothersbefore_p065a.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-144884\" class=\"wp-image-144884 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/mothersbefore_p065a.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"730\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/mothersbefore_p065a.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/mothersbefore_p065a-300x219.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/mothersbefore_p065a-768x561.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-144884\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The author\u2019s mother in the seventies. Photo: \u00a9 Brit Bennett.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>When my mother first arrived in Washington, D.C., she stepped out of Union Station, entranced by the cherry blossoms. Those pink-and-white flowers blooming from the trees must have looked like a technicolor Oz, far from the green moss and brown bayous of small-town Louisiana she\u2019d just left behind. She was nineteen then and had never been farther than Texas; well-wishers advised her to not reveal that she was from out of town so she wouldn\u2019t get scammed. So she and her sister Liz jostled together in the back seat of a cab and acted unimpressed by all the sights\u2014<em>Oh, just the White House? The Capitol? We\u2019ve seen it all before.<\/em> But it must have been hardest for my mother to pretend to ignore the cherry blossoms. She told me this story once, years ago, and I like to think about my mother then, long before she was a mother, a woman I will never know. I like imagining her in the back seat of that cab, in awe of the world.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Brit Bennett is the author of <\/em>The Mothers<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Excerpt from the new book <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/1531\/9781419742941\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them<\/a><em> (Abrams Image), collected and edited by Edan Lepucki. \u00a9 Brit Bennett and Edan Lepucki.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brit Bennett recalls one of her mother\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":838,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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