Sundress Reads: Review of I Am My Mother’s Disappointments

Victoria Hood’s I Am My Mother’s Disappointments (Girl Noise Press, 2024) reads like letters to a mother who is gone but not absent from the speaker’s life. This collection of poems centers mostly on grief and how it affects the speaker’s life, from being able to battle her eating disorders to believing her mother would be disappointed in her choices.

The opening scene is a suicide pact between the speaker and their mother, agreed upon after the former opened up about wanting to end her “dumb life” (Hood 1). When, years later, the mother decides to take her own life, the pact lingers in the speaker’s mind. Ultimately, she doesn’t want to follow through with it, choosing to stay behind and miss her mother instead. This poem immediately sets the tone for a collection that informs the speaker’s mother of all the changes that have taken place since she left, while also looking at the past with a critical lens and asking questions that will never truly be answered.

The speaker reaches out to a person who is no longer here, boldly declaring “I forgot to get over your death.” (Hood 3). But they have changed, life has gone on, and there is no way for the speaker to know how her mother would feel about the woman she has become. There was no list conveniently left behind with all of the mother’s dreams and hopes for her daughter, so the search for parental validation is endless. It becomes an obsession in the way that all things the speaker does always end up with her questioning whether the mother would approve, be proud. Mostly because the mother left too early, and now there are only scattered memories that the speaker holds on to as a volatile guide to the person her mother would like her to be. 

When loved ones die, it is common to cherish only the good memories, share them at a dinner table, and sanctify this person in the process. While listing all the ways her mother would be disappointed in the person the author has become, Hood describes someone who could potentially condone a non-traditional path to life, without kids and more than one partner, writing, “But then again, Mother, you might be so jealous of my freedom, (…) of my commitment to two people, that you hate me all over again” (17). I like that the speaker decides to examine her complex relationship with her mother, providing us a very human glimpse into this woman we have never known.

We also learn of the violence interwoven with love, the selfishness that blinded the mother to her daughter’s ailments and made her uncomfortable. As the mother nourished the belief that thinness is beautiful, the daughter decided she preferred to go hungry. Now that the speaker is eating again, they wonder whether the mother would notice they’re happy or if they would “wonder why [their] daughter had gained seventy-five pounds over the past few years?” (Hood 10). The dysfunction in a chaotic upbringing and the self-inflicted type of coping mechanisms finally lead the speaker to admit that maybe if their mother had not left, their life would look different and they like it just as is. The speaker ends up revealing that “[she is] just as disappointed with [her mother] as [the mother is] with [her]” (Hood 50). The anger and resentment in these poems dig up difficult memories, but there is also acceptance and the realization that regardless of it all, the speaker will always unconditionally love their mother. 

Hood’s poems underpin the complexity of grieving someone. Wanting to get answers, to make them proud, and then remembering that they are not here. The author manages to expose vulnerability in verses that can be relatable to anyone who has lost a loved one and still yearns for their approval. For example, when Hood writes, “Please come back and yell at me” (18), the story is someone else’s but it can always hold true for others. This is ultimately the most powerful thing for me specifically, since losing both my grandparents within two years of each other.

Despite the collection being knit around grief and sadness, the poems transmit how powerful love can be—not just being loved by others, but the process of learning to love oneself. The raw emotions end up leading to a satisfying conclusion with notes of positivity and hope for the future, but without any true intention of “moving on” from grief, because that is not something that can be done, not really. Rather, there is an acceptance that even though all mothers die in the end, their presence will be preserved through memories, good and bad. And that’s okay.

 I Am My Mother’s Disappointments is available from Girl Noise Press

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Ines Pinto (she/her) is from a small beach town near Lisbon, Portugal. She decided to leave those shores behind as she moved around Europe, eventually completing her master’s degree in International Politics. She dreams of a fairer world, so she worked in the non-profit sector to call for the end of corruption and dirty money flows before moving to New York to start a brand new adventure. She is also the proud mother of a spoiled cat named Louis, a certified multilingual Eurovision fan, and a reader with an appreciation for all genres.