Not Your Gilmore Girl: A Meditation on Being Mothered

The Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so, I publish an essay from an emerging writer. This week, I am thrilled to share work from a former student, Sunari Weaver-Anderson. Sunari is a writer, artist and clumsy roller skater from North Richmond, California. She studies Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. You can stumble upon her at various cafes in Eagle Rock, drinking too much caffeine, reading critical theory and trying (desperately) to find ways to uplift marginalized communities like her own. Her poetry has been published by Nomadic Press in QuIP (2018) and she self-published Firebirds (2020), a collection of surrealist closet dramas about a family of clairvoyant women.

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On days that I miss my mama, I look for her in strange places. My closet. The mirror. The finger-picking of an acoustic guitar. Tonight I am looking for a fantasy to try on, to live in. Tonight, I’m playing pretend.

Where you lead, I will follow. Anywhere that you tell me to.

Carole King’s vibrato and the chirping of her tambourine sends a surge through my body. In the pilot of Gilmore Girls, we are grounded in “Stars Hollow,” an idyllic New England town with a church bell tower, a starched American flag, a local diner passed down as a family relic, and Lorelai—a young single mom with aspirations of owning her own inn as she asks for a cup of coffee:

“How many cups have you had this morning?”

“None… plus five.” She beams, and the server calls her a junkie as he pours her sixth cup of coffee. “Angel,” she smiles a sly smile, “You’ve got wings, baby.”

***

It was a Tuesday—no, a Wednesday night when my mom first locked me in the room with her. I was doing homework on my bed when she came in, closing the door behind her. I remember the scraping of the lock as it slipped into its place. She stood between me and the brass knob. A human barricade.

There was no joy or love or humor in this night. For me and my mother, this was the beginning of the end.

The first time we see Lorelai interact with her daughter Rory, they are heckling two men who are trying to seduce them in their town’s greasy spoon—two men who don’t realize that they are mother and daughter, sixteen years apart. They laugh at the men who have sexualized them, throwing their heads back, enjoying the joke and a memory made. This is the magic and fantasy of Stars Hollow, where a confrontation like this doesn’t evoke fear or panic but instead a diaphragmatic laugh shared between a mother and her daughter. This would be the first of many scenes where we see the two bond over shared humor and their “the two of us against the world” attitude.

My mother and I bonded, but not so much over jokes in local diners.

When I was twelve, my mom taught me to roll a blunt. I watched her thick brown fingers remove the cigarillo from its foil pouch. “2 for 99¢ Swisher Sweets,” it read. I recognized these wrappers from the gutters of my neighborhood, the same ones strewn across lawns, or laying limply beside the liquor store trash cans. These wrappers littered North Richmond, in their range of vibrant colors, the way confetti litters a park after a party. This was no Stars Hollow.

I remember the way my mom cracked open the shell of the cigar and used her index finger to trail the tobacco into the waste bin. She ground up the green florets and pinched the dust they made between her fingers, trailing it down the half-tunnel of the open Swisher. She would smile at me as I did the same, cackling at how methodical I was. How precise. I was performing for her. Trying to be good at this thing that she loved.

I stared as she rolled the new cigar in on itself.

“Now you have to seal it,” she said, amused, “like an envelope.” She dragged her tongue along the exposed edge of the tobacco leaf, carefully rolling it between her fingers, adhering one side to the other. I struggled to emulate her technique. In the end, I held up mine, which was soggy and misshapen, while she held up her own, which resembled a pirouette cookie, uniform and cylindrical.

I know this isn’t the kind of story I should want to share about my mom. It isn’t an indictment of the kind of mother she was. It isn’t a judgment. I’m telling it as a story of the way I bonded with her. Of the way she let me know her. Of the way I tried, desperately, to fit into her world. To be loved.

In the fifth season finale of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai picks Rory up from jail after she compulsively steals the yacht of a rich stranger. Throughout the season, Rory had been studying at Yale and realizing her dreams of becoming a journalist. She tells her mother she stole the yacht in an emotional haze after being told by the media mogul—for whom she’d been interning—that she would make an amazing secretary but a pitiful journalist.

“I was so stupid, I’ll never be that stupid again,” Rory said, her big blue eyes looking up at her mother, asking for forgiveness.

“Ah,” Lorelai smiles with her eyes, and if she had crow’s feet, this is when you’d see them, “sure you will.”

A few scenes later, Rory professes that she’ll be taking time off from school to discover herself. Lorelai’s face twists into something unrecognizable as she says, “So what’s the great master plan then, huh? You’re gonna move back home, live in your room, work part-time at the bookstore?” This is the first and only time we see Lorelai reject her daughter, choosing tough love over her usual kid-glove method of parenting. “Not an option.”

Without Lorelai, Rory promises to figure it out. And she does, finding her way into the warm and wealthy embrace of her estranged maternal grandparents, who redecorate their spare house to her liking. A maid draws her baths and a chef prepares her meals. She spends her time lounging about, swimming at the pool house next door, and rendezvousing with her trust fund boyfriend. We are made to believe that she is finding herself, like any other twenty-something, but instead she is adjusting to the wealth she will one day inherit and to luxuries that are foreign to most of us.

Season six tries to convince us that she and Lorelai might never reunite—and yet we know that they will. In Stars Hollow, nothing is as absolute as the permanence of “Lorelai and Rory,” and thus nothing is as predictable as the two finding their way back to each other.

For the rest of us, relationships with our mothers may not be as inherent or indestructible. Not as resilient.

The second or third or maybe fourth time my mom locked me in our room, she accused me of choosing my grandparents over her. They had filed for custody, hoping to protect me from the isolation and violence and unpredictability of being my mother’s daughter. Behind these locked doors she would lecture me. Corner me in the room. Call me out of my name.

If I could, I would give you a dialogue here. I would give you an idea of all the ways in which she alienated herself from me, of all the ways she objectified me with her language, making me smaller and smaller and smaller until I was nothing but ears. But I can’t. The vitriol in her voice, the way she spoke to me, is more memorable than the words she strung together.

These territorial episodes—where she would accuse me of choosing anyone and everyone I loved over her then locking us into the room we shared—didn’t arrive out of thin air. To others, I was “Sunari,” but to my mom, I had always been hers. My whole life, a possession. An object to be loyal and to be loved obscurely. To be loved in extremes. On her good days, she would put her hand on my head and call me my honey. “It’s me and you until the wheels fall off.” A sentiment I would vaguely recognize during my Gilmore Girls binges. The two of us against the world.

The third or fourth or maybe fifth time she tried to lock me in that room with her, I got to the lock first. She kicked at the door, making a dent in its rectangular panel. Later, in a small beige room, a therapist would call this very dent a trigger.

From the other side of the door, I promised to let her in if she agreed not to lock it behind her. Even then I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt—I was desperate to trust her and to be trusted. I was desperate for her to understand that my love wasn’t zero sum, that loving others didn’t take away from my love for her.

This time, when she locked the door behind her, I tried to open it. I reached around her, trying to turn the metal knob, and she took this as a sign of aggression. Defiance. She grabbed me by the hair.

I remember how the blood found its way to my skin after she struck me. I remember the heat of all that blood rushing to my face, a current of plasma and cells. Our room seemed to collapse into itself, into me. It was cluttered and enclosed, a reminder that there was nowhere to go. Her clothes seeped out of our dresser drawers and onto the floor. Rolling toward me. The mouth of the closet, shrinking. I cursed the security bars on the window for keeping me in. I cursed the decorative welding and their design, which curled into itself like a fleur-de-lis.

I could give you more details, describing all the places where her hands collided with my body, but I don’t remember. My ribs took the brunt of it. The next day, I would hold my shirt up for the social worker so she could search me for bruises. This is a version of the same testimony I once gave to the judge who ordered my restraining order and again to the judge at my guardianship hearing—where I spent the last day of being sixteen.

***

In a season six episode titled, “The Prodigal Daughter Returns,” Rory calls Lorelai from the road. She gleefully announces that she got a writing job at some crummy local newspaper, that she moved out of her grandparent’s house, and that she’s already organized her return to Yale. “Yes!” pride crosses Lorelai’s face, and before they can finish the call, Rory pulls into the driveway of her mother’s house. They throw their cellphones to the ground and embrace each other. 

“Ugh, I’m sorry. I was so mixed up,” Rory tucks her face into her mother’s shoulder.

“You’re sorry? I’m sorry! I should’ve pulled you outta there.” Lorelai cradles the back of Rory’s head in her palm the way you do a newborn. 

The first time I saw this episode, I rewound it. Played it again. Rewind. Play. I find myself compelled by the resolution between them. How tidily it's handled. As if their conflict is thrown into a tarp, rolled up and tossed into a river never to be seen again. Despite its collection of ills, I find myself compelled by how easy Gilmore Girls makes it look to be mothered.  

That’s not the resolution I got. I wish I could write how after everything—after the soreness in my ribs left me, after I ripped up the guardianship paperwork, after my mom started taking her meds—we embraced each other and competed in our own apologies.

But we never did.

Years later, I sit on my floor surrounded by banker boxes and glossy photos, and I rummage through the collection trying to find the Polaroid I took of my mother. I press it to my heart with closed eyes. Afraid of my own tenderness. Afraid of my own yearning. I sit barefoot on the wooden floor, and I study the flimsy picture: She sits on the couch, leaning into the cushion with an elbow. A white and black shawl cascades from her shoulders. Her black headwrap creates the silhouette of a veil. I study the ratios of her face compared to mine. The distance between our widow’s peak and our brow bone, the way the corners of our mouths line up with the width of our nostrils. I notice her wispy, stunted lashes sprouting from her closed eyes, and I think about the story of when she took the scissors to them when she was a girl. I notice crescents burrowing themselves into her cheeks. There’s no way she was smiling, I think, but I don’t remember. Maybe it was a grimace, maybe she was grinding one of her fingernails between her teeth.

For a moment, I sit in the stillness of the photo. The peacefulness of her face. I pretend I had captured a smile, and I pretend it was for me. I pretend not to remember the way she snatched the photo from my hands after I took it, or how she yelled and hid it in between the slats of her bedframe and the mattress. I pretend I didn’t steal it from her and tuck it into a book, eventually slipping it into the banker box when having it in my possession became too painful.

On days that I miss her, I look in strange places. A box of photos. A silly little sitcom. The dent in my door. Tonight I am looking for a fantasy to try on, to live in. Tonight, I’m playing pretend.