59 pages • 1-hour read
Like Mother, Like Mother
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Themes
The Importance of Women’s Personal and Professional Fulfillment
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, child abuse, rape, suicidal ideation and self-harm, and emotional abuse.
The text shows that, as time passes, society’s expectations for women change, creating possibilities for them to achieve both personal and professional fulfillment. The fact that the older women in the text, including Bubbe, Frances, and Zelda, fight for the opportunities to find this fulfillment, regardless of their society’s low expectations of women, indicates just how important it is. Rieger uses these characters to illustrate how even in restrictive social contexts, personal agency and resilience can carve out space for independence, demonstrating the universal desire for autonomy and self-actualization.
Bubbe and Frances have fewer opportunities than their granddaughters, but neither meekly accepts the idea that she should have to give up everything she wants. Though Bubbe is not happy to be responsible for keeping house and taking care of her son’s children in her old age—even wearing all black to signify how she mourns herself—she “insisted on being paid weekly, ‘like the housekeeper [Aldo would] need to hire’” (36). At the very least, she forces her son to acknowledge the value of her work so she will have some way of benefiting herself and her grandkids. Frances may marry a man she doesn’t love to escape her father, but when her husband dies, she finds new freedom as a widow. She tells Ruth, “I thought I’d remarry. I had offers, but I didn’t want to settle again” (245). Compelled to settle for something less than love once, Frances will not do it again. Ultimately, when her old college boyfriend reaches out, she engages in a years-long affair with him, unconcerned with her father’s or society’s potential disapproval. Frances’s decision underscores the novel’s larger argument that love and personal agency are not always mutually exclusive, and women’s fulfillment often requires a rejection of external expectations.
Likewise, Zelda takes the opportunity to escape Aldo so that she can find some personal happiness, which later affords her the chance for professional fulfillment as well. After Heidi starts school, Frida asks Herbert, “‘What would you think […] if I went to college? It would make me more interesting. I have a good head for numbers […].’ The one household task she had taken on enthusiastically was the family checkbook” (275). Capable and driven, Frida finishes her program, passes her exams and, within three years of starting work at her husband’s firm, becomes the income tax expert. When she dies, the newspaper runs a story about her because she was the first female business owner and accountant in town. “‘Women didn’t do those things back then,’ Heidi [says]. ‘I always wonder what she might have done had she been born thirty years later. Law and politics, I’m thinking. I could see her as the CEO of an investment company’” (311-12). By highlighting Frida’s accomplishments and speculating on what she could have achieved under different circumstances, the novel challenges readers to consider how structural limitations have historically stifled women’s ambitions. Although Zelda’s ambitions were limited by Aldo and her society, she found ways of circumventing both, proving just how significant personal and professional fulfillment are for women, regardless of the era in which they live.
The Impact of Unresolved Trauma
Many characters experience some kind of trauma, and its impact varies widely, especially when it remains unresolved. Rieger portrays trauma as something that lingers across generations, shaping behaviors, fears, and emotional detachment in ways that the characters themselves may not fully recognize.
For Lila, the trauma of her childhood abuse causes her to step in and provoke her father so that he beats her instead of Clara or Polo. Rather than allow herself to feel victimized, as her siblings do, Lila assumes the role of protector, exposing herself to more abuse. She says that Aldo’s father beat him consistently; “‘It made a man of me,’” he’d say. She shrugged. ‘I suppose it made a man of me, too’” (11). In saying this, Lila appears to mean that it made her tough, but this toughness comes at a price. Grace points out how Lila’s voice goes “dead” when she describes her childhood, as though Lila must completely close herself off emotionally from what happened to survive it. Joe says Lila has no internal life, a trauma response that prevents her from internalizing the way she was abused and potentially abandoned. Through Lila, the novel suggests that trauma does not always manifest as outward pain—it can also take the form of emotional numbness and an inability to engage deeply in relationships.
The Inescapability of Maternal Legacies
Lila’s and Grace’s experiences of their mothers, even when those experiences are fewer in number than what is typical, suggest that maternal legacies are inescapable, particularly on daughters. The novel explores the cyclical nature of maternal influence, showing how behaviors and emotional wounds echo across generations, often in ways that daughters do not fully recognize until they become mothers themselves.
When she is young, Grace lacks compassion for Lila and cannot understand her mother’s choices, but Lila’s impact on Grace is apparent nonetheless. Even before Grace develops empathy, she acknowledges Lila’s influence on her. She says, “I’ll never get over Lila […]. If I have children, they’ll never get over me” (134). Grace realizes how much Lila’s actions affect her, and she also suggests that they will impact her ability to be a good mother, just as Lila’s is affected by Zelda. Grace claims, “I can dimly see myself being a mother but not a good one” (138). Of course, Lila hadn’t been able to imagine herself as a mother at all. Joe says, “[Lila] refused to acknowledge anything like an inner life […]. Forward and outward. Grace is like that too, except when it comes to Lila” (248). He sees very clearly how his wife and daughter are similar, even when Grace can’t. This generational mirroring reinforces the idea that daughters inherit not just traits from their mothers but also their fears, coping mechanisms, and emotional absences.
Zelda’s disappearance constitutes a major part of her maternal legacy. However, as Heidi acknowledges, one’s genes will prevail. When Dennis suggests that Heidi’s cynicism comes from brokering divorces, she demurs, saying, “I got it from Mom […], DNA” (283). Further, Heidi says, “She wasn’t motherly. She was nice and she was there. Our father was our mother” (295), a description that resonates thoroughly with Grace. Even without any clear memories of her mother, Lila becomes so like her. She may not physically abandon her children, as Zelda did, but Grace feels her mother abandoned her emotionally. Of her choice to escape, Frida says, “If I looked back, I couldn’t go forward” (301), and this is mirrored in Joe’s description of Lila. Neither Frida nor Lila could permit themselves to live in the past; both had to look ahead—regardless of their unresolved trauma—to find the fulfillment they sought.
Maternal legacies might be inescapable, but Lila and Grace show that these legacies aren’t emotional traps. Grace’s shift in perspective upon becoming a mother highlights that while inherited trauma is unavoidable, individuals can still make conscious choices about how to respond to it. Lila may need to believe that Zelda died so that she wouldn’t have to come to terms with the possibility that her mother abandoned her, but she is determined to make sure her children have a better experience than she did. By demonstrating how both rejection and acceptance of maternal influence shape identity, the novel suggests that healing is possible—but only when the past is confronted rather than ignored. In the end, Grace tells Clara, “I’ve been thinking a lot about your mother and mine […]. Having a baby does that to you. Your perspective changes” (313). She develops compassion for Lila and Zelda, as neither one benefited from another’s protection during their time with Aldo; this is a level of empathy Lila herself was not capable of offering during her life. However, Lila took steps to ensure that her children would have a better life than she did, and Grace learns to stop seeing herself as a victim when she acknowledges others’ struggles and pain.
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