Stone Yard Devotional

Much of the novel focuses on the protagonist’s memories of her deceased mother. The protagonist’s mother was a monumental influence in her life while she was younger as well as in the present, as she ages without her. When she was a girl, the protagonist found her mother’s unconventional habits embarrassing, but now she counts herself fortunate to have had a mother so confident in her own beliefs and desires. She and her mother had a strong bond, held together by trust. Her mother is a guide to her and, even posthumously, helps her to become the adult she is. As she grows older, though, the protagonist realizes that not all mother-daughter relationships are built on such mutual trust and respect: “[T]he complications and layers of hurt and mistrust, of envy and control, and about the confusion so many of my friends still carried about who was parent to whom—I began to understand how rare such a simple and powerful trust had been” (110). Many of her friends have tenuous relationships with their mothers and must become parents to those who raised them. Meanwhile, the protagonist’s mother was confident enough in herself to allow the protagonist independence and support without criticism. She was a woman who did not burden her daughter with her struggles and insecurities, and as an adult, the protagonist now worries that she should have done more to understand those struggles.

The protagonist often wishes that she had acted differently while her mother was alive. She comes to realize that her mother was secretive in many ways and that she, the protagonist, did not fully understand her. Of her many meditations on their relationship, this is among the protagonist’s profoundest regrets. Her lack of knowledge of who her mother was and what she needed results in moments when the protagonist looks back and wishes she had been more present. In the aftermath of her father’s death, the protagonist believes that her mother simply does not need to cry, and she discourages her from returning to a yoga class in which she began to sob. However, she comes to realize that she stopped her mother from reaching emotional release: “[M]y mother had been on the cusp of some new understanding of herself that day […] and it was I who held her back from that discovery. Once more I wish I was able to be a wiser daughter to her when she was alive” (186). The protagonist was not mature enough to see what her mother truly needed. Lacking a deeper understanding of her mother’s emotional complexity, she led her down the wrong path. Now older, the protagonist has the wisdom she wishes she had possessed while her mother was alive.