Quotation Study: Motherthing, Ainslie Hogarth

On feeling unconditionally unloved by my mother...

This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!

These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.

There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.

This Weeks Focus: Motherthing, Ainslie Hogarth

There couldn’t be a more appropriate time to revisit Motherthing than now — not just because it’s a searing portrait of maternal dysfunction, but because I currently feel like I’ve been emotionally suplexed by my own mother. Which is to say: I am writing this while blinking through the kind of tears you don’t cry in full, because that would mean admitting defeat. The sort of tears you just suppress and salt away into muscle memory.

I’ve always said — half-joking, half-wistful — that my thesis on mother-daughter antagonism was me trying to intellectualise my own family dynamic. A safe, academic way of saying: something’s not right between us. I don’t live with my mum anymore. I keep a strict emotional radius. But now I’m planning a wedding, and you don’t just not invite your mum to your wedding, do you? Even if she’s the kind of person who, upon receiving the invite, tries to stage manage the entire day like it’s her second coming — despite paying. I’m not even married yet and already dreading the possibility that she’ll hijack the day, that her inability to just be happy for someone else will sabotage the day I marry someone who has loved me than I feel she ever has or will.

Anyway. That’s enough of a prelude (or, more accurately, a rant disguised as context). Let’s talk about Motherthing.

Ainslie Hogarth’s 2022 novel is a domestic horror that doesn’t rely on jump scares — the horror is interpersonal, psychological, and inescapably maternal. Abby, our narrator, works at a care home and quickly becomes obsessed with one of her patients, Mrs Bondy. Where others see a cantankerous old woman, Abby sees something soft and sacred: a real mother. When Mrs Bondy’s actual daughter threatens to move her out, Abby confronts her — and in doing so, the entire facade begins to crack.

“And she should have been my mother. You’re the one who should have endured the suffering of a mystic, not me.”

Abby has a Messiah complex: the belief that she’s been unjustly burdened by suffering that was never meant for her. But it also reveals the fantasy a lot of us have when our own mothers fail us — that someone else out there could have done it better. That some other woman could have given us softness, or stability, or a kind of love that doesn’t morph into shame.

The line between victim and villain is always blurry in mother-daughter stories, but Abby doesn’t see that. She casts herself as the wounded child and the other daughter as undeserving — not of her mother’s cruelty, but of her proximity to the very idea of a mother. Abby doesn’t want to see Mrs Bondy for who she is; she wants to keep her myth intact. It’s not just denial — it’s delusion weaponised as survival.

“When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks will become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly it can project enough mother-things into the socks that they do the trick. Becomes a Motherthing.”

Sometimes, anything can become a mother if we need it badly enough.

In my thesis, I wrote about substitute mothers — quasi-maternal relationships that take up the slack when the real ones disappoint us. These substitutes are often friends, teachers, older women, fictional characters, even romantic partners. They’re not always good, but they’re something, and often that’s enough.

I’ve had my own sock-mothers. Women I projected softness and safety onto, even when they were emotionally unavailable or problematic in their own ways. Because the truth is: when you’ve never felt held (I cannot recall my mother hugging me), you’ll contort yourself into any shape to be held, even metaphorically.

“I was raised by a woman who wanted to be loved like a mother, but not act like one.”

This line cuts. Because it’s not that my mum was cruel in the conventional sense. She didn’t beat me. She didn’t abandon me. But she wanted credit for love she didn’t give. She wanted to be seen as nurturing without ever truly nurturing. You can have our names in your Facebook bio but that’s just performative when there is nothing but degrading words spoken to us. There is something so uniquely disorienting about that — like living in a house where all the furniture looks like furniture but none of it works. A chair you can’t sit on. A bed you can’t sleep in.

“I told myself I’d never be like her, and then I started to become her the second she died.”

This is my worst fear. That I’ll be so focused on rejecting her legacy, I’ll end up replicating it. But I do believe — or maybe I just need to believe — that generational growth is real. That I can inherit some traits and still evolve past them. That the society I live in, the therapy I’ve gone to, the relationships I’ve cultivated — all of it has equipped me to rewrite what she couldn’t.

“She never hit me. She didn’t have to. Her silence could split me open.”

Because absence, when it comes from someone who’s meant to be everything, is a kind of violence. I remember the long stretches of silence like rooms I wasn’t allowed to enter. The way she weaponised coldness. The ache of being a child who knows how to apologise before she knows how to be angry.

Motherthing understands what many books about motherhood don’t: that the worst wounds aren’t always physical. That sometimes, the most lasting kind of horror is the sense of always having to prove you’re loveable — not to the world, but to the one woman who should’ve known it without needing proof.

So yes, I’m scared that my mum will ruin my wedding. But more than that, I’m scared of how normal that feels. How familiar chaos has become. How even now, in my mid twenties, I’m still trying to give the socks a second chance. And by socks I mean books about mother-daughter relationships.

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