Reviewed by Paula Shaffer Robertson
Posted on: October 5, 2023
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How far should a daughter go to fix a fraught relationship with her mother? That’s the question posed on the back cover of Rica Ramos’s memoir, Nobody’s Daughter. Ramos chronicles her lifelong dilemma trying to find her mother’s acceptance—and maternal love—from the same woman who married the next door neighbor while Ramos was still a little girl then stoically remained in denial as he sexually abused Ramos for years. She could not even look Ramos in the eye when authorities finally proved abuse had taken place, and still refused to leave the man.
Ramos takes us on a personal journey of how she evolved as an adult with lifelong feelings of abandonment and betrayal by her mother to understanding the deeper complexities of relationships—in particular, the mother/daughter bond. In the psychoanalytical world, mother/daughter abandonment issues, whether emotional and/or physical, are referred to as the “mother wound.” And Ramos starts off with a bad case of it at the most inopportune time: in her early 40s and as the mother of two sons, Ramos is engaged, in the process of planning a wedding, shopping for the dress, and dealing with the uncomfortable subject of whether to invite her mother to the wedding or any activities pertaining thereto. The problem is that her mother won’t do anything without her abusive husband, a man Ramos understandably has a deep resentment toward. But above all, Ramos misses a genuinely loving mother’s presence in her life. Her mother provided for her physically, but she totally skipped out on the emotional and protective side.
Reading Ramos’s words feels like talking to your best girlfriend over a chilled glass of fine wine; and with the topic of emotional/physical abandonment and sexual abuse, one can’t help but get personal. Without being too graphic, Ramos adeptly examines the raw feelings of a young girl being molested by the man who married her mother. Then there is middle-aged Ramos dealing with the after-effects of abuse.
In one chapter, Ramos intertwines different periods in her life under subheadings of the children’s calling game, “She loves me, she loves me not.” One of the “she loves me” times occurred when Ramos was 20 and pregnant for the first time. Her mother actually came through. Those times were countered by ones of “she loves me not,” such as when Ramos is only five years old and chided by her mother who says, “You are stupid, so stupid!” Ramos never forgot those words, nor the other “she loves me not” incidents that haunt her into adulthood.
Readers feel Ramos’s grief as she grapples with conflicting feelings and unanswered questions that may never be resolved. Ramos puts to the test the power mothers have over daughters, and the power of forgiveness and acceptance. Telling her story, she passes the test admirably.
In Nobody’s Daughter, Ramos displays her craft mastery with colorful, imaginative, and descriptive language. She fleshes out her host of characters—the many mother substitutes—and rounds them out with realistic dialogue. Readers wind up wanting to be friends with Ramos; her writing is that engaging.
