“I do not know which to prefer,
the beauty of inflections
or the beauty of innuendoes,
the blackbird whistling
or just after.”
— Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The mother who forgets is often feared. She is no longer the custodian of the domestic archive, no longer the ground of the child’s stability or the embodiment of continuity. When a mother descends into dementia, she threatens the psychic and cultural scaffolding upon which we build the myth of maternal permanence. Yet perhaps it is precisely through her unravelling that the deepest contours of caregiving, identity, and memory come into view.
This post or short essay explores the figure of the demented mother — not as a mere object of loss, but as a threshold figure who resists normative temporalities, disturbs the reliability of kinship, and exposes the fragility of narrative itself. Drawing upon feminist and psychoanalytic theory, trauma studies, poetry, and literature, I argue that the demented mother is not simply absent but differently present: a dissonant echo whose fragmentation forces a rethinking of what it means to remember, to mother, and to mourn.
The Mother as Disrupted Archive
In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch (1997) introduces the notion of postmemory — the powerful affective connection to a traumatic past one did not directly experience. The maternal figure is often central to this transmission; she becomes a vessel for the familial story. Dementia interrupts this channel. The mother who forgets can no longer safeguard the family lore — names fade, histories become jumbled, the genealogical line collapses under the weight of temporal distortion.
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), memory itself is a haunting — spectral, disruptive, and unrelenting. Sethe, the mother, is tormented not only by her past but by its material return in the form of her deceased daughter. The novel refuses closure, much like the experience of caring for a demented mother, in which the past is neither fully accessible nor wholly absent. Morrison’s narrative structure — fragmented, recursive, polyvocal — mimics the very texture of memory in decay.
Such figures expose the paradox of maternal forgetting: the mother loses memory precisely at the moment when her children most need it — to make sense of their own narrative formation. She becomes a gap in the archive, a rupture in inheritance.
Poetics of Forgetting: The Disassembled Self
Poetry, more than prose, offers a form to articulate the unformed, to trace the edges of incoherence without demanding resolution. Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), though centered on the death of her brother, becomes a meditation on fragmented remembrance. Assembling scraps, definitions, and half-legible photographs, Carson resists the seduction of coherence — a poetics that resonates with the experience of witnessing a mother’s mind fray at the edges.
Eavan Boland, in her late works, turns toward the silences of the maternal body — the unsaid, the slipping away. “I remembered her. / I remember her still,” she writes in The Pomegranate, pointing to the simultaneity of presence and absence. Dementia, in this sense, is not a void but a layered presence: interrupted, recursive, illegible. The demented mother does not vanish but becomes scattered across errant gestures, broken sentences, the repetition of a name without anchor.
Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun (1989) speaks to this melancholic territory — where the subject mourns an object not fully lost, a grief that cannot be completed because the mother remains physically proximate but psychically unreachable. Kristeva’s notion of melancholia — a mourning without a grave — offers a theoretical resonance with the poetic fragments mothers leave behind in their forgetting.
Embodied Memory and the Traumatized Maternal Form
To speak of the demented mother is to speak, inevitably, of her body. The forgetting mother is not only cognitively altered; she is physically disoriented. She stares into space, gestures without context, loses control over bodily functions once governed with grace and privacy. The body becomes visible, too visible — a leaky, trembling archive. But whose memory does it carry?
Theorists of trauma, such as Cathy Caruth, remind us that trauma is “the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (Caruth, 1996, p. 153). Dementia, while often seen as neurological, also carries traumatic qualities — not only for the sufferer but for the witness. The daughter who sees her mother no longer recognize her undergoes a second severance: not only the symbolic weaning of the child from the breast, but the annihilation of the gaze that once anchored her selfhood.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) posits that even when cognition falters, trauma resides in the somatic. The mother may not name her children, but she may respond to the scent of rosewater, the intonation of a lullaby, the rhythm of hands that once soothed her. Here, memory detaches from language and finds refuge in gesture, in presence, in the pre-verbal — in what Kristeva calls the semiotic chora.
Judith Butler’s concept of precarious life (2004) becomes especially poignant here: the mother’s body in dementia is vulnerable, exposed, dependent, and socially abjected. Feminist disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2002) further reminds us that culturally constructed notions of the female body as passive or dependent are intensified when illness or cognitive decline is present. The demented mother thus becomes a compound figure of marginality — female, aging, cognitively altered — and is often rendered invisible within dominant narratives of agency.
And yet, as trauma studies and feminist theory both suggest, this body still signifies. It remembers. It calls for care — and for a reimagining of what care entails.
Maternal Dependency and Ethics of Witnessing
Eva Feder Kittay (1999) insists that care must be rethought from the standpoint of dependency. Her work in Love’s Labor radically centers the caregiver and the cared-for as relationally interdependent rather than hierarchically bound. Within this framework, the demented mother is not a burden or failure, but a call to ethical proximity — a relational vulnerability that forces a re-reading of agency.
The traditional feminist impulse to move beyond the maternal as a trap (Rich, 1976) is troubled here. For the daughter-caretaker, the maternal is not behind her, but ahead — an anticipatory becoming. To care for the demented mother is to witness a version of one’s possible future. The maternal dyad collapses time: mother becomes childlike, daughter becomes keeper of the flame. And yet, the fire flickers.
Lisa Baraitser (2009) offers a compelling response in her notion of maternal time — a time of waiting, suspension, and non-progress. Dementia renders time circular, looping — a rhythm not unlike the sleepless early months of motherhood. In both, language falters, patience is tested, and love becomes a repetitive act rather than a coherent narrative.
Diagnosing the Mind, Silencing the Self
Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) reminds us that to diagnose is also to disarm. The medicalization of the mother’s forgetting locates her in the realm of the “madwoman,” removing her from the rational subject. She is spoken for, managed, institutionalized. In the clinical file, her maternal subjectivity is irrelevant — or at best, a footnote to her decline.
And yet, the diagnosis is not merely biological. It is sociocultural. In a world where productivity, memory, and cognition are valorized, the demented mother stands as a terrifying counter-image. She slows us down. She requires repetition. She makes no progress. And in so doing, she opens the space for poetic slowness, for theoretical listening, for ethical patience.
Memoirs like Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (2013) and The Undying by Anne Boyer (2019), though not about dementia per se, write into this space of obliteration and survival. They remind us that the maternal, when touched by suffering, becomes not only a wound but a radical confrontation with the limits of speech.
After the Blackbird
The demented mother is not merely a figure of loss — she is an uncharted presence, a being unmade and remade by time. She is not who she was, but neither is she absent. She lingers, fractured, as echo and gesture, as touch without memory, as breath without name.
To accompany her is to walk with unknowing — to accept that coherence may never arrive, that love may speak in repetitions, and that mourning does not wait for death. In her, we see not the end of meaning but its transformation. Not silence, but a new language — halting, embodied, broken, true.
And perhaps this is the most radical lesson she offers: that memory is not the only form of continuity. That care can exist without recognition. That presence can persist without narrative. And that even in forgetting, the mother — unconsoled, uncontained, unremembering — remains a mirror in which we must learn to see ourselves anew.
This, too, is mothering.
To stay, without being seen.
To speak, without being heard.
To love,
when nothing is returned.
References
Baraitser, L. (2009). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. Routledge.
Boyer, A. (2019). The Undying. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso.
Carson, A. (2010). Nox. New Directions.
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Deraniyagala, S. (2013). Wave: A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami. Knopf.
Foucault, M. (1965). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Random House.
Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal, 14(3), 1–32.
Hirsch, M. (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press.
Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press.
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.
Rich, A. (1976). Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W. W. Norton & Company.
Stevens, W. (1954). The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
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