Introduction

"Tyler's ability to dissect the parent-child relationship is unmatched."— Titan GOLD AWARD

The Night Garden: Of My Mother is an honest, beautifully written exploration of the intricate bonds between mothers and daughters.

Sandra Tyler, the acclaimed author of Blue Glass, a New York Times Notable Book of The Year, mines what it means to be divided between these roles, with empathy and affectionate comedy.

When her 86-year-old mother falls and breaks her hip, Sandra Tyler is 42, with a nursing infant and precocious toddler.

After this fall, Tyler's mother insists on hiring her own caregivers—a motley patchwork of lost souls, including the too-friendly who think Scrabble is a good idea. But when she has a near-fatal fall, it is the author who hires a live-in aide, Chandice, who moves into her mother's house as if it were her own, with her KitchenAid mixer and apple-and-kale concoctions. Where should Tyler's allegiance lie? At what cost to their relationship should she no longer defer to her mother's steadfast guidance?

As her mother's dementia worsens, Chandice warns the author about other daughters "gone crazy" watching their mothers become unrecognizable. After her mother's death, the author is admitted to a psychiatric ward, where she sleeps the "sleep of the dying," as her mother slept in her final weeks. But in the timelessness of this ward, she can wonder: what exactly had always been at the core of their bond?

In breathtaking prose, The Night Garden candidly explores what it means for a daughter to have her focus fractured by conflicting responsibilities while still seeking, above all else, her mother's approval, protection and love.

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Excerpt

There was a trajectory to these final years, and I’m reminded of the winding dirt road along the Rio Chama River, where my mother took me in New Mexico, a place she returned to several times in her youth, to ride horseback through the painted desert of red rock. I would find one black-and-white photo of her leaning on a horse ring. She’s in a white blouse, her wavy hair blowing in the dry wind. She is relaxed and happy, clearly in her element. She would tell me about riding a horse down a mountain in a lightning storm, and how “crazy” but exhilarating it was. I often have imagined her in that same blouse, her hair in the wind, riding down that mountain. I imagine her exposed to wind and sky, riding through sage brush and cotton woods, her white blouse brilliant against dark clouds.

She took me to New Mexico after my father died, and this winding dirt road was off the main paved one to Ghost Ranch, the home of Georgia O’Keefe — located in the “thin space,” between the corporal and spiritual, framed by magnificent cliff faces of Mesozoic sedimentary rock. As we were leaving the ranch, we saw a sign for a monastery “just 13 miles” off the main road, and we made the detour. What we didn’t account for was how long a distance 13 miles is when you can only drive five-miles an hour on, not only a winding, but steep and most rocky, dirt road. It was already late afternoon, the shadows deepening across the mountains — our curiosity was met with some trepidation. But there was quite literally no turning back, no room to safely turn around on the one-lane road without rolling into a ditch on one side, off the edge of a steep incline on the other. We continued on, surprised again and again by sharp veers along the edge of the valley. But even if we could have turned around earlier, we probably wouldn’t have. This moment held us captive: the receding sun transforming the layered quartz and siltstone, hills of disintegrating gypsum and sandstone. I can hear my mother: “Oh, it’s gorgeous!” It was dusk when we finally were able to turn around, in an overlook, but not without first walking down to the river, where we gazed back up at the cascading cliffs.

That is what I would miss most, our seizing of the moment. But at this juncture in our trajectory, seizing a moment took on a whole new meaning. There was not time for vistas. Because from the time I dropped off the boys at school to drive to my mother’s, then to drive back to pick them up, I was rushing. Time was stretched taut between my mother and me, our two points on the map — the two places I needed to be. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. How would you characterize the relationship between the author and her mother before her mother loses her independence— what are some examples of their role reversals?

2. How do you think this reversal would affect your relationship with your own mother?

3. How does the author’s relationship with her mother’s aide evolves throughout the book?

4. When her mother loses her license — how pivotal is that event in their relationship?

5. What do you think about how well the author portrays herself as a sandwich mom? Do any of you identify with these caregiving demands?

6. What are examples of how Tyler explores the profound bond between mothers and daughters, and the questions we might have about our mothers as daughters once themselves?

Weblinks

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