welcome i am so pleased to have a leash in the hock stevens joins me to talk about her memoir mama g and i wanted to explain exactly kind of your background because as we talking we have some overlap and commonality yes except i didn't immigrate from india but you immigrated from chandigarh india yes to minnesota and you grew up in the eighty's in minnesota during the prince purple rain yeah absolutely and you came and got your masters in fine arts from for creative writing some fairly dickinson university  and your short story i'm a was selected as a top ten in the twentieth eleven tennessee williams literary festival which is fantastic thank you yeah and others yet with the robert wood johnson hospital initiative the other day job is being a pediatric nurse correct but you love to write yeah and i had the pleasure of reading your you know what is in the book that you're displaying but also what your memoir is right mama jean yes so i have to tell you that it felt like you had a cinderella story oh ok that's the that's that's really what what it felt like ok arms of you had the stepmother yes you know the experience of what a stepmother is like and with you know her having a child you know with your father yes and how that impacted your life yes so for the benefit of our viewers tell us a little bit more about your experience what led you to write and she was bringing together a number of women writers to write about their experiences with their mothers most i think most people wrote very positive things and ended up that i you  know i told her well i don't know if you really want me to write about my mom because i don't you know my i lost my mom when i was three so i have sort of you know unresolved feelings about the whole process and i had never really written about it i had spent you know my entire life not talking about it pretty much was something that i grew up just believing it was something that was in my past but not really to talk about and as a result of the project that i worked on with nina i wrote this essay that appeared in this anthology and after that it just kind of released me and allowed me to write my memoir which is called mama g just happens to be called mama g it's about two hundred fifty pages but it it is what's in here the essay in here is a snapshot of my life and the memoir is a much more extended view of what life is like without a mother and it just so happened i had six siblings and all of us experienced the loss of our mom and pretty much right you know the connection is that everyone knows what it's like at some point in their life not to have their mother no matter what age you are it's always a devastation to lose a mom because the mother is really the core of the family you have some i explore that in my memoir just not only growing up but the loss of my mom and all sold the search from my mother trying to find her and maybe i won't tell you what happens at the end so maybe you know somebody hopefully they'll want to read it but yes so basically  it is it is a search for mother love and i think that's really what it is it's a search for my own desire to know what it's like to know my mother and know my mother's history and i think that's that's what you know what as women that's what we want we want to know our mothers and we want to know where we came from absolutely absolutely and you and i when we did the prior interview which was several months ago  talking talked about the loss of our mothers i was older so you know i wasn't angry but i definitely agree that losing your mom your mom is the core as you said she is the glue whether your parents are married or divorced she's a really good mom because i've read about some cases where there aren't good moms and it's always shocking to me but if she's a good mom you miss her and you you want to know about about her and you lost your mom to cancer yes i did and i really read that in in the book i also lost my mom to cancer and cancer devastating you're in the health care field it has improved in terms of the care but it still is wreaks havoc on on families that experience cancer  and your dad waited a little while and then he met your step mom yes so actually the the interesting part of the story is that my father so when my mom  died she expressed three wishes to my father i guess he would say you know maybe i mean she was also very ill solve some of these i felt like first one was that she didn't really want to get married again and i think i sort of understand that as a woman  you know it's hard for us to say how can you know forty forty three year old man with seven kids not get married again but as a woman i sort of understand that i mean if you you know the way that they mapped they fell in love in india right before the partition so you know their first their very first year together as a couple was during the partition where there was war and people they really didn't even know if they would make it  and then my sister was born immediately my oldest sister was born right after that so they met during a very tumultuous time but there was just a lot of passion and it was during the time where in india people arranged marriages and my parents  love and chose to get married on their own they wrote letters and so she had a real passionate connection with my father so as a woman i sort of understand that request don't get married again but it's kind of as a human you think well that he's going to be lonely and that's sad you know and then her second request was that she never wanted him to sell our family home and that was because she you know her request was because she wanted the children to have a place they could call home which i feel only a mother would think that you know i mean that's just something a mom you know really thinks about i'm leaving my children and i want them to have a place and it was a home that she had carefully built i just came from india and it's still there and someone else owns it it's still there and in the in the verandah she had put our names in stone and she had collected different color stones but we could see our names so i mean that's that's the kind of mother she was she wanted you know she wanted a place that we could say this is our home and here my mother you know she's not here now but here she loved me so much she put my name in stone back you know and i you know that to me that's very important and then the third one was that she never wanted to be buried in the us she wanted to be buried in india because she was she never really wanted to stay here it was a very short term trip that we were here for but unfortunately she ended up dying here but so yes my father did marry soon after that because as a result you know we were living in minnesota hundred sixty s and m social work just isn't what it is now and a man with seven children all on his own basically they they told him that you know if he wasn't going to find somebody to take care of us they were going to adopt  so our family was under the threat of being separated so under that and i think he felt a lot of pressure and he said he a cousin of his introduced him view of a single dad raising children i can understand that it was in india it was in the us yes so yeah so what was that like having your step mom well it wasn't like having a mother that's one thing i would have to say i think you know initially i think it started out well when she first arrived i think it was fine but i think  when she gave birth to my my brother my half brother i think that's what changed her perspective and i think a lot of people go into the idea of being in a divorced you know marrying someone who's divorced or marrying somebody who's widowed and i think it works but my personal belief just living through what i lived through i think when you have children together with that new i think that changes that perspective and i don't think that she thought that through i don't think that she did it maliciously i think it became something that you know her feelings evolved as the years went by and they became cold and maybe even cruel at times but and i don't think her intention at that moment was to do what happened i think she gave birth to a child and she realized all of a sudden oh this is my child and these feelings of maternal instinct just kind of kicked in and all of a sudden we were you know mice seven brothers and sisters were kind of like and i mean i guess or so after thought maybe an end and i think i mean i've never i never spoke to her about it but i would presume that i think that chuck that surprised her and i don't i don't know she planned for that feeling to come and i think a lot of women don't i think women just think oh well i can love you know all of this child as much as i love the next one but i don't know i think we don't give enough credence to our own instincts for own children you know we love them so passionately and so with so much fervor that i think we i don't know i mean i and that's a good thing i guess that's how god made so you you wrote the book in issue still living she died a year ago year and a half ago and as i said in the opening i of it made me think of cinderella because you talked about having many jobs the different treatment that you're talking about and i just wondered i  can see that the it's probably lifted a burden off you one to write about your mom and to to write about something that you experienced but to publish it now that she's deceased has to be easier yeah actually you know so the essay here came out while she was alive and she was you know she was older when she died she was eighty you know eighty nine i didn't expect her ever to read it i also never told her about it and i told my dad about my dad still doesn't know but the memoir i think i i think i just own it more i think writing the essay getting it published it just allowed me to say you know what this is the truth and this is how i feel about losing my you know i losing my mother this is how i feel this is and i think maybe it's my she could be i think i have to get to  just like i don't care i'm just going to do it so i think that had something to do with and i think i just i just for once in my life i just wanted to write about this and i i have to tell you karen i have tried so many times to write about this and i always had to stop because i lied so much and i pretty much lie i would lie because i just feel so uncomfortable with the truth and i think you know as as humans we want people to perceive us as good or perfect or you know a cleaned up version of ourselves and i feel like if someone read this what with the thinkable you know what would they think and i just got to the point where everyone has issues and we have to just learn how to persevere and succeed and not be victims and just you know what you had happen but it made me strong absolutely and that's really what i think and i think that's what my mom would have told me to my mother would have said it's there wasn't the greatest thing that happened to you kids but you're all tough you're all strong move on and i think we all have we really have but it's it's an interesting story and i think people will enjoy reading it and i think by writing it it shows that things happen across all cultures among families that no one's perfect we all struggle and you're hoping other people come to realize that and also the whole notion of losing your mom at whatever age you really at three don't have a really crystal clear memory of her maybe as your older siblings do but if they had her for a longer right of time so what you had to you know adjust to is going to be different but that too is going to help people and your siblings read about the case well my sisters i have three sisters we're very close we actually go on sister trip so just really nice i have three sisters and three brothers i have a half brothers was my half brother of course has not read this and he i don't i don't think he will my older one of my one of my brothers has read most of my manuscript my sisters have read the entire manuscript you know from the very first draft which was terrible but they still they gave me some good feedback and then i took it to an editor in the editor gave me some really wonderful feedback and kind of helped me shape it as a story much better and so it's it's come a long way it's been three years progress and i've been working on it for about three years now so yes they have read it and even you know some of the things like well actually listed by don't know about this date and you know names and dates and right and so another thing i was going to say a lot of i think my siblings history have been lost as a result of what happened when my mom died and my father remarried because we adopted my stepmother's history and that became our history although they her family really never accepted us but really that was that was the only history we knew and i grew up my whole life calling people are in the you know in the in the book thing called a must see and mama was calling them osses and they were not interested in us as nieces and nephews even you know a grandmother not at all we were not their grandchildren so it took me an entire lifetime i think when i got when i got married and probably in my forty's is when i all of a sudden realize that i have this whole family that belongs to my mother i knew my father's family fairly well but my mother's family absolutely unattached to them i didn't know who they were  in fact i didn't even know some of their names her siblings my i didn't know the name of my grandmother so all these things part of this journey of writing this memoir was sometimes going back to india sometimes going to london trying to uncover the i guess my mother's history and i did a lot of it there still left more but i did i found out things about her and one of the most important things that happened as or when i was reading this memoir is that her best friend who appears in the memoir her name's gloria live moved to london and my mother wrote her best friend these letters over the so about three years ago on a sister trip we went to you know we went to turkey and to london and gloria gave us the author's letters and she kept them she kept and it was wonderful because i got to find out first what my moms are really good writer like the greatest  so great and then you know other things that i follow like oh wait she's just like look at she's doing this and some of the things that she's writing about that she's doing there it is in my sister or i can see that i got that from her so it's not like one hundred percent i got to know her i got to know her and i got to know and also the letters were really great because she's writing to her friend ray she's not writing to her child right so it's an entire of yes yes you know women talking to women right so i got to know her as a woman and that was awesome you know it was just like this moment of like hey and so i typed them up and of course i shared them with all my my siblings so i did was unselfish no what about your mom's family your blood phone calls have you met them yes well sadly i did meet two of them before they passed away but sadly all of them have passed away at a very early age and my grandmother so my my mother died in sixty five my grandmother came to united states in seventy five and she came to visit my mother's my uncle on my mother's side they lived in ohio and she came and visited them and she wanted to see us here we were living she came to ohio rid of is that her son and his family and her i just feel that my stepmother was at that time in seventy five my mother had been dead for ten years and pretty much we had wiped all of her memory i mean we only referred to her as but ani mama which means we were only allowed to talk about her very very rarely and if we did we couldn't call her mama because we were had to call my stepmother mama so we had to attach this word which means previous or other  hindi which is sort of disrespectful frankly and i mean i stopped doing it as soon as i realized what was going on that it was called running on families to call her but even that we weren't really allowed to talk about her and we were not allowed to keep in touch with our family  as far as her side so my grandmother came wanting to see her grandchildren she didn't get to see us and we didn't get to see her and that would have been an amazing connection to know the mother but one who loved my mother best yet so and then she she died two years later she was back in india and she died yeah so yeah you know that life is sometimes so your plan is to publish this manuscript find a literary agent really make this available for the public yeah i mean i you know i want people i want it not to be divisive i wanted to be actually something that people can see that you know people struggle but you can get over it and i also want people to really appreciate whatever relationship they have with their mom and if it's not a good one and your mother is alive you should figure out how to fix  because eventually we're going to all come to a point in our lives where we say and you know i wish i had that would be a horrible thing to say i wish i had talked to my mom when she was right there right because i mean i don't think i i live in regret but i do live and i do wish i had had a chance to say goodbye to her i wish i had had a chance to do so to grow old with her and i that's how i opened my memoir as we talk about what we can learn from our mothers as they age because that's not all that i'm aging i think that's that's what i'm wondering about i'm wondering about things like you know also she would have known all of what i feel and how i feel and give me advice on you know eat this or don't eat that or can you read for us because i think that sure great sure sure sure to read so i think i'll just i'll read from the essay which is in the my moment of what i'm asking my mom some questions that we create our way mama gee i often wonder what life would have been with you i know you were not perfect may times i've been told of your quick temper or your strong will maybe we would have had our trials and tribulations but they would have been ours between you my mother and me sometimes when my friends complain about their mothers i want to scream i find myself losing control for no reason one day at work a colleague told me her mother was annoying her because she wanted to come over and see her baby again and again she was upset because our mother brought her so many meals that are fraser was now too full imagine her surprise as i lost my temper and through my tears shouted at her to be thankful that she had a mother at all how i wish you had been there when my first son was born i sat alone in that apartment my breasts leaking milk the infected stitch on my p c to me s of a grapefruit it was impossible for me to sit down both my son and i crying as i desperately wished i had you to tell me what to do next i wondered how i had angered god so much that he had taken you from me we never knew each other you didn't know the girl i was the teenager i became or the woman i am today for a long time i wondered if i even loved you because i didn't know who you were but i have learned to love you over the years i love you for giving me life i love you for giving me my wonderful brothers and sisters who have been my rock and foundation since you left us i love you for teaching me that good friends are precious and worth any amount of sacrifice i love you for forcing me to be strong think independently and i love you for teaching me compassion and empathy for people who have tasted the bitterness of life i love you because knowing that you were a part of my life no matter how short gave me the courage to break the cycle and raise my child children the way you would have raised me i love you for shaping my life it songs it sounds wrong to say it but if you hadn't died i wouldn't be the woman i am today i think about you more and more as i get older i wonder if you and your entire family are enjoying a party and haven and having a great time i don't visit your grave even though it's only an hour from my house because what's the point i don't get the answers i want i want to ask if you are proud of me and what your dreams were for me how would you have guided me did you love me in many ways i'm still a little girl waiting for you to love me your loving daughter alicia for the that's the end that is so powerful and that's one of my favorite parts so touching and i wish we had more time to to follow that up