Why My Mom Taught Me to Admire "Unlikable" Women
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I am very much my mother’s daughter, but I did not inherit her unapologetic boldness. "You’re too trusting," she used to warn me when I was a little girl. And she was right. Even as I got older, I was the first to talk to a stranger, pick up hitchhikers, loan money to anyone who asked, all while wearing my heart on my sleeve.
There was a story my maternal grandfather liked to tell about his daughter. One day, when she was about 10 and playing in the neighborhood, an older boy kept bullying my mom’s younger brother. Having met her limit, my mother yanked the boy’s bike away from him, tossed it down into the creek, dusted off her hands and went back to playing.
My mother has always been fierce in her love and protection over her daughters and any creature that needs protecting. It would take me years to understand the world that shaped her view and what she was desperately trying to impart: that it can be downright dangerous for women to worry about being likable.
One day after I stepped off the school bus from kindergarten at the foot of my drive, a stranger in a convertible cruised up to me. He asked me to come closer. Trusting kid that I was, I obeyed, until my mother ran down the hill screaming like a banshee. She’d been working in the garden at the top of our yard. The man peeled away before she was able to glimpse his license plate.
From an early age, women are programmed by society to be agreeable. "Why aren’t ya smiling?" countless men have asked me — and millions of other women — as if any other expression makes them uncomfortable, or worse. There is a double standard in our society, one in which “boys will be boys” and girls are tasked with the chore of pleasing people.
In all of my novels, I’ve found myself writing well-heeled women who behave in nefarious ways. Try as I might, I’m incapable of not writing complicated, messy, and yes, sometimes downright toxic female characters, and with my latest novel, A Likeable Woman, I decided to really plumb the whole topic of likability.
And it’s got my mom, Liz, written all over it.
Mom always marched to her own band
In the '70s, we lived in a tiny East Texas town. Mom was a boundary-pusher who very much railed against the constraints on women at that time. She squeezed art into her life where she could, setting up a batik-making station in our garage, painting canvasses on our kitchen table, making collages in the laundry room.
In the '80s, her marriage to my father crumbled, both casting her into a different social class and upending everything familiar in her life — including friends who distanced themselves and neighbors who whispered and gossiped behind her back as if divorce were a disease they were scared to catch. My newly single mom worked the graveyard shift as a nurse in the psych ward of our local hospital to make ends meet. Even with the pressure of her new reality, she still wove art into her life where she could.
Along the way, she created her own code for living in a Tupperware-toting, curtain-twitching small town. When it was time to replace her car, she bought the only thing she could afford: A tiny, three-cylinder Subaru Justy that had plastic seats and felt like riding down the road in a tin can. It may have not been a Porsche, or even a Toyota Corolla, but my mother drove that car defiantly, having a set of bright orange-red flames decaled down the sides. It showed everyone what she thought about keeping up with the Joneses.
Mom fought for the underdog — including herself
As my sisters and I reached puberty, it wasn’t uncommon for boys to stop by asking after one of us. And it was equally not uncommon for my mother to answer their knocks with her face stern, eyes narrowed, gruffly demanding to know "who they were and what they wanted." With her daughters sneaking out of the windows at night while she was at work, she did everything in her power to keep us on the straight and narrow, pushing us to get the best grades so we could go to college, be independent and not "reliant on some man to support you."
Her tactics were received by my peers with respect and awe; nobody was messing around with Liz. Or her daughters.
She was always fighting "the man," be it a teacher who had made the grave error of spanking one of her girls, an angry dude in a pick-up truck who cut her off or any authority figure who was in the wrong. Liz never bit her tongue or lowered her voice.
When I was younger, these moments would alternately confirm her as my personal hero, or sometimes, made my inner people-pleaser uncomfortable. But after years of watching her fight for what she believed in, I’ve come to accept that her way is often the only way to keep the world from trampling all over you, especially if you’re a woman.
She taught me to roll with whatever life brings
After my sisters and I were in college, my mother met and fell deeply in love with Jim, an eccentric, intellectual, liberal-leaning person just like her. She and Jim were soulmates, and after they married, they spent 10 years together in a log cabin at a nearby lake where they raised organic vegetables and made their own wine. But one day, while driving home, Jim was killed in a car accident. And I watched, once again, as my mother picked up the pieces of a shattered life and reimagined another one for herself out of transparent will.
I called my grandfather right after, asking him how he thought she could live through this. "She’s tough as an old boot," he said, his voice cracking, "She’s gonna make it."
A week or so after Jim’s death, I watched as she stoically removed his clothes from the closet. I think this was her way of training her brain for her new reality. She sold their lake house to my older sister a year or so after that, finding a home in town, then retired from her position as director of an early childhood intervention program and began making batiks again, traveling, spending time with her kids and grandkids.
"Put one foot in front of the other," she’d say to me on countless occasions. Her resilience and fiery defiance is what set me on this path of writing women who, by coloring outside the lines society has placed them within, can be perceived as unhinged or eccentric.
Society still fears "unlikable" women — but we need them more than ever
Watching the way my mother approaches the world consistently reminds me that women should be allowed to have complex inner lives, to make mistakes, just like their male counterparts.
A Likeable Woman
$20.99
amazon.com
With our bodily autonomy increasingly under threat, it’s critical that women are allowed to govern themselves, their paths, their choices and not have their very beings edited by society. That’s why one of the main characters in A Likeable Woman, Sadie, bucks against her insular world by creating art in her backyard studio. Just like my mother, Sadie dreams of a life outside of the straight and narrow path the women around her are walking. My mother always helped me believe the same was possible for me. When I first told her I wanted to be a writer but didn’t know whether or not I could do it, she emphatically declared, "You can be and do whatever the hell you want."
I’ve been living, and writing, by her example ever since. I want my books to hold up a mirror to women — especially girls who are just learning how to be in the world — so they can glimpse themselves in all their messy, complicated and sometimes boldly unlikable glory.
There’s a danger in keeping that mirror scrubbed clean. It’s the rabble-rousers, the bold women who have pushed back against these rules that have sparked the most change, broken the biggest boundaries, inspired the freshest ideas. Women who have been perceived as bossy, difficult or noncompliant like Greta Thunberg, Angela Davis, Mahsa Amini and Malala Yousafzai fought that patriarchal edict to "just smile."
Instead, they gazed back in that mirror with a defiant expression, and, in doing so, changed the world.
May Cobb's novel, A Likeable Woman, is available now from your favorite bookseller. This essay is part of a series highlighting the Good Housekeeping Book Club — you can join the conversation and check out more of our favorite book recommendations.
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