50 Questions to Ask Your Mom About Her Life
Fifty questions about the woman who existed long before she was anyone's mother, and about what she made of the life that came after.
Heritaris Editorial Team9 min read
Mothers are frequently the family historian: the one who knows the birthdays, keeps the photographs and can explain how everyone is related. Being the keeper of everyone else’s history has a strange side effect. The person doing the remembering is often the one nobody thinks to ask about.
These questions try to correct that. Some are about her childhood and the women who raised her, some are about ambition and work, and several are about the parts of her life that had nothing to do with children at all.
Two things help. Ask when there is time to spare rather than in the middle of something, and resist the urge to reassure her when an answer turns out to be complicated. A mother who is being honest about a difficult year usually wants to be heard, not comforted out of it.
50 questions to ask your mom
Girlhood
- What kind of girl were you?
- What did your bedroom look like?
- What did you do when you were left to yourself?
- What were you told girls should be, and did you believe it?
- Who was your first real friend?
- What did you dream about doing?
The women who raised you
- What was your mother like when you were young?
- What did she teach you deliberately, and what did you learn by watching?
- How much did you know about her own life?
- What was your grandmother like?
- What did the women in your family carry that nobody talked about?
School and friendship
- What were you good at, and were you allowed to pursue it?
- Was there a teacher who took you seriously?
- Who did you spend every day with at fifteen?
- What did you talk about?
- What happened to those friendships?
Work and ambition
- What was the first job you were paid for?
- What did you want your working life to be?
- What got in the way, if anything did?
- What work have you done that you were proud of and nobody noticed?
- Did you ever have to choose between work and family, and how did you decide?
- What would you have done with more time or more freedom?
Love
- Who did you love before Dad?
- What did you think of him at first?
- When did you know?
- What did you expect marriage to be like?
- What has been hardest about it, and what has been best?
Becoming a mother
- How did you feel when you found out you were pregnant?
- What was the birth like, in your own words?
- What did nobody warn you about?
- What were you like as a young mother?
- What did you worry about at night?
- What did you enjoy that surprised you?
The years I remember
- What was I like as a small child?
- What did I do that exhausted you?
- What were you dealing with in those years that I had no idea about?
- What did you sacrifice that you have never mentioned?
- What do you miss about when we were young?
What you carried alone
- What was the hardest period of your life?
- Who supported you then?
- What did you never tell your own mother?
- What have you decided to let go of?
Pleasure and taste
- What music do you return to?
- What is the best meal you have ever eaten, and where?
- Where have you been happiest?
- What do you do purely for yourself?
What you know
- What advice would you give a young woman starting out today?
- What do you know about people that took you decades to learn?
- What do you hope your grandchildren inherit from you?
- What do you want me to remember about you?
Afterwards
Ask her to name the people in the photographs while you are together. Mothers are frequently the only remaining person who can, and that knowledge disappears in a single generation. Preserving family memories explains how to attach that information to the images so it survives, and the grandparent questions go one generation further back while there is still time.