Book summary “I'm Glad My Mom Died”: summary

Introduction

You often find yourself trapped in the suffocating shadow of a controlling parent, where your own desires are entirely subsumed by someone else's unmet ambitions. Navigating family dynamics marked by severe manipulation, guilt, and emotional abuse leaves you feeling disconnected from your body and your sense of self. When your childhood becomes a labor camp dedicated to fulfilling another person's dream, you lose the fundamental right to discover who you actually are.

Jennette McCurdy's memoir chronicles her harrowing journey as a former child star who survived the intense psychological and physical abuse of her narcissistic mother. The central argument is that true autonomy and emotional healing require you to dismantle internalized abuse, reject familial codependency, and confront the painful reality of a toxic upbringing. You learn how relentless grooming and boundary violations masquerade as maternal love, setting a dangerous foundation for adult self-destruction.

The book traces this painful trajectory across distinct phases of exploitation and survival. You begin inside an oppressive home environment dominated by hoarding, financial instability, and domestic volatility. The narrative then follows your entry into the high-pressure world of Hollywood child acting, detailing the grooming, invasive hygiene routines, and eating disorders orchestrated by your mother. As television fame arrives alongside the return of your mother's terminal cancer, you experience the suffocating weight of codependency and public scrutiny.

The later chapters explore the turbulent aftermath of maternal loss, the exploitation and betrayal faced within the television industry, and the grueling path toward recovery. You witness the long-term toll of obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe bulimia, and deep-seated shame. Ultimately, the account demonstrates how intensive psychotherapy, quitting acting, and breaking the silence surrounding family secrets allow you to reclaim your voice.

• How do you untangle your own identity from the demands of a narcissistic parent?
• What happens when the person who is supposed to protect you becomes your primary abuser?
• Can you ever find peace after the source of your trauma is gone?
• How do you unlearn a lifetime of bodily alienation and reclaim control over your choices?

1. Family Background and Home Life

You learn that your home environment is consumed by extreme clutter, hoarding, and domestic volatility, forcing you into hyper-vigilance.

Hoarding and Preservation

Your mother compulsively preserves remnants of everyday items under the guise of cherishing memories. Grandpa bought a bulk set of wrapping paper from Sam's Club, which your mother made you carefully peel instead of rip. Jennette carefully peels Christmas wrapping paper at the end of June to satisfy her mother's desire to save scraps at six years old.

Domestic Volatility

Following your mother's cancer diagnosis at thirty-five with stage four breast cancer, hoarding behavior escalated. Bedrooms became unusable, sleeping mats were deployed in the living room, and the garage was impassable due to accumulated junk and dead pests. Marcus and you have to lift a heavy, broken manual garage door together like Indiana Jones to access the second refrigerator hidden behind trash and traps. The mother frequently recounts her cancer story five to ten times, turning the illness into a central household theme.

The household is marked by explosive, violent arguments between your parents. Your mother frequently flies into rages over perceived disrespect or lateness from your father, sometimes escalating to threats with kitchen knives and banishment from the house. When your father comes home three hours late from work, your mother screams, attacks him, and eventually retrieves a large kitchen knife to force him out.

2. Entering Acting and Early Career

Thwarted Ambitions

Your mother's own thwarted desires for stardom and fame drive her to aggressively push you into the Hollywood entertainment industry. Because her own parents prevented her from pursuing acting, she resolves to live vicariously through you. She grooms you for a Hollywood career she believes she deserved.

Your mother channels her unfulfilled ambitions of fame into pushing you into the Hollywood entertainment industry at a very young age.

While pinning butterfly clips into your hair, your mother explains that she could have married a doctor, lawyer, or movie producer and was destined for fame. She stands four foot eleven, or five foot two when wearing heels. The driving time to Hollywood from your home takes an hour and a half.

Breaking into high-level youth management requires industry connections and relentless persistence when initial rejections occur. When Laura from Barbara Cameron's agency initially rejects you for lacking charisma, your mother begs her to sign you on a trial basis, ultimately winning acceptance. She proposes a six-month trial period to prove you can book work.

Background Acting

A child actor's entry point into the industry often begins with background work, standing in crowds as human props with long hours and minimal luxury. Background performers receive lower priority on set compared to principal actors, lacking access to shaded seating, cold water bottles, or personal comfort items.

Your mother wakes you up at 3:00 a.m. for your first background gig on The X Files, with an official call time of 5:00 a.m. You play a child suffocating in a gas chamber during an eight-and-a-half-hour total duration of the first set workday alongside thirty background children. You later stand on a hot dirt pile for Golden Dreams.

When signing with an agency, specific financial rules apply to protect your earnings:

• twenty percent goes to the agent;
• eighty percent is kept by the family;
• fifteen percent of the remaining eighty percent is placed into a Coogan account accessible at age eighteen.

At the Academy Kids agency office, your mother signs representation paperwork and explains this financial split to you. Child actors are legally required to have a portion of their earnings set aside in a protected account until they reach adulthood.

3. Acting Classes and Grooming

Saturday acting classes run from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. You must memorize scripts cold within thirty minutes without emotion before adding feelings later.

Students must perform animal sounds like an elephant or a monkey in front of the class to break inhibitions, which makes you feel deeply humiliated. Mothers must sit in on scene breakdowns, turning performances into stressful experiences due to sideline coaching.

Your training involves strict obedience, uncomfortable loosening exercises, and painful beauty maintenance routines imposed by your mother.

Mom believes you lack natural comedy energy and administers specific stimulants before comedy tryouts to force alertness. Before auditioning for a Mad TV sketch parodying Kathie Lee Gifford, Mom makes you drink sugar-free Red Bulls. You have to pee four times before the audition due to the drinks.

Rigid Training

Casting directors occasionally reject you because your appearance does not match the homely or ethereal requirements of the character. You are called back for a role as an androgynous hermaphrodite on Grey's Anatomy wearing a rhinestone shirt and gogo boots, but ultimately lose the part because casting decides you are too pretty.

Physical Maintenance

Every month involves a rigorous maintenance trip to buy store-brand beauty products. Mom tints your eyelashes, bleaches your hair with heavy foil, and applies harsh teeth-whitening strips for extended periods, causing physical pain.

Mom leaves knockoff Crest Whitestrips on your teeth for forty-five minutes instead of fifteen minutes, causing the bleach to leak, sting your gums, and turn them white.

4. Crying on Cue and Psychological Toll

Producing tears on command stands as the ultimate professional skill for a child actor. To achieve this, you learn to exploit real family trauma by imagining horrific scenarios involving the death or severe illness of your relatives.

You master crying on cue by exploiting real family trauma while developing compulsive rituals that mask the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For an audition for Hollywood Homicide, you think of your grandfather clutching his sock doll and break into hysterical sobbing that impresses the casting directors. A single tragic visualization scenario works for 4 to 6 auditions before you become immune and need a new source of grief.

Trauma as a Skill

The suppression of personal emotions to master crying on cue eventually causes psychological resistance and a loss of performance ability. While trying to audition for Without a Trace as a character named Emily whose dad was murdered, you discover you cannot manufacture tears. You attempt to quit acting on the drive home in traffic on the 101 South, only to back down when your mother becomes hysterical.

Compulsive Rituals

Desperate to experience the spiritual Gift of the Holy Ghost promised after your baptism, you begin hearing an internal voice instructing you to perform complex physical rituals to ensure career success. This Still Small Voice actually reflects the onset of OCD.

During the final callback for Princess Paradise Park, the voice commands you to perform specific actions:

• cross your name off the sheet;
• touch your underwear band 5 times;
• twirl on one foot;
• lock and unlock the bathroom door 5 times.

5. Body Control and Parental Boundaries

Your mother weaponizes calorie restriction against puberty and maintains intrusive hygiene examinations that cause profound bodily alienation.

Calorie Restriction

Puberty brings physical changes that threaten your career. When you discover a breast lump, your mother introduces calorie restriction as a secret method to stop growing. She frames physical growth as a direct danger to your marketability.

You and your mother adopt extreme eating habits to control your size:

• maintain a strict 1,000 calories daily limit;
• weigh yourself five times a day;
• measure your thighs weekly;
• consume safe foods like sugar-free Popsicles and applesauce.

After six months of restriction, you shrink down to a kids' size 7 slim. Your home scale shows 59 pounds, while the doctor's office scale records 61 pounds. You experience the growing-up diagnosis with terror while striving to remain grateful-happy for your mother.

Intrusive Examinations

Your mother maintains complete control over your hygiene and boundaries. She conducts intrusive body examinations during showers well into your adolescence.

You endure mandatory single or joint showers with your brother Scott where your mother performs physical checks for lumps and bumps. During a front butt exam, you dissociate to cope with the discomfort. You mentally escape by retreating into Fantasyland thoughts of Disneyland attractions.

6. Showbiz Milestones and Exploitation

Booking a series regular role brings financial relief and industry status while entrenching you as the emotional provider for your household.

At fourteen, you secure the twenty-episode pickup order for the first season of iCarly, landing the part of Sam Puckett. Your mother screams with excitement, rushes to the Art Supply Warehouse to announce it to Dustin, and celebrates achieving your shared dream.

Securing a series regular role brings gifts, industry status, and financial relief, yet it intensifies the maternal expectation that your career success must completely fulfill her unfulfilled ambitions.

Series Regular Success

You quickly learn that leverage in the entertainment industry comes with heavy personal costs. Powerful authority figures use a cyclical strategy of excessive flattery and terrifying degradation to keep you compliant.

The Creator invites you and your mother to a lunch meeting to hint at a future spin-off show called Just Puckett. He showers you with flattery while simultaneously exhibiting a history of screaming at crew members and firing children on the spot.

Wardrobe and Kissing Trauma

Early professional exposure to sexualized wardrobe requirements triggers deep shame and body dysmorphia. You attempt to preserve your innocence while wardrobe fittings force you into revealing clothing that conflicts with your developing body.

During a wardrobe fitting for iCarly, you are required to try on bikinis at the request of The Creator despite your intense discomfort and desire to wear a one-piece suit with board shorts.

Performing an on-screen first kiss under volatile direction turns a natural milestone into a mechanical violation. During the filming of an episode, you are forced to repeat seven total takes of your first kiss with co-star Nathan. The Creator yells demanding more head movement, leaving you emotionally frozen and disgusted.

• You endure volatile power dynamics on set.
• You navigate strict wardrobe demands that violate your personal boundaries.
• You maintain compliance in exchange for conditional praise and career advancement.

7. Fame and Family Crisis

Global television fame brings intense anxiety and public scrutiny just as your mother's cancer returns during a country music stint.

The Burden of Fame

You find that hitting cultural phenomenon status turns daily life into a gauntlet. Strangers constantly shout repetitive catchphrases at you in public. You develop a deep aversion to unexpected interactions while perfecting your people-pleasing mask. A trip to Disneyland has to be halted midway through the Christmas Fantasy Parade because so many people recognize you on Main Street.

Reaching puberty brings intense shame as your body changes. Growing breasts and getting your period make you feel humiliated about losing your childlike form. After finding blood on your underwear at Nickelodeon Studios, your teacher Patti and your mother celebrate you becoming a woman. This celebration deepens your distress and drives you back into strict food restriction to stay a kid.

The Music Stint and Cancer

A writers' strike prompts you to pivot toward a music career. You sign with a record label and spend grueling weekends flying between Los Angeles and Nashville to record songs and prep for a radio tour. You record a single titled Not That Far Away written by professional songwriters about missing your mother. You sing about absence even though you have never spent more than three months away from her or even a few hours alone.

Being away from your mother's strict food monitoring on tour triggers a chaotic and secretive binge-eating habit. You experience an irresistible urge to eat heavy, unrestricted foods for comfort.

• You eat boxes of Cheez-Its on the tour bus.
• You consume store-bought cookies and burgers in hotel rooms.
• You weigh yourself constantly while hiding the behavior.

The physical relief of fullness is immediately overtaken by intense guilt. You overeat until you are in physical pain and gaining weight rapidly. During this turbulent travel schedule, you discover an email revealing that your mother's cancer has returned.

8. Codependency and Illness

Your mother's health deteriorates severely while codependency deepens as she moves into your solo apartment.

Maternal Decline

As cancer progresses, your mother loses a dozen or so pounds, goes bald, and eventually requires a wheelchair. You maintain a facade of cheerfulness despite the terrifying reality of her declining health.

You plan to spend a night alone in your Burbank apartment. Your mother asks to stay, turning temporary visits into a permanent setup where she moves in entirely. This living arrangement deepens the psychological enmeshement between you.

Secret Romance

Seeking validation and romance, you enter a secret, emotionally fraught relationship with Joe, a thirty-two-year-old crew member who recently ended a five-year relationship. You deal with his heavy drinking, emotional volatility, and mismatched sexual expectations. You endure humiliating experiences out of a desperate need to feel special and loved.

After Joe gets drunk and cries over his ex-girlfriend in a hotel room, you submit to performing a sexual favor despite having no experience and feeling completely unprepared.

You also experience your first kiss at age eighteen with Lucas, a twenty-seven-year-old bandleader from Nashville, after long-distance texting and brief meetings during festival dates.

• You share your first kiss in Room 223 of a Hampton Inn and Suites.
• You feel immediate relief at getting it over with.
• You recognize that the relationship is incompatible and decide to end things.

Meanwhile, the creator exercises psychological control over young stars by isolating them, offering preferential treatment, and blurring personal boundaries. The creator frequently compares the cast to stars of other shows to drive competition and tests loyalty with alcohol.

9. Paparazzi Backlash and Loss

The Four Seasons Lie

A cast wrap trip to Maui provided by Nickelodeon gives you a brief escape from work. You lie to your terminally ill mother about who you are vacationing with to avoid severe punishment and emotional backlash.

Jennette pretends she is vacationing in Hawaii with her gay friend Colton instead of her boyfriend Joe.

• .2 seconds: The amount of time Joe's eyes linger on a Four Seasons employee.
• 37: Missed calls from Mom after TMZ publishes photos of the trip.
• 16: Voicemails from Mom.
• 4: Missed emails from Mom.

When TMZ publishes photos of you on vacation with your boyfriend, your mother unleashes a barrage of vitriolic emails and disowns you. She posts a scathing open letter on an online fan club to turn your fans against you.

Mom emails Jennette calling her a slut and a floozy, tells her she gave her cancer back, and posts a letter on a fan club site. You also receive 22 unread emails from Mom during the second wave of messages in Hawaii, alongside 45 missed calls when the phone is pulled from the safe.

The Mother's Death

Facing your mother's hospitalization and impending death, you experience extreme emotional stress. This stress triggers a severe restriction of food followed by attempts to purge, associating thinness with value and control.

Jennette tries purging for the first time in a hospital bathroom after eating Burger King while her mother is in the ICU. You proudly reach a low weight of 89 pounds while withholding food.

The death of an abusive and enmeshed parent leaves survivors in a state of emotional numbness rather than immediate grief.

After years of false alarms and medical deterioration, your mother finally passes away in hospice care at home. You and your siblings feel entirely numb and devoid of tears.

When Mom stops breathing in the living room of the house, the siblings sit in silence and check their phones rather than crying.

Struggling with Mormon beliefs about the Celestial Kingdom, you agonize over whether to honor your dead mother's wish by singing a vocally impossible song at her funeral. At the Garden Grove 6th Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jennette attempts to speak at the podium but breaks down into a guttural cry instead of singing. There are 15 minutes remaining in the chapel before the next event, forcing her offstage.

10. Studio Betrayal and Rejecting Hush Money

Working on a spin-off exposes you to extreme exploitation, culminating in studio betrayal and your refusal of network hush money.

Years of coaching make you take pride in being labeled a good sport by crew members and executives. You learn to accept poor treatment without complaint to advance your career.

Jennette receives a five-hundred-dollar gift card to Barneys with thanks for being such a good sport inscribed on the note. Directors and managers use the phrase constantly while letting your co-star miss work for external pursuits.

Working alongside a burgeoning pop star who receives preferential treatment triggers intense feelings of inadequacy and jealousy. You constantly compare your own stagnation on a half-baked spin-off to your co-star's rising music career. The breaking point occurs when your co-star returns to set excitedly talking about playing charades at Tom Hanks's house.

The Good Sport Trap

Promised a directing slot to placate you into doing the spin-off, you discover your name replaced with N/A on the schedule. A producer later admits someone else threatened to quit if you directed.

During a scene in a boxing ring, you suffer a severe panic attack and collapse on the floor. You experience a massive emotional breakdown in front of the cast and crew.

Bulimia eventually betrays your expectations and transforms from a perceived method of weight control into an uncontrollable addiction. You attempt various strategies like buying expensive Whole Foods items and low-calorie meals to stop purging.

Rejecting Hush Money

Following the cancellation of the show due to sexual harassment claims against a producer, the legal and management team presents an offer intended to prevent any public discussion.

Jennette is offered three hundred thousand dollars as a thank-you gift on the condition that she never speaks publicly about her experience with the creator at Nickelodeon, which she immediately refuses as hush money just 3.5 weeks after the show ended.

At 21 years old, you despise fame and public recognition for childhood roles as sources of deep alienation. You routinely refuse to take pictures with strangers who shout character names at her on the street, reserving photos only for those who know your actual name.

11. Therapy, Relapse, and Family Secrets

Confronting childhood abuse in therapy triggers severe bulimia relapses, compounded by the revelation of a family secret regarding your parentage.

Confronting Abuse

Laura helps you navigate the triggers of red carpet events by requiring you to eat a monitored lunch beforehand. She attends the events as your plus-one to prevent immediate purging. At an award show, you eat a pre-event meal with Laura. You later battle a massive panic attack backstage after fighting the urge to purge cheeseburger sliders from the buffet.

When Laura identifies your lifelong calorie restriction as anorexia condoned and taught by your mother, you experience a severe psychological crisis. You reject the realization, quit therapy via email, and immediately rush home to purge until you cough up blood. Years of repetitive binging and purging cause severe physical degradation. While throwing up multiple airplane meals during a 14-hour flight to Sydney, you realize that stomach acidity has worn down your enamel so severely that you lost a lower-left molar.

Secret Parentage

Mark reveals to you that he is not your biological father, confirming that your mother had an affair during their marriage. She kept the secret her entire life during 30 years of marriage, leaving you with profound confusion and a lack of closure one year since Mom's death. During a meeting with Mark and his new girlfriend Karen, Mark casually announces that Dustin, Scottie, and you are not his biological children.

A new eating disorder specialist named Jeff has you discard diet foods and track your intake for two weeks of tracking food and purges. Jeff analyzes your food tracking worksheets, pointing out that skipping breakfast and eating incomplete lunches leads your body to desperately crave large quantities of food like pad Thai and Del Taco late at night. Jeff institutes a strict protocol:

• Eat three full meals daily.
• Include two daily snacks.
• Stop erratic restriction.
• Eliminate late-time binges.

Jeff teaches you that perfectionism and self-blame add toxic shame to normal recovery mistakes, creating a shame spiral that triggers further destructive behavior. He hands you a weekly packet titled Don't Let Slips Become Slides. Learning to accept slips without self-loathing keeps minor errors from turning into major relapses.

12. Independence and Recovery

You achieve true independence by quitting acting, discarding your bathroom scale, and finally shattering the pedestal of your abusive mother.

Fixing a partner can serve as the core glue of a relationship. When one person stops enabling and focuses on recovery, the relationship naturally falls apart. Jennette and Steven break up after a silent, tearful boat ride in a swan boat on Echo Park Lake once they realize fixing each other was all they had in common.

Holding onto a stressful, inappropriate living environment under the guise of it being a good financial investment actively harms one's mental health and sense of safety. Jennette hires an interior decorator named Liz who brings cheetah-print fabrics and orders mint-and-cream curtains costing $14,742, which are nonrefundable when Jennette cancels her services to sell the house.

Uncovering the truth about biological lineage can lead to anticlimactic encounters that offer few definitive answers or emotional resolutions. Jennette approaches her biological father, Andrew, as he leaves the stage at a Newport Beach hotel jazz concert accompanied by her friends Colton and Miranda.

Quitting Acting

Relying on a bathroom scale to define self-worth provides a simple but destructive substitute for the hard work of personal identity formation. Jennette drops her scale down the trash chute in her building as a gift to herself for her twenty-fourth birthday, successfully going without getting a new one the next day. The fluctuating numbers the scale would read to define her included:

• 95 pounds.
• 105 pounds.
• 115 pounds.
• 125 pounds.

Leaving a career where you have zero control over outcomes is a vital step toward reclaiming personal agency and mental health. Jennette informs her team of agents and managers during a conference call that she is declining further acting auditions after learning her Netflix show has been cancelled following an 18-year career.

True eating disorder recovery involves not just physical cessation of symptoms, but enduring a persistent internal mental battle against ingrained self-loathing. While eating at Tortilla Joe's in Downtown Disney on her 26th birthday, Jennette gets overwhelmed by anxiety, excuses herself to the restroom, and purges in a stall while remembering her therapist Jeff's warnings.

Participating in industry reboots for financial gain can trap performers in past identities that hinder professional and personal growth. Jennette receives a phone call from Miranda trying to convince her to join the iCarly reboot for the generous money offered, but Jennette politely declines because of her mental health.

Shattering the Pedestal

Romanticizing deceased parents prevents individuals from confronting the abuse, exploitation, and narcissism that defined their upbringing. Jennette sits in front of her mother's grave covered in competing family-chosen adjectives like brave and playful, listens to The Doobie Brothers playing from a mourner's stereo, and walks away knowing she will never return. She catalogs the invasive medical exams until age 17 and forced child stardom beginning at age 6 inflicted upon her.

Shattering the Pedestal

Romanticizing deceased parents prevents individuals from confronting the abuse, exploitation, and narcissism that defined their upbringing. Jennette sits in front of her mother's grave covered in competing family-chosen adjectives like brave and playful, listens to The Doobie Brothers playing from a mourner's stereo, and walks away knowing she will never return. She catalogs the invasive medical exams until age 17 and forced child stardom beginning at age 6 inflicted upon her.

Escaping maternal enmeshment, managing eating disorders through structured normalization, and rejecting exploitative industry structures form a coherent path of recovery. You see that breaking free requires dismantling every system of control governing your identity, body, and labor. Reclaiming your life demands that you stop performing for others, reject institutional hush money, and confront the hidden origins of your compliance. True healing emerges only when you refuse to protect the reputation of your abusers and begin to validate your own experiences of violation.

To break free from enmeshment and build an authentic life, you can follow these practical rules derived from this journey.

1. Recognize that severe behavioral control disguised as love is actually abuse, and name it without justification or minimization.
2. Sever enmeshed relationships by establishing physical and emotional distance from anyone who treats your autonomy as a threat.
3. Reject systems that profit from your compliance, whether exploitative employers or manipulative family structures, even when you are offered financial incentives to stay silent.
4. Stop outsourcing your bodily autonomy to others, and discard the external measurements, scales, and routines that enforce self-alienation.
5. Confront your compulsions and eating disorders in professional therapy by tracing their origins to emotional starvation and domestic terror.
6. Refuse to manufacture grief or maintain public grief rituals for an abuser, allowing yourself to feel numbness, relief, or anger instead of forced sorrow.
7. Shatter the pedestals of authority figures who demand your unconditional obedience, and replace their rules with your own authentic desires.
8. Validate your hidden pain by speaking the truth about your childhood, no matter how much discomfort it brings to those who benefited from your silence.
9. Redirect your energy away from pleasing others and toward discovering what you actually enjoy consuming, creating, and experiencing.
10. Build an independent life defined by personal agency, where your daily choices reflect your own values rather than the unfulfilled ambitions of anyone else.

10 Key Ideas

1. Your home environment is consumed by extreme clutter, hoarding, and domestic volatility, forcing you into hyper-vigilance while your mother channels her unfulfilled ambitions of fame into pushing you into the Hollywood entertainment industry at a very young age.
2. Your training involves strict obedience, uncomfortable loosening exercises, and painful beauty maintenance routines imposed by your mother.
3. You master crying on cue by exploiting real family trauma while developing compulsive rituals that mask the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
4. Your mother weaponizes calorie restriction against puberty and maintains intrusive hygiene examinations that cause profound bodily alienation.
5. Booking a series regular role brings financial relief and industry status while entrenching you as the emotional provider for your household.
6. Global television fame brings intense anxiety and public scrutiny just as your mother's cancer returns during a country music stint.
7. Your mother's health deteriorates severely while codependency deepens as she moves into your solo apartment.
8. The death of an abusive and enmeshed parent leaves survivors in a state of emotional numbness rather than immediate grief.
9. Working on a spin-off exposes you to extreme exploitation, culminating in studio betrayal and your refusal of network hush money.
10. You achieve true independence by quitting acting, discarding your bathroom scale, and finally shattering the pedestal of your abusive mother.