My Real Mother
A little girl with a vast imagination… abandoned.
A beautiful story without happy endings.
What do you do when the person who is supposed to love you most in the world, leaves?
Desperate to understand why her mother left, Tina Katamay explores the past through her mother’s eyes. Discovering a life where war, mental illness, and substance abuse causes lives to unravel and dreams to be put aside.
This story is a work of nonfiction, with the fractures creatively painted in by that abandoned little girl that still resides deep within.
"More About the Book"
Linda Holloway was my real mother. She was also, in many ways, a mystery. Like me, Linda was a storyteller, but she was also a pathological liar. She loved me deeply, but she also abandoned my sister and I. She is, like many of us, complicated and deeply flawed. Yet, she should not be defined only by her faults. She was, after all, a real person.
She died of COPD in 2018. Moments before her passing, she spoke the final words that would alter my path in this world, “Now write the book.” The book. The punchline at the end of many of our conversations over the years. Conversations filled with fantastic and occasionally true stories of her life. Of our lives. Again and again, I’d say, “Geez Mom, we should write a book. So much disfunction. The world would eat these stories up!” She would laugh, but the imagined pages remained empty. Now she was ready though. Ready to leave and ready for me to tell her story. What a gift. What a burden.
Two years passed before I was able to find it within me to begin this book. When I finally did, I found myself staring at a blank page. At that moment, I came to a realization. My real mother was a stranger. How would I reconcile the woman I knew, the person she pretended to be, and the person she actually was? Where did I even begin?
I reached out into the heavens and asked her for guidance. Then… she answered.
This book is part memoir and part make believe. Part desperate attempt to know her better and part a journey of emotional healing. An attempt to embrace forgiveness through empathy. A chance for that abandoned little girl that still lies deep within me to understand. What had happened to my real mother?
My Real Mother is book one of a three-book series. Here, I explore the moments that made her the person she had become. An astounding story of teen marriage and pregnancy, mental illness, sexual assault, substance abuse, war, infidelity and so much more.
Did I find the answers, I longed for? You tell me…