Internalization vs. Externalization Theme Analysis

Throughout The Mothers, Nadia internalizes her grief and emotional pain rather than externalizing them. She keeps herself from outwardly mourning her mother’s death, instead dealing with the trauma as an “inside hurt,” even as she admires Luke for his ability to wear his pain externally. Not long after her mother commits suicide, Nadia gets pregnant and has an abortion, an event that perfectly illustrates her struggle to externalize her internal hardships. In this manner, Bennett illustrates that people often suffer in ways that are invisible to others, but by showcasing the emotional toll this internalization takes on Nadia, Bennett suggests that hidden suffering is no less real than externalized expressions of hardship. 

At her mother’s funeral, Nadia refrains from crying. She receives praise for her stoicism: “At the repast, a parade of guests had told her how well she’d done and her father placed an arm around her.” Even though her community commends her for her supposed strength, Nadia is stricken by a sadness she doesn’t know how to address publicly. Removing herself from the public eye, Nadia stops going to school, instead spending her days riding buses and drinking in the dark corner of a strip club to be “alone with [her] grief.” Of course, it’s somewhat ironic that she, a seventeen-year-old girl with a childish backpack, goes to a bar as a way of hiding her grief, since anybody who sees her drinking at the strip club most likely understands her presence there as a cry for help. Indeed, this irony speaks to the strange way Nadia expresses (or fails to express) her emotional distress. Although she instinctively internalizes her pain, Nadia’s attempt to force her grief into an “inside hurt,” shows that she actually longs to externalize her pain.

Nadia’s desire to outwardly express her grief is made evident by her immediate attraction to Luke. Having been severely injured in a football accident, Luke is an embodiment of external pain: “How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide,” Bennett notes when Nadia encounters Luke one day while skipping school. Luke’s limp is a constant, visual reminder of his short-lived football career, which came to an abrupt and painful end. This is exactly what Nadia can’t bring herself to do, a fact that makes Luke especially attractive to her. When they eventually have sex, she doesn’t shy away from the pain of her first time; “Sex would hurt and she wanted it to,” Bennett writes. “She wanted Luke to be her outside hurt.” Nadia makes Luke an outlet for her internal pain. However, since they keep their relationship secret, even this gesture toward externality remains secretive and private.

Nadia’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion represent the dichotomy between that which is internal and that which is external, in the sense that a secret life grows inside her but is removed before anybody can possibly guess what she is experiencing. Pregnancy is a form-altering experience, but Nadia has an abortion before her body puts her internal world on display. When she comes home after the procedure, then, her father doesn’t notice anything different about her. “She was grateful so far that he hadn’t [noticed], but it scared her, how you could return home in a different body, how something big could be happening inside you and no one even knew it,” Bennett writes, implying that some part of Nadia wants her father to see what she has done. Successfully hiding her abortion means that she has to cope with the resulting emotional turmoil on her own—a solitary burden that follows her throughout her life, as she keeps her abortion a secret from her father, best friend, community, and future boyfriends. Worse, she can’t stop thinking about having made such a difficult decision as a mere teenager, and constantly thinks about Baby, the name she uses to refer to the child she would have birthed. Even as an adult, Nadia daydreams about what Baby would have been like, revealing how internalization can keep a person from moving beyond grief and loss. Without an outlet to express her pain, Nadia finds herself saddled with grief for the entirety of her life, ultimately suggesting that internalized hardships are just as life-altering as externalized hardships and may actually come with deeper, more permanent consequences since they hinder a person’s ability to process his or her emotional troubles.