This is the sort of story that I don't fancy reading. I highly dislike stories about mother-daughter relationships. I don't to read about all the pressure and stress of being a 'firstborn daughter', much more an immigrant daughter who carries the entire clan's hops and dreams. It's madness. Still, I scanned through it quickly. This is 'Firstborn Immigrant Daughter' by Taiye Selasi, published in The New Yorker on May 31, 2026.
The story is written in as a letter to, well, a firstborn daughter of immigrants. There were ten points the letter-writer addressed. The ten points are PTSD-inducing to me. The author is spot on about what mothers expect of firstborn daughters. I see these expectations are selfish, unrealistic and serves to dominate rather than nurture.
In an interview with the same journal, the author was asked what exactly did she see mothers want, and if the expectations of immigrant mothers of their daughters, and firstborn daughters are higher, never mind if they have older sons.
At one point, you write, “When the mothers of your friends from the New Country coo, ‘All I want is for my daughter to be happy,’ you laugh. Your mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy. Your mother wants her daughter to be impressive.” For a girl, how challenging is it to grow up with those kinds of expectations when her peers might be having a completely different experience of childhood and adolescence?
It’s an invisible challenge, no? We know that girls outperform boys at school. We know that immigrant girls—here I include class migrants, permanently emigrating from the underclass to the upper—are pushed to outperform their peers. But we rarely stop to ask: Who is working harder, in any country, than an immigrant daughter? Founders, lawyers, novelists, pharmacists, actresses, a former Secretary of State—is there any single demographic more consistently high-performing? Because we often occupy (or ascend to) the same social rank as nonimmigrant men, these men are called our “peers.” But I know few nonimmigrant men who can match the hustle of an immigrant daughter. If we ran twice as far, twice as fast, to reach the same point as these men—then, by definition, we are faster runners (not equals). Our hustle is peerless.
A mother's expectations of me is my true horror story. A mother who keeps reminding you she gave you all that she had, and that guilt is enough to bind the child to the parent forever. It took me years to acquiesce that I will never live up to her expectations, and it's okay. It took me years to recognize how selfish her expectations are.
It also took me years to understand that the extended family has no right to raise me or discipline me if I don't want it. I have little affection or sentimental feelings about 'Childhood Homes'. My fondest memories of my childhood don't involve my parents. I have neither attachment to houses and homes, nor photographs and personal knick-knacks or things.
I think this is a story that can be felt differently by readers. The expectations are so powerful that it will affect us (daughters) in different ways, whether we're immigrants or otherwise. It's so chilling that I got the heebie-jeebies at the end.
A daughter, by contrast, as your mother knows well, born a daughter herself, is a belonging. She belongs to the family, to the village, to the culture, to the Church, to the Old Country, but to herself? No. Because your mother was a girl once, she was owned, too, and though abandoned or betrayed by her owners she believed them when they told her, as they liked to do often, that a woman unowned is unloved. Despite her brilliance and her resilience, your mother still believes that a woman is safest in the world as a wife and that a wife is safest in a marriage as a mother—hence your father, hence her fury, hence you. Point being. When your mother chose your father—if (1) she did choose, and we pray that she gave her consent, and if (2) one can be said to have chosen a man when “no man” was never a choice—if your mother chose your father, she did so in part to be safe, to be claimed, to be owned. As a girl in the Old Country, she could not own herself. As a woman, she sought out a co-owner. Then, given that a mother cannot own a son, her first shot at ownership was you.
By “firstborn daughter” we mean only this: the first thing your mother could own.
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Third. If you wish to belong to yourself, you must forgive your mother. She knows not what she does or has done. But we do.
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