Rachel Aviv

speaker

401 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 6 Jul

Rachel Aviv’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

And when I met her and some of her friends...

I was amazed to see how kind of casually and how normal it had become that they were going years, even decades, without seeing their children.

They had made this incredible sacrifice that in order to support

their own children and to allow them to live full lives, they needed to abandon them, essentially, and come to America and take care of other people's children.

I mean, she became like a surrogate mother for these other children, and she also found herself with so much more time to kind of shower them with attention and sort of educational goods.

So her children were like, well, you know, why did you never read us books?

Why are you reading this other child books?

And her children really struggled with...

holding these two facts, one of which was that their mother went to America because she wanted the best for them.

And the second was that their mother was building a new life away from them and they had no contact with her except through Facebook.

And so they couldn't help but feel jealous of these sort of American toddlers who were receiving their mother's love.

I think the way I rewrote it was thinking about the kind of fantasy of reunion.

It was about Emma's desire to reunite with her children and her children's desire to reunite with her.

And they had this fantasy of what that would be like.

And there was a way in which I was sort of thinking about it as more of a universal fantasy that there is this like

space of safety and being held and cared for that everyone holds as this like almost primitive fantasy.

And I think I was aware of how unreachable it was in Emma's life, both because she didn't plan to come back home

And also the strange thing happened where she felt like she was self-actualizing, like she actually was enjoying herself.

She was making friends and she didn't know that she wanted to go back to the old life.

And her children didn't know anymore what it even felt like to be in the physical space of their mother.

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