Mother: The cross of being seen as gods

God looked a lot like my mother. That was the first line in an essay I wrote several years ago. And in the stories collected by Joyce Carol Oates and Janet Berliner in Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, the reader is thrust, again and again, into an awareness of this inevitable comparison. How easily are mothers perceived as gods by their daughters - sometimes malevolent gods, occasionally compassionate, but always, somehow, larger than life.