The Mother-Daughter Relationship

Excerpted from
Good Daughters; Loving Our Mothers as They Age
By Patricia Beard

Even the best relationships between mothers and daughters have always been complicated. It's not only our own situations or the times we live in that make it difficult to be good daughters to our aging mothers, we are also at the affect of-sometimes at the mercy of-powerful and deep-seated patterns of human behavior. Although each generation is different from those who came before, in certain ways that profoundly affect us, we are much the same as our remote ancestors.

The most basic tension in the mother-daughter relationship is a daughter's desire to be close to her mother and the countervailing urge to push her away. Those feelings are not particular to any one of us; they are instinctual and they have biological origins.

It is reassuring to realize that ambivalence is a natural characteristic of the mother-daughter relationship. As I began to focus on this ancient history, I felt lighter-less like a "bad girl" when I wanted to push off from my mother and less singularly foolish when I heard the snappish, adolescent voice with which I still sometimes answered her. Knowing why I felt irrationally irritable sometimes-and, also irrationally, deeply affectionate at other times-put both feelings in perspective and took the sting out of the irritation. (I am always delighted to welcome the swoops of affection.)

A critical element in the way we develop is the exceptionally long dependence of a human child on its mother, which creates an attachment that is more prolonged and therefore stronger than that of most other creatures.

Even very small children experience the push and pull-spurting out in little attempts at independence, dashing back to curl up in their mothers' laps. But because it takes humans so long to be able to survive on our own, we also experience an exceptionally tense intermediate phase, adolescence, in which we both want and need our parents' love yet are getting other signals from our bodies that direct us toward autonomy. In adolescence, although we are physically capable of becoming parents ourselves, we are still emotionally immature and need more experience and information to get along on our own. So we strike out at our parents for holding us back, and then cling to them when the world is too much for us.

Even when a girl and her mother have a natural affinity, they experience this push and pull. In working through the conflicts, one goal is for a mother and daughter to learn to respect each other's singularity. If they succeed, the child is likely to flourish and be both attached and independent.

How does this play out with adult daughters and their aging mothers? Intensely. When the balance is off, even an otherwise mature daughter may experience exaggerated emotions as she continues to test herself against her mother, struggles for her approval and attention, or tries to break free from a mother who hasn't been able to move forward and acknowledge that her daughter is a separate adult. Women who are mothers and grandmothers themselves, well established in their adult lives, still continue to experience the puzzling and often distressing struggle that moves them to feel close to their mothers and also to want to maintain a healthy distance.

This innate push and pull underlies many aspects of the relationships between mothers and daughters. Among these is the predisposition for a girl to relate to her mother and want to be like her. Yet daughters are also motivated to establish themselves as different from their mothers, individual enough to cast their own shadows. An example: any woman who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s is likely to remember the convention of matching mother-daughter dresses. Little girls loved dressing like their mothers, but when they got older they wanted to adopt the styles of their own generation, to look unlike their mothers. (There were two unwelcome consequences of the desire to be different: either mothers forbade their daughters to wear what "all the other kids" were wearing or they began to want to look like their daughters-especially in the late 1960s-and started borrowing their clothes.)

Competition is another complication in the interplay between mothers and daughters. It, too, stems from their similarities and differences. It is rare to find a daughter who is competitive with her father, but mothers and daughters routinely compete for attention (often from the father) and about appearance, status, and power. (The anthropologist Helen E. Fisher points out that mother-daughter competition was originally based on the search for food. In primitive societies, she says, their relationship was "one of competition for a limited number of resources. If one eats the nuts, the other doesn't get them.")

An additional ingredient in this highly seasoned stew is the child's need to feel protected by her parents. But protection implies power, and a child who is overprotected may conclude that her parents don't believe that she is competent to take care of herself. Even an adult daughter can feel smothered and weak because her mother is still trying to "protect" her. Or she can feel exposed and weak because her mother didn't adequately protect her when she was young or has lost the ability to care for her now that the mother is old. Here, too, the tension reflects the push and pull between closeness and autonomy.

Getting your balance and moving gracefully through this obstacle course is like learning to dance the box step with a partner: one steps forward, the other steps back; together, you move to the side; then you step forward and your partner steps back. But if you lose the rhythm, you may do more than step on each other's toes; you may fall and hurt each other.

So even without conflicts between generations, the wide variation of maternal competence, or personalities who rub each other the wrong way, certain basic aspects of the mother-daughter relationship cause continuing anxiety for a broad spectrum of women. The ties of blood, gender, and membership in the same group and the daughter's bias toward connection pull her toward her mother. Her need to see herself as a distinct, competent adult who can identify not only with her family but also with a group of her peers drives her to seek a certain degree of separation.

The push and pull doesn't necessarily reflect the failure of a mother and daughter to love and understand each other. When we need a little distance from our mothers, we can moderate our guilt if we recognize that we will soon feel exactly the opposite and want nothing more than to talk to them. (This can help us understand our daughters better, too. Instead of wondering what we have done wrong when they seem to be avoiding us, we can relax because we know that an hour after they have said they are too busy to talk to us, we will probably get a long, confiding e-mail message.)

Feeling threatened by an aging mother's needs or her real or imaginary criticisms is similar to the automatic "fight or flight" mechanism that kicks in on a roller coaster: the danger is only simulated, but the adrenaline races anyway. Part of the task of being an adult daughter is learning to leave behind some of these unnecessary impedimenta. Consider that it's like taking the training wheels off a bike, and think how much faster you can travel on two wheels than on four.