Mother Daughter Relationships

Mother Daughter Relationships

"Remember, if you can't accept the daughter you have, you'll never have the daughter you want!"

How come she becomes a dragon?
At the beginning of those mother daughter relationships when you're just a child, you think your mother is a goddess. You smudge your face with her lipstick and wear her jewelry and high heels, desiring to be just like your mum. It is like that until you are about thirteen, when she abruptly becomes the most uninformed, irrelevant, off the planet dragon around, and you can't get far enough away from her. In the rough and tough teen years of mother daughter relationships, the main form of communication for the next five years or so will be a few words, "No way mum!" And then, somewhere amid your twenties and thirties, if you're fortunate, she becomes your greatest buddy again.

You Just Don't Understand Me!
Within mother daughter relationships, mothers and daughters aren't always the finest of friends. Difficulties in the adult mother daughter relationship most often occur over one very critical question. Will the mother accept you her daughter as a grown-up? That means, when she is visiting you, does she let you be in charge of your house? Does she have faith in you to be self-sufficient on small issues as well as large-who have you become , how do you express your sexuality, what about your job, what do you do with your money? Allowing daughters be their own woman is a universal problem for mothers emerging out of mother daughter relationships.

Mothers and daughters, who have difficulty with their mother daughter relationships as adults, often duplicate the old patterns of control and upheaval from childhood. They still can't hear each other. The daughter will hear the mother make a remark and she'll think, 'She wants to be in charge still.' And the mother will inadvertently say something that is totalling controlling, but was not meant to be. In the meantime, when the daughter responds, the mother hears nothing but anger-in a remark that does indeed convey anger but another message as well: "I love you, and aren't we able to do this differently?"

Get to know yourself
Most mothers are encouraging of their daughters within their mother daughter relationships, they want to be helpful to their daughters, and feel very bewildered by them. One of the things observed quite regularly is that the mother knows so very little about her own self, that she's giving too much importance on how her daughter turns out rather than, 'What do I know about myself and how do I feel about myself?' Daughters can model a great deal from a mother who is self-aware of herself."

I am sounding like my mother
The dread of growing up to be like one's mother has long been so common among Western women that it has a name. But rather than being true in reality, this primary care giver of our childhood will be very a different to the woman emerging from girl of childhood. The nature and dynamic of mother daughter relationships will change, as two maturing women face each other. Of course the small girl who has now become a woman in her own right will be always younger, maybe because of youthfulness, more attractive, with life still ahead of her. The mother, with her wealth of experience can offer wise insight and knowledge, and providing they both enter maturity together, they will gain so much from one another.

One of the most powerful themes in accounts of mother-daughter relationships in western culture has been that of connection and loss. Typically, a daughter. s marriage (or desire for a man) threatens the primary and intense bond between her mother and herself. The readings in the course, chosen from several historical periods and cultural traditions and including some feminist psychoanalytic theories, are designed to analyze and challenge the connection-loss model for mother-daughter relations.

An author's comment on mother daughter relationships

"Saying one thing about sex and motherhood, feeling contrary emotions about both at the same time, mother presents an enigmatic picture to her daughter. The first lie - the denial that a woman's sexuality may be in conflict with her role as a mother - is so upsetting to traditional ideas of femininity that it cannot be talked about.

The girl is left with the perception of a gap between what mother says, what mother does...and what the girl detects mother feels beneath it all. Nothing mother really feels ever escapes us. Our problem is that because we try to live out all parts of the split message she sent us, our behavior and lives all too often represent a jangled compromise. We don't know what to do.

We unbutton the top button on our dress and then button it back up again. That is a joke. But when we are in bed and feel the promise of orgasm, our unconscious and divided feelings assert their primacy, depriving us of satisfaction. That is no joke."

Excerpt from My Mother My Self by Nancy Friday

Naked Girl and Mirror - Judith Wright

This is not I. I had no body once-
only what served my need to laugh and run
and stare at stars and tentatively dance
on the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun.
Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was gone
on my own currents, quicksilver, thistledown.
Can I be trapped at last in that soft face?

I stare at you in fear, dark brimming eyes.
Why do you watch me with that immoderate plea-
"Look under these curled lashes, recognize
that you were always here; know me-be me."
Smooth once-hermaphrodite shoulders, too tenderly
your long slope runs, above those sudden shy
curves furred with light that spring below your space.

No, I have been betrayed. If I had known
that this girl waited between a year and a year,
I'd not have chosen her bough to dance upon.
Betrayed, by that little darkness here, and here
this swelling softness and that frightened stare
from eyes I will not answer; shut out here
from my own self, by its new body's grace-

for I am betrayed by someone lovely. Yes,
I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl.
Your lips in the mirror tremble as I refuse
to know or claim you. Let me go-let me be gone.
You are half of some other who may never come.
Why should I tend you? You are not my own;
you seek that other--he will be your home.

Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted with tears;
I lean to your kiss. I must serve you; I will obey.
Some day we may love. I may miss your going, some day,
though I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years.
Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too,
if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.