Being your ‘Mother’s Daughter’

Over the past year, I’ve collected more than a hundred stories, like precious beads, some as dark as black pearls, others like luminous sapphires, and strung them into an expansive female soul circle. Our conversations lasted from several hours to several days, taking place over cups of coffee or glasses of wine in kitchens across the country, from San Francisco to Dallas to the Adirondack region of New York. The women who generously allowed me to excavate their histories are rich, poor, black, white, gay, and straight and span ages thirty-four to seventy. Although some of the daughters I interviewed have lost their moms, this is not a book about dealing with death; it’s about dealing with mothers in this lifetime.

The stories on these pages are raw, startling, and most important, true. They resonate with prescriptions on how to kiss and make up and move on. Although the women’s backgrounds vary, their experiences have brought them to this common conclusion: Ditching old baggage and learning to love our mothers must come before we learn to love, and know, ourselves. And the pain that comes from losing a mother you’re still fighting with is a suffering that doesn’t subside. Some of the women requested that their real names be used. Those who wished to remain anonymous picked their own pseudonyms, and identifying details were changed. Here are some of the women you will meet.

Janine grew up on a farm in Georgia with a mother who beat her with a horsewhip. Ellen became a binge eater to fill up on the love she never got at home. As Adrienne’s mother lay dying, she flipped her estranged daughter the finger. Chynna speaks of feeling emotionally abandoned by her rock-star mother, Michelle Phillips, one of the mamas in The Mamas and the Papas. Rebecca’s mother hollered so much during her childhood that this daughter is raising her own kids in a home where raising your voice is forbidden. Grace’s mom carted around a heavy toolbox and could build virtually anything, from couches to carports. Grace is now dealing with the agonizing transition that many adult daughters are going through — the morphing of a supermom into a sad, needy widow. Erica came out as a lesbian around the same time her mother outed her own secret, that she was engaged in a long-term affair.

Despite their diverse histories, all of these daughters have embraced their mothers. And if they can’t forgive them for unforgivable acts, at least they are willing to forget the past and move forward. This takes enough maturity to understand that the meanest of mothers is often the product of her own lack of mothering or her own stormy past. Along with horror stories, this book also contains lots of love stories, such as the one about Juanita, a daughter in her sixties who never left her mother’s house, becoming her nurse until she died of Alzheimer’s. Then there’s Rita, a brilliant executive who spent many years frustrated that her mother, a voluptuous blond widow, goes to bars at night instead of tackling intellectual pursuits. At the age of fifty, Rita stopped obsessing about their differences and now joins her mom at the neighborhood pub. During these Cabernet-laced sessions of honest girl-talk, Rita has discovered what many grown daughters I interviewed are finding out about their mothers: “The mirrors are everywhere.” The book also contains sagas filled with more subtle annoyances that routinely come up between mothers and daughters, scuffles that reflect the line I heard time and time again: “My mother is a pain, but I love her anyway.”

MORE FROM PARENTING

Parenting Section Front

More women choose do-it-yourself births Will you scale back this holiday season? Does parenting make you dumb? Bane of this mother's existence: Cold coffee, warm beer Top 10 holiday toys you don’t know about Bewildered new moms hire baby planners Ho! Ho! Ho! 8 hot toys for the holidays   Dad of estranged boy testifies before Congress   Case against overparenting Gasp! Babies’ fat rolls being airbrushed away? Parenting Section Front   Add Parenting headlines to your news reader: