Being your ‘Mother’s Daughter’

Thanks to medical advances and the rise in senior fitness, we, their daughters, have an elongated second chance to smooth out the connection and to get it right. Women in their nineties are the fastest-growing segment of the aging population. That means a daughter of fifty may be sitting at the holiday table with her mother for the next twenty years, marking a new, previously undocumented passage in the female life cycle. Your own mother may be a tennis champ with a younger boyfriend and not on her last leg, like mine. But that doesn’t mean you can be lazy and put off working on the relationship. I know this firsthand, because I was late in the game to patch things up, and I am now racing to love my mom as much I can, while I still have her within reach. The best time to start the process of pushing through antique pain and vintage blame is when your mother is healthy, and not when you’re on deathwatch, like me. Your reward will be precious bonus years of a supportive friendship with the woman who has known you longer and better, and loves you more, than any other person on earth.

On these pages, menopausal daughters talk about giggling with mothers they used to despise, swapping stories about arthritis and eyelifts and dating. Even those with the most horrific pasts have chosen to suck it up and accept their imperfect mothers, lowering their expectations and opening their hearts. Those women who come to healthy completion in their relationships speak about how a mother’s death can even be emancipating. When a mother passes on, a midlife woman is freed to take the best of her, leave the worst behind, and become wholly her own person. The journey can be lonely, but it is also a rich adventure, as grieving daughters turn to spiritual exploration, tackling new dreams and deepening their friendships with other women. I know that my girlfriends, my personal soul circle, will be there to help me heal. They already have.

I am just back from three days in Santa Fe where four women I’ve known for thirty years gathered for a reunion at a mountain retreat. We are all fifty and our mothers are still alive. We laugh and cry about everything: old boyfriends, current husbands, good mothers, bad mothers, and how we will cope when we are orphans. It’s a Saturday morning, and we are lying naked on a cedar deck, wet from the hot tub. The air is cool, but we are warmed by the blazing sun and snug in the womb of the cliffs that encase us. At this instant, I have a clear vision of four fifty-year-old women being reborn.

We have emerged from the water, and we are wet, like infants newly plucked from the amniotic sac. Only this rebirth in New Mexico is not as daughters but as wise women accountable only to ourselves. Like babies, we will always crave comfort and love, but we can get that by staying connected to our long-standing circle of goddess girlfriend energy. As I continue to age and lose other loved ones, I will always find solace with the cluster of sisters I met in my youth, who still anchor me with light and love. Our mothers may move out of this world, but their spirits will be part of that circle, as will the spirits of grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and Mother Earth.

Listening to the rousing voices of the women who animate these chapters reinforces the urgency of working hard to form a mother-daughter bond built on compassion and surrender. By learning to love our mothers, we are free to become our strongest, truest selves. May this book propel you on your own urgent journey to find peace with your mother and peace with yourself.

Excerpted from “I Am My Mother's Daughter: Making Peace With Mom — Before It's Too Late” by Iris Krasnow. Copyright © 2006 by Iris Krasnow. Excerpted by permission of The Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

MORE FROM PARENTING

Parenting Section Front

Bane of this mother's existence: Cold coffee, warm beer   Dad of estranged boy testifies before Congress   Case against overparenting Gasp! Babies’ fat rolls being airbrushed away? What’s in a baby name? Find out — for $1,678   Hottest holiday toys Letters to Santa: How many gifts are OK to list? 10 most dangerous toys of 2009   Instilling family values in your kids Spare the rod? Struggling with spanking Parenting Section Front   Add Parenting headlines to your news reader: