It seems a lot of the reading I've been doing lately has had to do with mother-daughter relationships. Not on purpose; it's just happened that way. But it's true that I am also going through my own personal mother-daughter crisis, so I wonder just how incidental it really is.
For example, on top of one of my stacks of books was one called, "Please Excuse My Daughter," by Julie Klam. It's been sitting in that stack, being moved up and down in it, for a number of years. I own it because it was a book that I was forced to discard when I worked at the library because it had not circulated in awhile. I didn't take every book I discarded, just the ones that I thought I might regret not reading when they were gone. Lately I've been sick of political and serious reading and have been aiming for lighter fare, and of course there was the mother-daughter thing.
Julie Klam is very funny. She began her reluctant working career as a David Letterman intern. She is not at all like me, or my daughter; her mother is not at all like me, or my mother. However, at one point her mother comments on Rod Stewart as being, "'nice-looking but no Rudolph Valentino.'" About which Klam writes, "I remember feeling that fierce irritation only a daughter can feel for her mother."
Here's another book I read just last week: Roz Chast's new graphic memoir is entitled, "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?" The New York Times reviewer calls it, "by turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny." Well, I'm here to tell you that I didn't laugh out loud that much. My guess is that the reviewer was relating as the adult child, and not as the parent of an adult child. The thing is, the child being annoyed at the parent thing comes across loud and clear. Which, given my current personal crisis, was a little too close to home to want to laugh out loud.
Anyway, while I am trying not to overinterpret, I have to admit that I am becoming more aware through my reading that daughters are critical of their mothers. Yes, it's unnecessary, and it's also cruel, but it seems that when I was a teen and young adult, as justified as I was, I did not invent the wheel. And neither has my daughter.
As a psychologist and a new mother, I truly believed that love -- in psychobabble, "unconditional positive regard" -- would get a mother and daughter through all hurtles. I did pretty much the opposite of everything my parents had done and I became one of those awful parents who think their children are the sun around which we move. As it turns out, my kids are both pretty okay, so I was probably half right. My daughter seems to have made it through the hurtles, but as far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out. On the other hand, if you asked her, she might say that I ruined her for life.
While one of the few things I had been absolutely sure of was my parenting, I am now second-guessing pretty much everything I ever did or said to or for my kids. And I wonder just how my mother dealt with those years in my twenties when I needed to prove to myself that I didn't need her. I have to give it to her, though. Without a degree in psychology, without the depth of reading that I have available, she was able to sum up the mother-daughter thing in one sentence:
"Someday your daughter will do to you what you've done to me."
Up until now I thought it had been a threat. I now realize that she was merely stating a fact of life.
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