DAUGHTERS AND MOTHERS
In late June I went to Nantucket with my mother and my children for what is probably the twentieth summer in a row. The annual pilgrimage to my mother’s time-share on that lovely island began when my kids were babies and my mother was in her prime – about the age I am now. I’m not sure where I was, except overwhelmed by the classic juggling act.
Over the years I have enjoyed the benchmark that the Nantucket trip offered to monitor my children’s growing up. I see it most clearly in bike rides. First they were strapped in behind my seat; then after a few years, they were on small bikes, weaving perilously ahead of me, getting tired half way to wherever. Not long after that we were a proud string of straight-on cyclists – a mother duck and her little ones. That didn’t last long before I was left in the dust. Sometimes they would wait for me up ahead. Other times they were enjoying an ice cream cone at our destination when I got there. Nowadays I bike alone – they are renting jeeps and scooters.
The same time span has given me benchmarks to monitor my mother’s decline. At the beginning she shared the beach duty, digging alongside one of my kids or standing knee-deep in the water guarding against threatening waves. She would drive the car to meet us half way in our bike rides and help us load the bikes up and get back home. Then she got frailer and feared getting knocked over by the waves; then she stopped driving. In recent years, her slow pace has made us all ungenerously impatient. This trip she and my daughter and I went to a local spa where she had her first facial ever. She seemed to be delighted, but by the time we left, she couldn’t remember what service she had.
Considering the beloved generations on either side of me highlights the nature of mother-daughter bonds and how they have changed in my lifetime. A recent New York Times article reported on the emerging phenomenon of grown-daughter dependency - calling their mothers three or four times a day, consulting with them on decisions small and large, and discussing the most intimate details of their lives without inhibition (the article said nothing about the mothers sharing back, though they did characterize their daughters as "best friends"). The experts attribute this development to technological innovations such as the cell phone and e-mail. I think it is a totally different kind of breakthrough.
My 21-year-old daughter and I don’t talk endlessly or every day, and she doesn’t tell me “everything.” but I would say we have a very intimate, trusting, and fun relationship. I can’t say that about my mother. I have never felt that she knew who I was, and I am sure I made no effort to enlighten her. She had lots of secrets; I had a few too. The only time I took her into my confidence was when I was in college – back when abortions were illegal – and I needed help with an unwanted pregnancy. I must admit she rose to the occasion. But in general I thought of growing up as outgrowing my mother. Now that she is failing, I have to hold her hand when we go anywhere and help her undress in the doctor’s office, but that isn’t the kind of intimacy that I am talking about.
The big difference between the two mother-daughter relationships I am part of is the trust, respect, and honesty that women of my generation have come to expect from each other as a result of the common experience of growing up with the Women’s Movement. My mother never trusted women at all – she saw them as rivals; the conventional wisdom of her day was that in the cut-throat world of man-hunting, the female of the species would let nothing and no one stand in her way. When I was a teenager, it was understood that a call from a boy superseded any plans with other girls. It is hard to look back on those days when my best friends were not valued enough to be a priority. My daughter wouldn’t dream of canceling plans with her girlfriends and in fact often chooses them over invitations from boys.
By the time I was her age, I had learned to be wily with other women because they couldn’t be trusted; I learned to obfuscate with other women, because they couldn’t take the truth – and I was afraid that, being female, I was too fragile to take the consequences. But in my twenties and thirties I worked with women, engaged in political action with women, shared talk about experiences we thought were personal aberrations. Over the years we have become one another’s truth tellers; we watch one another’s back; we enjoy one another’s company -and laugh together like we laugh with no one else. That model, much more than my own experience as a daughter, has guided my relationship with my daughter. In many ways I feel I am growing up alongside her. I’d like to think we bring out the best in each other – even though we also know the worst
Over the years I have enjoyed the benchmark that the Nantucket trip offered to monitor my children’s growing up. I see it most clearly in bike rides. First they were strapped in behind my seat; then after a few years, they were on small bikes, weaving perilously ahead of me, getting tired half way to wherever. Not long after that we were a proud string of straight-on cyclists – a mother duck and her little ones. That didn’t last long before I was left in the dust. Sometimes they would wait for me up ahead. Other times they were enjoying an ice cream cone at our destination when I got there. Nowadays I bike alone – they are renting jeeps and scooters.
The same time span has given me benchmarks to monitor my mother’s decline. At the beginning she shared the beach duty, digging alongside one of my kids or standing knee-deep in the water guarding against threatening waves. She would drive the car to meet us half way in our bike rides and help us load the bikes up and get back home. Then she got frailer and feared getting knocked over by the waves; then she stopped driving. In recent years, her slow pace has made us all ungenerously impatient. This trip she and my daughter and I went to a local spa where she had her first facial ever. She seemed to be delighted, but by the time we left, she couldn’t remember what service she had.
Considering the beloved generations on either side of me highlights the nature of mother-daughter bonds and how they have changed in my lifetime. A recent New York Times article reported on the emerging phenomenon of grown-daughter dependency - calling their mothers three or four times a day, consulting with them on decisions small and large, and discussing the most intimate details of their lives without inhibition (the article said nothing about the mothers sharing back, though they did characterize their daughters as "best friends"). The experts attribute this development to technological innovations such as the cell phone and e-mail. I think it is a totally different kind of breakthrough.
My 21-year-old daughter and I don’t talk endlessly or every day, and she doesn’t tell me “everything.” but I would say we have a very intimate, trusting, and fun relationship. I can’t say that about my mother. I have never felt that she knew who I was, and I am sure I made no effort to enlighten her. She had lots of secrets; I had a few too. The only time I took her into my confidence was when I was in college – back when abortions were illegal – and I needed help with an unwanted pregnancy. I must admit she rose to the occasion. But in general I thought of growing up as outgrowing my mother. Now that she is failing, I have to hold her hand when we go anywhere and help her undress in the doctor’s office, but that isn’t the kind of intimacy that I am talking about.
The big difference between the two mother-daughter relationships I am part of is the trust, respect, and honesty that women of my generation have come to expect from each other as a result of the common experience of growing up with the Women’s Movement. My mother never trusted women at all – she saw them as rivals; the conventional wisdom of her day was that in the cut-throat world of man-hunting, the female of the species would let nothing and no one stand in her way. When I was a teenager, it was understood that a call from a boy superseded any plans with other girls. It is hard to look back on those days when my best friends were not valued enough to be a priority. My daughter wouldn’t dream of canceling plans with her girlfriends and in fact often chooses them over invitations from boys.
By the time I was her age, I had learned to be wily with other women because they couldn’t be trusted; I learned to obfuscate with other women, because they couldn’t take the truth – and I was afraid that, being female, I was too fragile to take the consequences. But in my twenties and thirties I worked with women, engaged in political action with women, shared talk about experiences we thought were personal aberrations. Over the years we have become one another’s truth tellers; we watch one another’s back; we enjoy one another’s company -and laugh together like we laugh with no one else. That model, much more than my own experience as a daughter, has guided my relationship with my daughter. In many ways I feel I am growing up alongside her. I’d like to think we bring out the best in each other – even though we also know the worst
posted by Suzanne Braun Levine at 10:15 AM
4 Comments:
I never felt like a had a "relationship" with my mother. There was never the intimacy that I hear some women talk about. My mother was difficult in so many ways. It took me years to understand her. I am writing a memoir and it is interesting how I can be more objective about her when I am writing.
When my father died, I was 15 and my mother was 52. She said I needed to find a man to take care of me (get married) because she was old and would not be around much longer. She was around for another 25 years.
I do not have a daughter, I do have a step-daughter, but we have never bonded - distance both literally and figuratively have separated us.
Reading about the lives of other women has helped me to understand myself and see all of my relationships in a more objective manner.
I have been incredibly lucky to have had a wonderful relationship with my mother my entire life. She has always been my biggest fan, my staunchest supporter, and always told me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and encouraged me to follow my dreams - even when those dreams led me to take a different path, or took me far away.
We've always been able to talk to each other about anything, and even though I'm in France and she's in the states, I call at least once or twice a month to keep in touch and connect. She has the same close relationship with my two sisters and her daughters-in-law.
I have two sons and a stepdaughter, and I am hoping to build that kind of relationship with her, although it's been tough sometimes, because I think in the beginning she viewed me as the obstacle to her parents "getting back together."
With my sons, we have the same closeness that I have with my mother - and are a solid unit, even as they're getting older and beginning to build their own lives where I'm no longer the center focus. I learned that from my mother.
Mothers, where would we be without them, no matter what the relationship was like growing up. Mine was too busy with my younger sister and brother to be a part of my school activities as I grew up. And I left home at 17, after graduating from high school, traveling and living in various parts of the United States. I didn't come back to my hometown until I was 24, then only for a short two years. But in those years, I really got to know my mom, she shared so much about being a woman dependent on her husband, because she had seven children and had never worked outside the home. Who'd have any energy left to work outside, after everything she did to make a home for all of us. She always told me, to keep my independence, even if I married, to always have my own money, my own credit, my own friends. In college in 1976 in Northern California I became part of the women's movement and a support group grew out of those political and personal statements of being a woman of the 70's. Here it is 30 years later, and several of the initial group are still together, with regular vacations and reunions; not to mention endless emails and phone calls. We've all been married, had children, divorced and now face our fifty somethings with new vigor as our children go off to college and move away from home. We have a slogan "The men, they have come and gone in our lives, leaving us with beautiful treasures, our children, But the women, they are forever." I think that says it all. We have great open relationships with one another and are raising our daughters to value their girlfriends as the best gift of this lifetime. We are truly a blessed generation of women.
I am regularly reminded of how profound our feelins about our mothers are. I really believed for many years that I had outgrown that relationship and moved on with my life. Boy was I wrong! Now that I am caring for my aging mom we are back into that intimate ambivalence. When you are both a daughter and a mother, the complexity is heightened, isn't it?
Suzanne Levine
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