Between Mothers and Daughters

What is it about the mother/daughter relationship that makes it often so intense, whether intensely positive or negative? Why are women rarely neutral about their bond with their mothers?

One recent study of family relationship based on cell phone bills showed that for most older women, their most frequent daily calls were with their daughter, if they had one.

When I ask women in individual or couples counseling about the "life script" they got from their mother, useful information emerges. As an adult woman, the more you can understand about your mother, the more you can grow to understand about yourself. It is important to look behind the "mask" of the mother role. Understanding the woman she is---her background, her growing up years, her beliefs, and her relationships, may shed a great deal of light on how she mothered you.

Your own life may build from a foundation of her values, fears, and beliefs; or your life may be, in part, a reaction to your mother's. For example, a woman may react strongly to her mother playing a voiceless/childlike role with her husband, and in the daughter's own marriage she may be quite focused on not being taken advantage of.

In examining the life script you received about being a woman, consider the family your mother came from. Was she born into an advantaged or disadvantaged family? How many siblings were there to compete with for parental attention? Was the family stable, or did she deal with a great deal of change and instability? Were the children nurtured by anyone? What hopes and dreams did she have for her own life? Did she benefit from a good education, or is she a self-made woman? What are her beliefs about men, marriage, raising children, faith, and a woman's role in the family? How did she appear to you as a child? Was she joyful or joyless? Was she a strong woman, or a martyr?

The fit between your temperament and your mother's is an important factor in determining how close you are to her. Stella Chess, MD, has done extensive research to determine the factor of "goodness of fit" between a child's temperament and a parent's temperament. If it is not a very natural fit (for example if a daughter is very unstructured and spontaneous, while the mother is extremely structured and planned), then the mother's ability to accept the child's natural temperament, rather than "declare war" on it, is a critical factor in creating a loving, positive mother/daughter bond.

It has been said that it is primarily in the mother-child relationship that we learn how to love and be loved. What an incredible responsibility it is to be what psychologist Bruno Bettelheim termed a "good enough mother." A mother doesn't have to be perfect. Admitting your own mistakes, apologizing as needed, recognizing and honoring your daughter's own unique strengths and gifts, listening, and spending time together in enjoyable activities, are sure ways to strengthen a mother/daughter relationship.

What if you don't like the script you got from your mother? Then, as you become consciously aware of what her script was for you, you may choose to selectively rewrite it, just like a playwright rewrites a script. Writer Pam Finger says,"You do not have to be your mother unless she is who you want to be. You do not have to be your mother's mother, or even your grandmother's mother on your father's side. You may inherit their chins or their hips or their eyes, but you are not destined to become the women who came before you. You are not destined to live their lives.So if you inherit something, inherit their resilience. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."

There can be difficult aspects of the mother/daughter relationship. Because we share our gender, mothers can impose strong messages about roles and relationships, even our relationship with our own body. Sometimes as mothers age, they have unresolved feelings stirred up by their daughters emerging into adulthood and asserting themselves. Developmentally, it is healthy for daughters in their teens and twenties to push back and reject some of who their mother is. Mothers need to stay grounded, patient, and give up control, as it is appropriate. (She may be back closer to you later in life). Some daughters sense a feeling of competitiveness between themselves and their mother.  A mother may have unrealized hopes and dreams for her younger self that she may project on her daughter.

As an emotionally mature woman of any age, it is possible to come to peace with your relationship with your mother. You can decide how you are like her, and in what ways you are different. You can determine what the boundary can safely be between the two of you. You can choose what you wish to ask of her and what you would like to give her.

Through our relationship with our mother, we can look behind us into our past. With our mother, we see our emotional roots and her roots with the woman who raised her. Through our relationship with our daughters, we can look into the future and see our dreams for them. We can anticipate the ways in which they will need to do this same sifting process of positive and negative scripts with us in time.

A key to coming to peace with your relationship with your mother is to begin to view her not just in her role as your mother, but as a woman in her own context. This shift helps to equalize the power between adult daughter and mother. When you make this shift, you can be free to construct a different relationship with your mother, being aware of your history with her, accepting what love and stability she can provide, and begin the lifelong task of "mothering" yourself.

Recently, I have been organizing closets at home, and ran across some heartfelt notes and drawings that my daughters made for me when there were little, and it touched me deeply. Children grow up and launch, but the enduring closeness between mothers and daughters, when it works, is among life's sweetest blessings. This week as we approach Mother's Day, I honor all those who seek to nurture, encourage, and mother to the best of their ability. It's a big job, but with the potential for great meaning. Mothering can be one of life's most transformational and complex experiences.

You Were Always Mom's Favorite: Sisters

Writer and  Georgetown University Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen wrote a terrific book about the complex relationships between sisters, called You Were Always Mom's Favorite that might really help you understand the relationship better if you have a sister, are a sister, or have daughters of your own (Ballantine Books, 2010). Sisters have a life-long conversation that can reveal much about each of them.

As it turns out, girls often define themselves by the differences between themselves and their sister or sisters. There is often a lifelong tug of war between competition and closeness. Sisters compete for parents' time, attention, and financial support. Each sister tries to carve out her own identity within the family. If an older sister is seen by the family as the "smart" one, a younger sister might seek to differentiate herself by assuming a different identity.

Birth order plays a role in the relationship between sisters. Tannen found this even between twin sisters, where there is still a focus on who arrived on the scene first. Older sisters may be called on to help with the care, supervision, homework and responsibility for a younger sister by parents, and later be resented by a younger sister for treating them as a parent treats a child. Younger sisters may be babied and protected. Adult sisters sometimes have trouble renegotiating childhood roles. For example, ideally it would be best for an older sister to build a mutually respectful relationship, and not try to know more or be the boss all their lives.

As Tannen and her researchers studied conversations between sisters, they found  something she labeled "sister speak" where sisters can develop their own unique conversational flow and share the telling of stories. Because sisters usually share a common history, they can have conversational shorthand that they understand but others might not completely get.

Alignment in the family is important. If one sister is seen as "closer" to mom or dad, it can cause other sisters to feel left out.  As  a structural family therapist, I often want parents to be more aware of having as many good kids as they have children, and not joining in an alliance with one child, or playing favorites.

As adults, resentments can be exacerbated by one sister living closer to aging parents and assuming a larger or solo role in managing parents' increasing needs. Some adult sisters opt out and leave caring for aging parents, by default, to another sister. Some mothers add to sister conflict by over-praising one sister or her children.

Your sister might  represent the path you did not take in life. Acceptance, tolerance, and mutual respect can help soothe differences. So can lowering your expectations about your sister, and adding in other close female friends.

Sisters can be such different things to different women. It's wonderful when they are close emotionally, caring, supportive, and interested. Many women feel the loss of what they would have longed for if their sister is competitive, cold, disinterested or antagonistic. I have found women who feel sadness that their sister order got messed up.

Whether your sister is a strong ally or a stiff competitor, chances are she's one of the few people on the planet who knows your whole life story. The relationship between sisters, or the lack of it, helps to define us as women and as individuals.

Siblings: It's Complicated

This week, I heard a story on NPR about several recent studies on the impact that older siblings have on younger siblings that got me reflecting. Siblings can be our oldest friends. They hold our past, and we hold theirs. We may be a good fit, but we might not be. We didn't pick them out. We compete as children for time, attention, and parental resources. Brothers and sisters help form our identity, for better or worse.

The NPR story featured interviews with an OB/GYN who works with pregnant teens, who noticed a pattern that if they were helping a pregnant teen with medical needs during her pregnancy, they were very often seeing her younger sister(s) in the coming years with a teen pregnancy of their own. In a follow-up study, they showed that girls with an older sister who got pregnant as a teen are 5 times as likely to have a teen pregnancy themselves.

Another study quoted in the NPR story followed the substantial increase in smoking if another sibling smokes. It's enough to make you wonder how your siblings can impact your life, your choices, and your personality. Perhaps siblings can influence us for good (as in being responsible, getting good grades, etc.), or for bad (smoking ,drugs, alcohol, shoplifting, early sexual activity). In some families, I see children working hard at differentiating from older siblings to be different on purpose.

Birth order also comes into play. Are you a typical oldest child who is responsible, seeks to please parents, and tries to influence younger siblings? Are you a middle child who got lost in the shuffle and can get along with anybody? Are you a typical youngest who was babied a little?

As a family therapist, I sometimes feel having siblings gives us our first opportunity to learn how to have a voice, assert ourselves, and learn how to become socially skilled in working things out with other people.

Siblings can be extremely different, or amazingly similar. Sometimes all you have in common is your parents, and growing up together. Different siblings can also have markedly different childhoods growing up in the same family. Growing up you may each be competing for a niche in the family. Parents will play into this, as in "Mary is our athlete." As parents, we want to be sure to see each child in a complete way, and not stereotype their strengths or roles. You can have as many 'good children' in the family as you have children. Try not to play favorites.

With adult siblings, an attitude of tolerance is helpful, and trying to stay out of judgment. Lowering our expectations also helps. It's wonderful if they end up becoming your closest ally and supporter, but it often doesn't happen. Try to appreciate what you can about them, respect your shared past, and set boundaries if and when you need to if you have a sibling who is destructive towards you. It can be hard when you have to work together as a team with aging parents if you aren't close.

The sibling relationship impacts many of us profoundly. It helps to define your core self. It can be a source of support, understanding, and strength, or it may be the source of sadness, hurt, and the feeling that you wish you could be closer. You can do your part to be a supportive sibling, and then some of it is up to chance, parenting, the goodness of fit between your personalities, and your ability (and theirs) to accept the differences between you. Having a sibling you feel close and connected to is a great asset, but it's a team sport that takes both you and the other person.