Opinion

Preparing for the mother of all relationships

 Mothers and daughters clash at many times in their lives
 Mothers and daughters clash at many times in their lives  Mothers and daughters clash at many times in their lives

I’m intrigued by a recent statement made by the headmistress of an English girls’ public school that mothers who seek to be their daughter’s ‘best friend’ are doing them no favours, but creating a generation of dependent, spoilt young women ill-equipped to deal the life’s challenges. According to her dictum, “we must be parents with the authority to say no as well as yes, to compel as well as conciliate.” Hmmm…

There’s no relationship so volatile as that between mother and daughter. From the start it’s fraught with conflicting emotions – joy at giving birth to a replica of oneself, apprehension at producing a rival for a husband-father’s love. These are the opening steps of an elaborate dance that leaves mother and daughter now close, now distant, at key times in their lives. It’s this fascinating fluctuation of feelings that has animated a bevy of women writers who’ve built a literary career out of not getting on with their mothers.

The beginning is a pink-frilled promise of a precious baby – mummy’s angel, daddy’s pet, a period of plaything-style indulgence with daughter as ‘living doll’. These are the halcyon days of adoring, uncritical mum with matching daughter. No one can read a child’s character better than its mother. Already she detects in her darling the sinews of self-will, the developing muscles of stubbornness that will build into the bones of intransigence. Already she knows how little time she has to prepare for the lengthy guerrilla campaign of skirmishes, frequent parleys and renewal of hostilities that will go on till one achieves autonomy and the other, acceptance of it.

Meanwhile, school age daughter is conscious that mother has her measure and turns the full-beam dazzle of her charm on daddy, shamelessly playing one parent off against the other – a game at which she becomes increasingly adept as she matures. So it begins, ever earlier. Society’s tawdry values corrupt innocence and steal childhood. Junior hooker lookalikes in crop-tops with ambiguous slogans, jewellery and lip gloss believe that buying things will make them happy. Nobody of her age has to go to bed so early. All her friends have television and laptops in their rooms. She only has rubbishy old books. “It’s not fair!” is a mantra mother grows familiar with, since it precedes practically every statement from her daughter’s mouth for the next dozen years.

By some fearful irony, Nature arranges it so that mother’s menopause and daughter’s puberty happen simultaneously. Dad stands baffled on the sidelines, realising in horror that he’s married one termagant and reared another. Now come the fierce engagements over room maintenance, make up, dangerous companions, curfews, sleepovers and daughter’s conviction that her hopelessly-out-of-touch mum was put on this earth exclusively to embarrass her. These affrays are interspersed with periods of truce and shopping sprees together in perfect amity. Briefly they bask in each other’s loving company till hostilities inevitably resume. Back on eggshells, mother fears and prays. It’s a pattern mirrored in every family with girls. Worse is to come.

Nothing prepares a parent for the next stage, which leaves them in a state of baffled despair, giving credence to the myth of Changeling Child. The erstwhile reasonably biddable and occasionally dutiful daughter morphs into a hard-faced harridan done up like a streetwalker with a stud in her nose. Family is superceded by friends, a motley crew of undesirables, foul-mouthed and of questionable habits. Now come the long night vigils, waiting for her key in the door, dreading the 3am phone-call that says she’s in casualty, or worse. Relief at her return provokes the shouting match, the shuttered face, the slammed bedroom door.

Miraculously, in the blink of an eye a presentable, confident (and relieved) daughter exits to higher education or a job, leaving her exhausted parents in a state of semi-bereavement and unalloyed anxiety because Lord knows what she’s up to far from home.

Our children, they say, are only lent to us, but it’s a truth universally acknowledged by every daughter that no matter what she does or doesn’t do – a mother’s place is in the wrong.