To paraphrase a woman in her late forties:

"My earliest memories of my father are that he was very lovable, very available, all the good things - until I was six.  After that, our relationship was just rotten.  That's when my mother really took over.  I became Mommy's girl in cahoots against him.  She  made me her ally because she was so angry with him, and I was supposed to be angry with him too.  And I was.  I was a very, very good girl.  Without her telling me in so many words, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do."

When adult daughters and their mothers are too "invested" - that is, when they are too mutually dependent, forming an unhealthy best friendship - often it is because they have formed an alliance against the father.  In many of these cases, the fathers are alcoholics or irrational or frightening for other reasons.  Winning Mom's undivided attention - even for understandable reasons - overloads the relationship.  This mother-daughter "alliance" is one for which the daughter will often pay dearly for later as an adult.

Sometimes a mother takes her daughter inappropriately into her confidence about her marital unhappiness.   Sometimes a mother seeks, in  her daughter, the mothering she never had.  And nowhere is this phenomenon of maternal neediness more prevalent than in the case of divorce.  Without a father, except perhaps sporadically, the daughter is severely hobbled in her attempts to find her own identity separate from her mother.  The mother-daughter relationship is then in danger of overheating.

A mother's ability to give her daughter permission to maintain dual allegiance can be severely tested when her marriage dissolves.  Because of the acrimony that accompanies most divorces, such permission is extraordinary.  But sometimes it does happen.  To paraphrase another woman in a conversation:
"When my parents split up, my father moved to another state. But my mother kept him alive for me.  She said "Don't ever think he left you - he left me.  It wasn't about you".  Three years later he moved back and wrote to me saying he wanted to reestablish our relationship.  I asked my mother what I should do.  I was afraid that if I saw him , she'd think I was betraying her, and she knew it.  She said "Don't worry about my feelings.  I took care of them long ago.  He's your father.  It's important for you to  make up your own mind about him".  So I did.  I found out he's vain, he's selfish, he's immature.  But at least I found out for myself".


-- Modified on 3/8/2004 10:50:30 PM