No relationship is as highly charged as that between mother and daughter, or as riddled with expectations that can, like a land mine, explode with a single wrong step, a solitary stray word that, without warning, wounds or enrages.  For both mothers and daughters, the other is often crazy-making.

A woman might say:  “I can’t be with my mother for five minutes without wanting to kill her.  And yet I really believe in my heart of hearts that I would be nothing without her”.

Or a woman might say:  “Even though my mother is no longer here, I know what she *thinks*.  I hear her voice when I clean my house, telling me where to put this and where to put that and not to sweep anything under the rug.  I’ve always wanted to become a lawyer.  But I hear my mother again, “How could you give up your job and abandon your family?”  No matter what I do, I always hear her voice.  So I don’t clean my house so well – my rebellion.  But I also don’t go to law school.”

Mothers are often the yardstick by which daughters measure themselves – have they done “it” - education, career, sexuality, marriage, homemaking, thinness, popularity, chic, motherhood – as well as she has?  Better?  Differently?

Because if they have done “it” both well *and* differently, then they are prepared to survive without her.  They have completed the course.

But there’s a hitch in the mother-daughter separation process:  Women want to survive, but not entirely without her.  They want to detach from their mothers, but not defect.  Because, like it or not, they are still very much bound up with her.

Whether the relationship is strained or easy, hostile or amiable, daughters need their mothers, if only to affirm their history, validate their femaleness, and guide their way.  They need to know she’s there if they stumble, to love them unconditionally, to nurture the child that lives within their daughters even now, without infantilizing them.  It is a need that never leaves even in the best of mother-daughter attachments, and in the worst creates a yawning gulf wider than the heart can bear.

A mother sets the tone for her daughter’s life, provides a road map and a model, and continues through her daughter’s middle and old age to be her example.  And so daughters ask their mothers:  When did she menstruate?  Begin menopause?  How did she feel about and deal with love?  Friendship?  Work?  Sexual longing?  Loneliness?

But if a mother and daughter have no connection, the daughters cannot ask the one person whose psyche and body have programmed their own.  That’s why the loss is so great when the daughter has to figure it out for herself, and forge her own trail rather than following her mother’s example or learning from it.  Such a daughter has to discover herself, alone.