Of all the pairings within the family, the mother/daughter pairing is the most emotionally intense and the most mutually dependent. A daughter is a mother's gender partner, an extension of herself.  And mothers are their daughter's role model, their biological and emotional road map, the judge of all their relationships.

Consequently daughters will turn to their mothers for all kinds of permmissions - including, sometimes, permission to love Daddy.  

A daughter's relationship with her mother is a little like bungee-cord diving - a daughter can stake her claim in the outside world in what only looks like total autonomy - sometimes even "divorcing" her mother in a fiery exit from the family - but there is an invisible emotional cord, like a bungee cord, that snaps her back.  For always there is the memory of mother, whose judgements are so completely absorbed into the daughter's identity that she may wonder where Mom leaves off and she begins.

Those memories and long-ago opinions are the prism through which a daughter views the world: Mother-daughter intimacy, or disaffection, is the fertile ground in which a daughter's sense of self in relation to others begins to grow.  

Because of this, Mom is a powerful moderator of the father-daughter connection.  A daughter's attitude toward Dad, and indeed toward men in general, will be tailored by the quality of her mother's marriage, her mother's views of men, and the health of her mother's self-esteem.

A daughter follows her mother's example of how to behave with a man.  And if it is obvious that her mother is loved by her father, the daughter concludes that Mom is very good at attracting and keeping a man - and so is worth imitating.  And so daughters observe their mother's pleasing ways, and themselves try to be similarly pleasing to Daddy.  The well-loved, secure wife has no trouble allowing her daughter to share Daddy's love.

To continue this ideal scenario, a father is avaiable to help his daughter balance both her love and her anger toward her  mother, to moderate the inevitable emotional extremes in the intense mother-daughter relationship.  With Daddy's steadying influence daughters can learn to be comfortable with healthy anger, rather than feeling that they must be eternal good girls who must at all costs conceal their anger.

At the same time the father can help the mother to loosen her maternal grip.  He can intervene if the Mom is too emotionally invested in the child, or too harsh, by temporarily siding with the daughter, while at the same time providing the boundaries of rage - acknowledging the child's feelings but setting limits on their expression.

A healthy family triangle, then, provides the daughter with a stage on which to rehearse her separate identity.  A daughter can then go from one parent to the other for an emotional safety valve, to let off steam.  Having equal, unambivalent access to both parents - and spared their competition for her loyalty - she can then concentrate not so much on dual allegiance as on simply growing up.

More on Mom later...