Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [53]
When Sara was fifteen she made a joke that was funny in a painful way. I liked to take her swimming, walking or out to lunch. Tongue in cheek, we labeled those outings mother-daughter bonding experiences. Then one day she began calling them mother-daughter “bondage” experiences. We both had tears in our eyes from laughing. To this day, we call our outings “mother-daughter bondage.”
Growing up requires adolescent girls to reject the person with whom they are most closely identified. Daughters are socialized to have a tremendous fear of becoming like their mothers. There is no greater insult for most women than to say, “You are just like your mother.” And yet to hate one’s mother is to hate oneself.
The experience of American girls is so different from that of Leah, who was reared in a culture that respected the mother-daughter bond. In Western culture, mother-daughter tensions spring from the daughter’s attempt to become an adult, to be an individual different from and not dependent on her mother. Because of mixed messages within the culture, conflict between mothers and daughters is inevitable. To have a self, daughters must reject parts of their mothers. Always mothers and daughters must struggle with distance—too close and there is engulfment, too distant and there’s abandonment.
These age-old tensions are exacerbated by the problems of the 1990s. Mothers and daughters have even more turbulent relationships today. My office is filled with mother-daughter pairs who are struggling to define their relationships in positive ways. Part of the problem is that mothers don’t understand the world that their daughters now live in. Their experiences were different. For example, most mothers were teased by boys in junior high about their bodies and their sexuality. They hear their daughters complain about what happens to them at school and they think it’s the same thing, but it’s not. The “teasing” is more graphic, mean-spirited and unremitting. It’s no longer teasing, it’s sexual harassment, and it keeps many girls from wanting to go to school.
Mothers are often unprepared for how their daughters behave. Their daughters may swear at them, call them bitches or tell them to shut up. This shocks them because they never swore at their own mothers. Their daughters may be sexually active at a much younger age. They struggled with sexual issues in committed relationships, and their daughters’ casual attitudes floor them. Today’s mothers kept secrets from their mothers, but they have no idea how different their daughters’ secrets are.
Most mothers do their best to raise healthy daughters, but they are often unsure how to operate. For example, a neighbor raised her daughter to fight for her rights and to resist anyone’s efforts to control her. Now at eleven, her daughter is often in trouble at school. She starts fights with teachers who she thinks are unfair and hits kids who pick on other kids. While her scrappiness is admirable from a feminist perspective, it’s getting her in trouble. Other children have realized that she’s a fighter and they set her up for trouble. The mother wonders if she has done the right thing.
A friend actively encouraged her daughters to keep up with sports, to eschew makeup, eat hearty meals and speak up in class when they knew the answers. During adolescence, her daughters were hurt and rejected by more sex-typed peers. They didn’t conform to the feminine norms and suffered dreadfully.
My cousin’s common sense told her that her daughter shouldn’t have a two-hundred-dollar low-cut dress for her eighth-grade graduation. But all her daughter’s friends had such dresses. Her daughter begged her to buy it because she was afraid that she would feel like a geek at her graduation party.
This same cousin had strong beliefs about alcohol and teenagers. She said no to parties where alcohol was served. But her daughter insisted that all the popular kids went to the parties and that she’d be left out of her crowd.