A mother-daughter relationship is often intensely competitive, and the competition is always conducted along the lines of who is a better woman. When the first child is born, for example, it frequently occasions a bloodbath between Mom and grandma as to who is a better expert on the feeding, the clothing and the raising of the child.
But that’s not the worst case. In most serious cases, the mother pushes her daughter out of the field of childbearing completely, cannibalizing her fertility to remain the only fertile woman in the family. What makes this hard to spot is that, almost always in these situations, the mother is ostensibly desperate to have a grandchild, badgering her daughter about it incessantly. This badgering is a triumphant cry of victory. The process of repeating, “you are childless” is the reward.
There are also cases where a mother drives the daughter out of the possibility of having a stable (or sometimes any) romantic relationship. These are usually mothers with difficult personal lives of their own, often on their second marriage, especially when the marriage is to somebody younger. Or maybe it’s a mother who didn’t marry the man she loved and settled for somebody else out of convenience.
None of this is done consciously. My grandmother only had one child, and it thwarted her life. I’m not saying, of course, that it would thwart everybody’s life but it did hers. She concocted a complicated theory about how having more than one child was wrong and immoral, and when my mother got pregnant for the second time, grandma went to truly extraordinary lengths to prevent my sister from being born. Thankfully, grandma wasn’t my mom’s mother. She was the mother-in-law, and her mandates had zero effect on my mother.
Now look at me, who only has one living child, and this thwarted my existence. You know what my grandmother’s name was? Klara. She renamed herself as Clarissa, and I thought she was my mother until the age of four because my own mother was very absent at that time.
It gets even funnier in the case of my sister who is repeating the life of the great-grandmother whom she never even knew. They have a striking physical likeness and a similar life journey in quite extraordinary ways.
My husband is the exact copy of my great-grandfather, in ethnicity, profession, gestures, personality, and attitude towards me. The moment I first saw him, I knew, this is my great-grandfather sent back to me and we must be together. My great-grandfather was not biologically related to me, so it’s not icky.
This is why I always say that it’s crucial to know about your ancestors. We play out their games, looking for a resolution of the problems they never solved whether we want to or not, whether we even know about it or not.
Clarissa's Blog 
These discussions all just make me relieved that I never had any girls. Already figured it’d be a disaster because I had such a strained relationship with my own mother. This is… way above the level of complicated I can manage 😉
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There’s a wonderful cure for all this for mothers. It’s easy, widely available and invariably good. A mother needs to have an all-consuming interest that draws her away from the competition. It can be a profession, a sport, or a hobby. Knitting, vegetable canning, embroidery, charity, church beautification, writing, reading. As long as it’s passionate and not sporadic, it will work.
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I know this woman who is a goddess of embroidery and pickling. Her pickled mushrooms are a near religious experience. She embroiders and pickles all the time. As a result, her adult children propagate like bunnies, which is highly unusual for a middle-class Ukrainian family where mothers live to format their adult children, and fertility rates are abysmal.
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My mother had church, community theater, a career… and it wasn’t enough. Every time I showed an interest in anything as a kid, she’d get so involved in it that it wasn’t mine anymore. So died my childhood interests in archaeology, music, art… the only thing I was able to hang onto was plants, and maybe it is because my grandmother, her mother, was the gardener of the family and my mother couldn’t quite get into that. ** But it’s weird because my grandmother’s mother was an expert and dedicated gardener (they couldn’t afford not to grow food)– and several of her daughters took it up. My auntie explained to me that with so many kids, helping in the garden was the sure way to get time with mother. So it *can* work the other way.
Gradually recovering those other interests as an adult.
I do still have a lot of cringe reaction to that childhood experience, and struggle with it even with sons. So when they are interested in stuff, I try to facilitate those pursuits as much as possible without being *involved* myself. It’s hard though. I’ve become, weirdly, “the music person” in the family, and this complicates the homeschool thing– I desperately want the kiddos to be music-literate, but unlike other subjects, when we try to bust out the solfege they resist like their lives depend on it. I’ve never had to fight to get math or history or literature checked off. I’ve given up trying to teach anything vocal. The eldest gets off scot-free by having an indifferent ear. Kid2 though– has a lovely voice and very good pitch and it would be a sin *not* to impart some kind of music training, so he’s learning an instrument I know nothing about. I’ve only ever played woodwinds, so he’s doing strings. Still get resistance, but it’s less. I’m picking this discussion apart to see if I can find a better strategy in it.
**so of course one of my kids has developed a passion for cacti, the one thing I wasn’t growing.
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Hey, my kid adores graphic novels, which are the only type of reading material I detest. I’d rather read a candy wrapper than a graphic novel. But I never mentioned that to her. So how does she know that graphic novels are only kind of reading where I’m completely incompetent?
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My daughter adores graphic novels, too! i enjoyed them as a kid, as well, but was much more into books
Of course, there were less options when I was a kid in the graphic novel genre. my only bone to pick is they’re a waste to buy bc she reads them so quickly. I’d rather take them out from the library. But I’m also not going to say no to any book she wishes to buy, so she wins, anyway. They are very popular with kids today. which novels are her current favorites?
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Same here. I am so happy I only had boys. I haven’t spoken to my mother in years after the last time she exploded on me (yet again) via text. It was about what a horrible person I was because I was not, from across the ocean and over text, sufficiently devastated about a very minor health issue of hers. That’s when I decided I’ve had enough.
I have to say everything about my life, including my marriage, improved markedly once I fully cut her out of my life. She was always such a hateful, jealous, judgmental person. Her not-so-subtle putdowns during adolescence, whereby she’d bring up how whatever feature she was criticizing in me was expressed in her in a much superior way, fucked me up big time.
It’s awful to say this, but it’s true: She’s always disliked me, presumably because I was so much like my dad, and it didn’t help when I started excelling at school, especially in the sciences (which was also a dad-like quality and a source of personal insecurity for her).
This shit has made me extremely distrustful of women and made it hard for me to have good female friendships.
Not that Dad was a saint, mind you, but I never got this vibe that he really disliked me, more like he didn’t give a shit if I lived or died unless I performed academically or athletically.
So yeah, when you mom dislikes you and your father’s affection is completely dependent on your academic and athletic performance, that will fuck you up in a way that affects all your relationships through adulthood.
I am in awe of my husband who grew up with loving parents and is so confident and well-adjusted, he sometimes seems like an alien! 😁
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My mother didn’t like me, either. Every time she looked at me, I could see her disappointment. Not that she ever abstained from voicing it in minute detail. And it was similar to what you describe. She though I was bookish and academically gifted to rub it in her face and diminish her.
My husband’s parents are even worse, though. I told my mother a few years ago that I was ending our relationship and stopped getting in touch. She became paralyzed in a very Freudian way where no doctor could find anything wrong with her to cause it. When that had no effect, she learned to self-contain and since then I became the most beautiful, talented, accomplished, excellent mother, etc. But she, at least, was ready to do it at the threat of having no relationship. Others aren’t. N’s mother prefers to have no relationship at all. So he had to cut her off completely. Which I support because seeing him depressed and almost suicidal every time he talked to her on the phone was harsh. She was driving him into an early grave, just like she drew his father, dead at 52.
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oof. At least I can say my mother isn’t *that* bad. I think she was just burned out from decades of teaching other people’s dysfunctional children. Nothing left for her own kids at the end of the day. Plus, life was pretty disappointing for her and she’s not the sort of person to transcend that with grace.
She’s not bitter and angry or hateful, just… eh. Impatient, doesn’t really like kids, and if you do not police your boundaries, will happily take over and boss everybody around relentlessly. Having an adult relationship with her meant learning to police boundaries. Constantly. But once I do that, she accepts the situation and we can deal with each other.
I am sad that she still doesn’t like kids. She wants to be a good grandma, but just… can’t. My kids don’t like her. She’s not really interested in them as people so much as theoretical “grandkid” objects, and they stubbornly resist all attempts to purchase their affection with gifts.
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–and to balance that equation, my dad always thought we were brilliant and is very proud of us.
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The second case fits my mother to a T, her second husband was a dumbass loser younger than her she married six months after divorcing my dad and one month before my brother was born. I was thirteen and just starting high school, I had this rose-tinted view of high school being about dating and going to the prom like in sitcoms.
Instead I became the primary caretaker for my baby brother since she had to go right back to work and his father was a lazy idiot with no job and my older brother was in the military. That’s why I knew I didn’t want marriage or kids or even dating, I had to rush home every day to take care of my brother so Mom could work and his lazy dad couldn’t be bothered.
On top of all that, my brother has autism and that’s when his dad bailed, so that marriage was a complete shit show. Seeing all this made me celibate, I did not want to end up with a loser and kids, I wanted to just listen to very loud rock music and read and watch baseball in peace without all this crap
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I’m very much with you on this experience. I was my sister’s primary caretaker since she was very little. Then I became her only caretaker when I was 22. Understandably, I was all mothered out after that and broke out in hives at the thought of having my own children.
I couldn’t have friends when I was 11-18 or any time for myself because I had to pick my sister up from school, feed her, play with her, make sure she did her homework. And it’s way too young to have this kind of a lifestyle.
I’m glad you and I are talking because it helps to be able to tell this to somebody who experienced it.
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Maybe it’s because that’s exactly how Mom grew up, she was the oldest child and daughter of a widow who worked two jobs, so she became a surrogate mother to her younger siblings. Grandma’s case was different because she worked and didn’t bring in a new partner, but Mom still had to take care of her siblings as a teen. People with teen children shouldn’t have kids, IMO, teens should be enjoying high school and joining clubs and hanging out with friends
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This all sounds so unfortunate. My 11-years-older sister often got stuck looking after me, but I like to think it wasn’t *that* onerous. I was very quiet and I tagged along to all her friends’ houses after school. They taught me new board games (pente!) and let me play with their gerbils and I remember it fondly. But I suppose it was not so thrilling for her 😉
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I loved taking care of my sister. And I was happy to “adopt” her at 20. Our relationship is one of the best things in my life. But I paid for that. Like everything in life, it had a price.
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