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.