It’s common knowledge that it’s tough to be a teenage girl, especially towards the end of high school. Cliques, boys, emotional upheavals, term papers, SATs, college essays—and the prospect, both scary and exciting, of heading off to college.
But what about the mothers? We suffer too, just watching it all. Or trying to. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the mother of a teenage girl yearns to know more than that girl wants to reveal. And the prospect of our daughters’ heading out the door—never to return to the family home in quite the same way—can make us a little crazy.
We hover, we grasp, we pry. Maybe we feel we have just a few more precious months to correct whatever has gone wrong in our relationships with our daughters—to try to achieve a closeness that the girls themselves are, simultaneously, trying to avoid. Their behavior may drive us to distraction, but the thought that we’ll soon be waking up in the morning and finding them gone has us in a panic. And through it all there’s the depressing realization that your daughter is now a lot more central to your life than you are to hers.
One reason I wrote my novel The Mother Daughter Show—which I began when my own daughter was a high school senior—was to explore the eternally fraught mother-daughter relationship. Each of my three main characters has a troubled relationship with her 18-year-old daughter. (Of course, there are also mother-daughter relationships that are happy and trouble-free, but just try writing a novel about a happy, trouble-free relationship!)
Each of these relationships is different, but none of these mothers really knows what’s going on in her teenage daughter’s life. And they’re dying to. As a mother you can understand, on an intellectual basis, that your daughter is going through a normal, healthy process of individuation, causing her to guard her privacy like a hawk. But at the same time, like my character Amanda, you sure as hell want to know who she’s talking to on the phone, or even just what happened at school that day. Teenage girls often react to such questions as though they were directly lifted from the script for the Spanish Inquisition.
Basically, they want you out of their lives. Until they want you in it. This phenomenon was neatly captured by the title of a popular book about relationships between teenagers and their parents: Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall. (Another title I love, for a book specifically about mothers and daughters: I’m Not Mad, I Just Hate You!)
Of course there’s also the “cool mom” model: mothers who pride themselves on their close relationships with their daughters. Their daughters tell them everything, and they share all the same likes and dislikes—or so they think. Maybe they’re right, and maybe I’m jealous of them. Or maybe I just needed a plot twist. But I decided to have my “cool mom” character, Susan, turn out to be the most clueless of them all: to her surprise, she discovers that her daughter has an eating disorder, and it seems like half the school knows about it.
For many parents it feels natural to assume, as Susan does, that your child is just like you, especially if you’re the mother of a daughter. She looks like me, a mother may think. She talks like me. She’s going through many of the same experiences. So she must be me, only younger! As my daughter would say, “False.”
Even if you come to realize that your daughter really isn’t you, you still want her to like you. And that can be a problem if, like my character Barb, you have a daughter who is constantly testing the limits and getting into trouble. For many of us baby-boomers, our own parents were more authoritarian, or at least more distant. But, maybe because we were young in the 1960s, it’s hard for us to see ourselves as authority figures. Ideally, we’d like to be our kids’ friends, even if they have no interest in being friends with us. But at some point, difficult as it may be, almost all parents—mothers included—are going to have to play the heavy.
One thing I realized when I was planning to write The Mother Daughter Show is that maternal relationships don’t arise in a vacuum. The way we interact with our daughters has a lot to do with how our own mothers treated us, whether we like it or not. And so each of my main characters also has a mother of her own, with whom she has—you guessed it—a troubled relationship.
I’ve known some women whose relationships with their mothers were so toxic that they shied away from the idea of having children at all, fearful they’d be doomed to inflict on another generation what they suffered themselves. Some mothers are at the opposite extreme, eager to replicate their own happy relationships. Most of us, I suspect, are somewhere in the middle, hoping to keep the good stuff but do better in areas where we feel our mothers fell short. But unconsciously, we may find ourselves repeating their mistakes too, listening in horror to our own voices as we utter the same words that once made us cringe.
Maybe, like Amanda, we shrank from what we perceived as our own mothers’ emotional neediness, but then find ourselves feeling just as needy with our daughters. Maybe, like Susan, we’re determined not to be manipulative, but find it impossible to resist the impulse to exert control. Or maybe, like Barb, we strive to avoid the hypercriticism that made us resent our own mothers, but find that our daughters resent us nonetheless.
For all their conflicts, the mothers and daughters in The Mother-Daughter Show—to a greater or lesser degree—ultimately come to a point of mutual sympathy and understanding. You might say that’s the kind of happy ending possible only in a comic novel. But it’s possible in life too, although maybe not until the teenage years are over. Someday, I hope, my daughter will have a daughter herself. And if there’s any experience that can induce a woman to feel some sympathy for her mother, it’s having a teenage daughter of her own.