No Mother, You Can’t!

Mother-daughter conflict is today’s canary-in-the-coalmine, and as I wrote in my 4-part blog for Medium on today’s estrangement trend, young adult daughters are revealing something vital about what it means to be a mother and a daughter in our patriarchal society. Attachment Theory, a popular human development theory about the emotional bond babies need from their primary caregiver for their emotional and developmental wellbeing, suggests that a mother’s lack of emotional availability when her daughter was a baby can lead to her daughter feeling angry at her mother when she is an adult. It is true that daughters need their mother’s emotional attention when they’re a baby, but suggesting a single causal reason for an adult daughter’s anger with her mother is inaccurate and defies logic. This single cause diagnosis ignores the countless influences that can cause a daughter to be angry, for example, a father’s emotional unavailability or emotional manipulation that divides a daughter from her mother, gender inequality, the way patriarchy harms the mother-daughter bond, violence, racism, and current and past life events. This single cause diagnosis also repeats the patriarchal narrative that blames mothers, not fathers, for their daughter’s (and son’s) problems.

When therapists and coaches, mothers and daughters, and family members blame the mother for causing her daughter’s anger, without any real understanding of what is happening in their relationship and how patriarchy has set them up for conflict, these voices of blame are acting like a magician who directs their audience to not notice the harm patriarchy inflicts on mothers and daughters. Patriarchy’s definition is that a good, caring, emotionally present mother is a selfless, self-sacrificing, and self-neglecting mother, and patriarchy directs us to not notice that this definition harms a mother’s agency, her emotional and mental wellbeing, and it sets the daughter up to be angry at her mother.

In this blog I focus on how patriarchy sets daughters up to “police” their mother’s compliance with patriarchy’s “good mother” role, and how this policing behavior can make an adult daughter demanding and controlling of her mother, and angry when her mother doesn’t comply. The patriarchal expectation that mothers are selflessly available, is so deeply embedded in how we see our mothers, and ourselves as mothers, it makes sense that an adult daughter will be angry when her mother strays away from this role expectation and prioritizes what she needs. A mother’s diversion from the so-called norm is shocking. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary, because this norm is enshrined in theory, especially the popular Attachment Theory. We have no frame of reference, no experience, no language for a mother who is emotionally present and available for herself. And patriarchy provides no frame of reference for how a mother and adult daughter can build a mutually supportive relationship. For some adult daughters, a mother’s rejection of the selfless mother role is confusing and inconvenient, especially if the daughter is a mother who is struggling under the weight of what patriarchy expects from her.   

I call this blog, “No mother, you can’t”, because that is how many adult daughters are voicing their anger when their mother rejects the selfless mother role. Some of the common statements I hear from daughters are, “No mother, you can’t come to my wedding because we are eloping”; “No mother, you can’t visit me when my baby is born because my partner and I want to be alone for a while and figure this out ourselves”; and “No mother, I’m not visiting you for your birthday or at Christmas or Thanksgiving because I’ve made other plans”.

On the surface, these and other similar requests sound entirely reasonable. Weddings are unaffordable, and eloping makes sense. And I understand the desire to cocoon with your partner when your baby is born. And adult daughters are free to make their own plans for Christmas and Thanksgiving. This is what it means to own your agency. But what is most telling about the way some adult daughters are announcing their plans, is that they are not initiating a conversation. What the mother needs from her daughter in their relationship, and how she feels about not being invited to the daughter’s wedding or not seeing her daughter for her birthday or at Christmas is being silenced.

It is wonderful to see adult daughters challenge patriarchy’s gender rules by claiming what they need, and their agency and rights as people. But this change must include the mother. When the mother is not included in this change, daughters are acting like patriarchy’s foot soldiers, to use Mona Eltahawy’s term in “The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls”. When adult daughters respond to their mother’s feelings with words like, “No mother, I don’t want to hear what you’re feeling. You are being selfish and controlling. Why can’t you just be happy for me”, they are voicing their internalized patriarchy. When a mother is told that she is being “selfish and unsupportive” and “should only want what her daughter wants”, the daughter is policing her mother’s compliance to the selfless mothering role and treating her relationship as a zero-sum-game, where claiming what you need requires silencing and denying the other.

I know that most adult daughters are unaware that they are silencing and shaming their mother’s fight for her voice and agency. And most young adult daughters are unaware that by policing their mother’s compliance with the selfless mothering role, they are likely to step into this patriarchal role themselves when they become a mother, and consequently, repeat this harmful generational dynamic with their future daughter.  

In conclusion, from listening to my clients and from personal experience, I know how painful it is to not have a voice in your mother-daughter relationship. It leaves you feeling desperate, invisible, a little crazy, and used. The Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model (MDAM) helps explain and heal this all-too common theme by shining a spotlight on the harm that patriarchy’s definition of mothering inflicts.

The first solution in the MDAM reminds us that mothers are people first, which means that mothers have emotional and relational needs just like daughters, just like everyone. And a mother’s and daughter’s relational needs are not surface level desires that can be ignored or shamed away. A mother’s desire to share in her daughter’s life and celebrate birthdays, for example, is wired into her body. The desire is physical and linked to a mother’s emotional wellbeing, as it is for daughters. Both mothers and daughters need to feel emotionally connected to their individual and relational wellbeing.

It is high time that mothers and daughters, and men, joined forces to challenge the selfless, self-neglecting, self-sacrificing mothering role, and the belief that mothers are the natural primary caregivers. We need to expose more loudly how this age-old sexism harms women and men and mothers and fathers alike. And it is high time that mothers are invited into today’s emerging language that inquires after what women feel, think, and need.