Reviving Ophelia (16 page)

The last month of her life, I sat by her in the hospital. She liked me to read and tell her stories. I brushed her hair and her teeth for her and fed her grapes one at a time. One night when she was out of her head from all the medicines, she imagined she was fixing spaghetti for twelve. “Hand me those tomatoes. Chop that onion quick. They’ll be here soon.” Another night she was delivering babies. “Push, push now,” she said. “Wrap that baby up.” When I slept beside her, she could sleep.

My relationship with my mother, like all relationships with mothers, was extraordinarily complex, filled with love, longing, a need for closeness and distance, separation and fusion. I respected her and mocked her, felt ashamed and proud of her, laughed with her and felt irritated by her smallest flaws. I felt crabby after twenty-four hours in her house, and yet nothing made me happier than making her happy.

Western civilization has a history of unrealistic expectations about mothers. They are held responsible for their children’s happiness and for the social and emotional well-being of their families. Mothers are either idealized like the Virgin Mary or bashed in fairy tales and modern American novels. We all think of our mothers with what Freud called primary process thought, the thinking style of young children. We have trouble growing up enough to see our mothers as people.

Western civilization has a double standard about parenting. Relationships with fathers are portrayed as productive and growth-oriented, while relationships with mothers are depicted as regressive and dependent. Fathers are praised for their involvement with children. Mothers, on the other hand, are criticized unless their involvement is precisely the right amount. Distant mothers are scorned, but mothers who are too close are accused of smothering and overprotecting.

Nowhere are the messages to mothers so contradictory as with their adolescent daughters. Mothers are expected to protect their daughters from the culture even as they help them fit into it. They are to encourage their daughters to grow into adults and yet to keep them from being hurt. They are to be devoted to their daughters and yet encourage them to leave. Mothers are asked to love completely and yet know exactly when to distance emotionally and physically.

Daughters are as confused as mothers by our culture’s expectations. Girls are encouraged to separate from their mothers and to devalue their relationships to them. They are expected to respect their mothers but not to be like them. In our culture, loving one’s mother is linked with dependency, passivity and regression, while rejecting one’s mother implies individuation, activity and independence. Distancing from one’s mother is viewed as a necessary step toward adult development.

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. My cousin was torn between her fear of alcohol and her desire for her daughter to be accepted at her school.

Mothers want their daughters to date, but are terrified of date rape, teenage pregnancy, AIDS and other diseases. They want their daughters to be independent, but are aware of how dangerous the world is for women. They want their daughters to be relaxed about their appearance, but know that girls suffer socially if they aren’t attractive.

Daughters struggle to individuate, but also need their mothers’ guidance and love. They resist their mothers’ protection even as they move into dangerous waters. And they are angry when their mothers warn them of dangers that they understand even better than their mothers.

Most girls are close to their mothers when they are young, and many return to that closeness as adults. But few girls manage to stay close to their mothers during junior high and high school. Girls at their most vulnerable time reject the help of the one person who wants most to understand their needs. The stories I tell focus on the mother-daughter struggle for the right amount of closeness. Jessica and Brenda have been so close that, with adolescence, Jessica rejects everything her mother offers. Sorrel and Fay have a good working relationship that’s neither too close nor too distant. Whitney and Evelyn have too much distance.

Jessica and Brenda were a study in contrasts. Brenda was a social worker in her late thirties. She was casually dressed and pudgy with wild, blond-gray flyaway hair. She talked earnestly and rapidly, using her hands to punctuate her expressive speech. She had words for every feeling and a sophisticated theory about every problem that she and Jessica were having. Around her blue eyes were deep laugh lines. Beside her sat Jessica, as still and distant as an ice sculpture. She was thin with long dark hair and a pale complexion, and she was dressed in a black silk shirt and pants.

Brenda said, “I’m at my wit’s end with Jessie. She won’t go to school and the authorities are on my case. Since I’m a social worker, this really embarrasses me. But I can’t physically force her to go.”

She sighed. “I can’t make her do anything. All she does is sleep, watch MTV and read magazines. She’s not doing chores or going out with friends. She’s throwing her life away.”

I asked Jessica how she spent her time. She looked away and Brenda answered. “She likes the television in my bedroom. All day while I’m at work she lies on my bed and generally messes things up. I bought her a television, but she still goes into my room. She claims my bed is more comfortable.”

Jessica sniffed dramatically and Brenda continued. “I wasn’t married when Jessie was born. She missed having a father. That’s affected her self-image.”

Jessica scowled when her mother talked about her, but refused to speak for herself.

“Jessie and I used to do everything together. She was a wonderful, enthusiastic girl. I’m amazed by what’s happening.” She sighed. “I can’t do anything right with her. If I ask her a question, she thinks it’s stupid. If I’m quiet, she accuses me of glaring. If I talk to her, I’m lecturing. I have to brace myself to deal with her. She yells at me constantly.”

Brenda patted her daughter’s leg. “I know she has low self-esteem, but I can’t figure out how to help her. What more can I do?”

I asked Jessica to leave the room. For someone so apparently disgusted by the conversation, she seemed surprisingly reluctant to go. For the next thirty minutes Brenda gave me a history of Jessica’s life. Then Jessica knocked on the door. “I’m sick. I need to go home.”

I handed Jessica an appointment card. “I’ll see you alone on Tuesday.”

I was glad this mother-daughter pair had come to counseling. Brenda, perhaps because she was a social worker, was reluctant to judge her daughter. She was so afraid of rejecting Jessica that she wasn’t being firm. She had parenting confused with abuse, and she was trying so hard to be good to her daughter that she was denying Jessica a chance to grow up. Brenda was in danger of “understanding” Jessica all the way into juvenile court.

On Tuesday Jessica came dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck. She sat silently on the couch, waiting for me to begin. I wrestled with my own feelings of pessimism about what the hour would bring. Already, after three minutes with her, I felt I was dragging a barge across a desert.

“How do you feel about being here?”

“Okay.”

“Do you really feel okay?”

“I don’t see any need for it, but morning television isn’t that thrilling anyway.”

“How are you different from your mom?”

Jessica arched one black eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have different values, ideas about life?”

She smirked. “I totally disagree with her about everything. I hate school, she likes school. I hate to work and she loves it. I like MTV and she hates it. I wear black and she never does. She wants me to live up to my potential and I think she’s full of shit.”

I considered saying that her life goal seemed to be to frustrate her mother, but instead I asked, “What have you wanted to do?”

Her eyes widened. “Modeling. Mom hates the idea. She thinks it is sexist and shallow.”

I suggested that she look into modeling for herself. She could do some research on the profession: What should she be studying now to prepare herself? Where would she get training? Are there jobs locally? How much does it pay?

After Jessica left I thought about this family. Brenda had devoted her life to Jessica’s happiness, and with adolescence all this closeness became a problem. Jessica tried to get distance by rebelling, but Brenda was too understanding. She forgave her and continued to be loving. So Jessica would be even more difficult and Brenda would be even more understanding. By now Jessica felt so engulfed that she would do anything to separate herself from Brenda. She was defining herself almost exclusively as “not Brenda.”

I saw Brenda later that day and warned her. “Whatever you do, don’t express any interest in Jessica’s research on modeling. Don’t offer to help or tell her that you’re glad she’s doing something productive.”

I asked Brenda about her life. “My life is Jessie and my work. I haven’t had time for anything else. I hoped that when she was a teenager I’d have more time, but it hasn’t worked out that way. I need to be around constantly. I wake her up every morning, go home at lunch to fix her something to eat. Otherwise she won’t eat, and you can see how thin she is. At night I keep her company. The poor kid doesn’t have anyone else.”

“You need a life of your own.”

She nodded. “I know you’re right, but ...”

I said, “Let’s plan some fun for you.”

I continued to work separately with Brenda and Jessica. They were terribly connected to each other and resistant to outsiders. Our therapy reminded me of the old joke—Question: “How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: ”One, if the light bulb wants to change.”

With Brenda, I pushed for some life apart from her daughter. Could she occasionally go for lunch with a friend or go for a walk in the evening with a neighbor? Did she like to read, listen to music or work with her hands? She decided to work on a school bond issue and once a week she left Jessica alone and went to a meeting. The first time she did this, Jessica called and said she was sick. But the second time Jessica made it through the evening in fine shape. When Brenda returned, she’d actually made them some popcorn and lemonade.