Quotes from Victoria Secunda

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.

Sons are for fathers the twice-told tale.

And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.

A father is available to help his daughter balance both her love and her anger toward her mother, to moderate the inevitable emotional extremes in the intense mother-daughter equation. With Daddy's steadying influence daughters can learn to be comfortable with healthy anger, rather than feeling that they must be eternal good girls who must at all costs conceal it.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Of all the haunting moments of motherhood, few rank with hearing your own words come out of your daughter's mouth.

The daughter can become the mother's opportunity either to make up for the past and right wrongs or to exact retribution for her losses. The mother's own experience of the long-ago family serves as an overlay to her mothering: Past and present are inextricably intertwined.

A well-fathered daughter will seek in her partnerships men who mirror the devoted father of childhood, avoiding partnerships that denigrate or compromise her. Having experienced the real thing when she was very young- having been taught self-reliance, she settles for no less when she is an adult.

Children who are accustomed to being treated well internalize that treatment and have a permanent sense of well-being. But children whose every need is instantly gratified and who are constantly praised to the skies do not have the same sense of well-being; rather they may feel despair or rage when that gratification is withheld, or when everyone doesn't glorify them in the same way.

Idealizing Daddy is grand when you're five; it's crippling when you're twenty-five or thirty-five. For if you still believe in Daddy's miracles, you may not believe that you can make your own dreams come true. Worse, you may not even be able to formulate them without his guidance

For all children, mothers are their first love, their first acquaintance with intimacy, touch, warmth, tenderness, sustenance. Infancy is a conspiracy between mothers and their babies, a bond that fathers can only helplessly witness, denied the profound pleasure and pain of giving birth.

People who are used to constant attention and flattery become inured to the merely pleasant and become "peak seekers." They expect the highs, and when their unrealistic goals or expectations are not met, they are not simply disappointed, they are devastated.

A certain emotional frostiness is the heritage of a culture that puts great stock in WASP values: One does not talk about money sex, religion, and above all, one does not expose one's feelings. If a case can be made for the cultural contouring of personality, the Puritan ethic is the culprit in such rubrics as 'Children should be seen and not heard' and 'Never complain, never explain.

Little children require their parent's unqualified love in order to survive and feel secure. Very soon, however, they need a tempered version of that devotion- parents who can give them the freedom to fail or feel sorrow or taste frustration, to fully experience their own pain and pleasure and learn from them. Therapists call this phenomenon "ownership.

If you scratch below the glossy surface of many "enviable" marriages, often you'll find a disenchanted wife whose husband finds the landscape of her emotions as uninteresting as the moon's.

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.

If unloving mothers were able to see their behavious as abusive, they either would stop behaving that way or they would get help for their dysfunction. But many cannot: instead, they deny it, to themselves, their families, and the world at large, in order to avoid a sense of guilt, to avoid having to make changes in their lives, or to avoid the bruising awareness that they, too, were unloved children.

The good father does not have to be perfect . Rather, he has to be good enough to help his daughter to become a woman who is reasonably self-confident, self-sufficient, and free of crippling self-doubt, and to feel at ease in the company of men.

Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.

Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself.

If it is your fault that your mother is miserable, it becomes a potentially fixable affront. Taking blame means that at least the hope of love is still there-all you have to do is deserve it.

We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents' goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.

If a mother has an unhealthy need to dominate her children-which she demonstrates by bullying, terrifying, neglecting, suffocating, indulging, humiliating, overprotecting or abusing them- those children must come to the recognition that such treatment is wrong in order to begin the long process of recovery and ultimate understanding.

When we recognize that we are not responsible for our childhood deprivations, and that we are entitled to feel anger (but not to act on it - awareness is not a license to kill), then we are able to let go of that anger and not be controlled by it.