Quotes About Mother-daughter

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.

Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It's humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother's bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.

At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers—which many daughters do not—in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothers' parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.

When a mother attempts to bind a grown daughter to her, whether by fear or neediness or illness or rage, the consequences can be devastating. To continue trying to please an unpleasable mother threatens an adult daughter's mental health and all of her relationships. And yet such daughters keep coming back to their mothers, without the daughters' altering that relationship and their bitter or anguished reactions to it.

Entonces nos sentamos juntas, en silencio, sin implicarnos la una con la otra, solo dos mujeres que escrutan la oscuridad de toda esa vida perdida. Mi madre no parece ni joven ni vieja, solo profundamente absorta por lo terrible de lo que ve ante sí. Y yo no sé qué soy a sus ojos.

She was like a mother to me...and I betrayed as a daughter will betray her mother and yet, never stop loving her.

Again from a distance, Sukie was once again struck by her mother's chic and how different things can seem from far away, how there's more than one truth, the faraway truth and the truth close up.

I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.

Then for a moment like so many times before this I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word has shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

Da bambina facevo esattamente la stessa cosa: mi sdraiavo sul letto con i piedi al sole sul davanzale della finestra perché a quel tempo avevo sempre i piedi freddi. Poi mi mettevo a leggere un libro, e questa scena con me sdraiata che leggo un libro mandava mia madre su tutte le furie, certa com'era che fossi destinata a una vita di indolenza, quando invece ero solo destinata a scrivere libri che altri avrebbero letto (34).

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.

It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction.

herself to be ugly, enormous, ungainly, taller than is acceptable, 'bosoms, swinging like jelly bags,' forever cursed as the plain daughter of a beautiful mother.

She writes better than anyone else about the mother–daughter relationship, in all its thorny, fraught, inescapable complexity.

The mother's relationship to her daughter not only formed the earliest, if not primary, foundation for all the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world.

The mother's relationship to her daughter not only forms the earliest, if not primary, foundation for how the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world.