Friendeavours: can mothers and daughters ever be true friends?

Can mothers and daughters ever be true friends?

mother-daughter friendship is notoriously knotty. It doesn’t have to involve Bridgerton levels of mothership control to seem like an impossibility to many. And yet – is this cultural hot spot part of the old patriarchal myth that consistently pits women against women? Maybe we are just told it should be hard…

I know that when I had my daughter I was filled with fear about our friendship. Here she was – my female energy, my kin, my new favourite future woman. Such pressure can be tyrannical. And maybe friendship isn’t meant to be – not for a while, anyway. You want children in your care to trust you and respect you. As my friend Alex said the other day after I asked about her relationship with her two preschool daughters, ‘How can you be the boss if you’re their friend?’ But you also want them not to fear your judgement, so that they’ll open up to you.

Does that ever change, as we move through the swathes of hormones in our teenage years (when I, for one, was a total cow to my mother)? Then into our twenties and thirties, when we start to see traits of our mothers (the horror!) come out in ourselves? When does the relationship become more of a friendship, as well as a mother-daughter dynamic – and is it even possible? Our parents are often our icons, then all of a sudden they are not. They are real human beings. I’m not sure we ever get over that primal shock.

I almost feel as though, when we grow up, many of us need to go through a break-up-andget-back-together story with our mothers, in a friendship sense. That there is a point when we reach an uncomfortable acceptance, and that has to be good enough. It’s hard to define. Maybe we just don’t have the word for it, that familial brand of friendship – that mix of obligation, gut-deep knowing and historic need. Joan Didion articulates it in her book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. ‘I close the drawer, and have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.’ It’s the silent, mean, passiveaggressive war that rages for years – in whispers, resentments, expectations, frustrations. The war might be over but we still need to be gentle around the wounds.

Of course, it’s not the same for everyone. If you’re finding yourself yelling, ‘Hogwash! My mother is an angel!’ look at it another way. Maternal love is famously unconditional, but would we want that in friendship? Adult relationships can’t be a sure thing all the time, because that isn’t how we evolve in our lifetimes. Another icon of womanhood, Glennon Doyle, writes in Untamed, ‘A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created.’

Whatever your relationship with your mother or with motherhood, remember this on 14 March: if you are a friend then you are maternal. Mothering is a skill we acquire, not a birthright. It has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the choices we make when it comes to the people we look after. It has helped me to realise that the way all our relationships interweave, interact and ebb and flow is the happy chaos within which we create our next move. There is room for more than one heroine in your narrative.

‘Mothering is a skill we acquire, not a birthright. It has nothing to do with biology’