My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

by Nancy Friday

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Author: Nancy Friday

Publisher: Delta

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0385320159
ISBN 13: 978-0385320153

When Nancy Friday began her research for My Mother/My Self in the early 1970’s no work existed that explored the unique interaction between mother and daughter. Today psychotherapists throughout the world acknowledge that if women are to be able to love without possessing, to find work that fulfills them, and to discover their full sexuality, they must first acknowledge their identity as separate from their mother’s. Nancy Friday’s book played a major role in that acceptance. The greatest gift a good mother can give remains unquestioning love planted deep in the first year of life, so deep and anassailable that the tiny child grown to womanhood is never held back by the fear of losing that love, no matter what her own choice in love, sexuality, or work may be.

Through candid self-disclosure and hundreds of interviews, Friday investigates a generational legacy and reveals the conflicting feelings of anger, hate, and love the daughter’s hold for their mothers–and why they so often “become” that mother themselves.

About the Author

Nancy Friday established herself as a magazine journalist in New York, England, Italy and France before turning to writing full time and publishing her first book, My Secret Garden, in 1973, which became a bestseller; Friday has regularly returned to the interview format in her subsequent books on themes ranging from mothers and daughters to sexual fantasies, relationships, jealousy, envy, feminism and beauty.

Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.

Chapter 1
MOTHER LOVE

I have always lied to my mother. And she to me. How young was I when I learned her language, to call things by other names? Five, four—younger? Her denial of whatever she could not tell me, that her mother could not tell her, and about which society enjoined us both to keep silent, distorts our relationship still.

Sometimes I try to imagine a little scene that could have helped us both. In her kind, warm, shy, and self-deprecating way, mother calls me into the bedroom where she sleeps alone. She is no more than twenty-five. I am perhaps six. Putting her hands (which her father told her always to keep hidden because they were “large and unattractive”) on my shoulders, she looks me right through my steel-rimmed spectacles: “Nancy, you know I’m not really good at this mothering business,” she says. “You’re a lovely child, the fault is not with you. But motherhood doesn’t come easily to me. So when I don’t seem like other people’s mothers, try to understand that it isn’t because I don’t love you. I do. But I’m confused myself. There are some things I know about. I’ll teach them to you. The other stuff—sex and all that—well, I just can’t discuss them with you because I’m not sure where they fit into my own life. We’ll try to find other people, other women who can talk to you and fill the gaps. You can’t expect me to be all the mother you need. I feel closer to your age in some ways than I do my mother’s. I don’t feel that serene, divine, earth-mother certainty you’re supposed to that she felt. I am unsure how to raise you. But you are intelligent and so am I. Your aunt loves you, your teachers already feel the need in you. With their help, with what I can give, we’ll see that you get the whole mother package—all the love in the world. It’s just that you can’t expect to get it all from me.”

A scene that could never have taken place.

For as long as I can remember, I did not want the kind of life my mother felt she could show me. Sometimes I think she did not want it either. The older I get, the further away she gets from my childhood, from her ironclad role as my mother—the more interesting woman she becomes. Perhaps she should never have been a mother; certainly she was one too soon. I look at her today, and with all the love and anger in the world, I wish she had had a chance to live another life, mine perhaps. But hers was not an age in which women felt they had a choice.

I have no idea when I began to perceive with the monstrous selfishness that dependency lends to a child’s eyes that my mother was not perfect: I was not her whole life. Was it at the same age that I began to make the terrible judgment that she was not the woman I wanted to be? It seems I have always known both. It accounts for my guilt at leaving her, and my anger that she let me go. But I am sure that she has always known, on a level her indoctrinated attitudes toward motherhood would never let her admit, that my sister and I were not enough. We had not brought the certification of womanhood that her mother had promised. That, once in her life, sex and a man had been more important than motherhood.

A more dutiful daughter than I, my mother wanted to accept the view of reality my grandmother taught her. She lied with the rest. She subverted herself, her genuine feelings, those burgeoning intimations of life’s hope and adventure which she found in my father, and which induced her to elope with him against her family’s wishes—all lost, in the name of being a good mother. Her mother’s rules had the authority of the entire culture behind them. There was no such thing as a “bad mother”; there were only bad women: they were the explicitly sexual ones, who lived out the notion that what went on between themselves and their husbands had at least as much right to life as their children. They had little “maternal instinct.”

We are raised to believe that mother love is different from other kinds of love. It is not open to error, doubt, or to the ambivalence of ordinary affections. This is an illusion.

Mothers may love their children, but they sometimes do not like them. The same woman who may be willing to put her body between her child and a runaway truck will often resent the day-by-day sacrifice the child unknowingly demands of her time, sexuality and self-development.

In our perception of our mother’s inauthenticity—her own anxiety and lack of belief in over-idealized notions of womanhood/motherhood she is trying to teach us—anxieties about our own sexuality are born. There is the beginning of doubt that we will succeed as people with identities of our own, separate from her, established in ourselves as women before we are mothers. We try for autonomy, try for sexuality, but the unconscious, deepest feelings we have picked up from her will not rest: we will only feel at peace, sure of ourselves, when we have fulfilled the glorified “instinct” we have been trained, through the image of her life, to repeat: you are not a full woman until you are a mother.

It is too late to ask my mother to go back and examine evasions she made as silently as any mother and to which I agreed for so long—if only because she doesn’t want to. I am the one who wants to change certain dead-end patterns in my life. Patterns which, the older I get, seem all the more familiar: I’ve been here before.

The love between my mother and me is not so sacrosanct it cannot be questioned: if I live with an illusion as to what is between us, I will have no firm resting place on which to build myself.
In my years of interviewing, how many women have repeatedly said to me, “No, I can’t think of anything significant I’ve inherited from my mother. We’re completely different women …” This is usually said with an air of triumph—as if the speaker is acknowledging the enormous pull to model herself on her mother, but believes she has resisted. But in my interview with her daughter, she smiles ruefully. “I’m always telling mom she treats me just the way she said grandma treated her … ways she didn’t like!” In yet another interview, her husband says, “The longer we’re married, the more like her mother she becomes.”

To be fair, if my interviewees and I talked long enough, they themselves began to see the similarities with their mothers’ lives. First the superficial, outward differences had to be worked through. Mother lived in a house, the woman I was talking to lived in an apartment. Mother never worked a day in her life, the daughter held down a job. We cling to these “facts” as proof that we have created our own lives, different from hers. We overlook the more basic truth that we have taken on her anxieties, fears, angers; the way we weave the web of emotion between ourselves and others is patterned on what we had with her.

Whether we want our mother’s life or not, we never escape the image of how she was. Nowhere is this more true than in our sexual lives. Without our own sexual identity, one we can put our full weight upon with as much certainty as once we enjoyed being “mother’s girl,” we are unsure. We have spurts of sexual confidence, activity, exploration, but at the first rejection, hint of loss, of sexual censure or humiliation, we fall back on the safe and familiar: sex is bad. It was always a problem between mother and ourselves. When men seem bright and alluring, we momentarily ally with them against mother’s antisexual rules. But men cannot be trusted. We say the fault is our own: we go from mother to men, with no self in between. Marriage, instead of ending our childish alliance with her, ironically becomes the biggest reunion of our lives. Once we wanted to be “nice girls.” Now we are “nice married ladies”—just like mother. Those quarrels with her over men are ended at last. The hardest thing to face in mother is her sexuality. She found it hardest to face in us.

Two women, each hiding from the other exactly that which defines her as a woman.

Unless we separate mother’s love from her fear of sex, we will always see love and sex as opposites. The dichotomy will be passed on to our daughters. “Mother was right,” we say, and the fervor with which we deny our daughter access to her own body is fired with all the anger, confusion, and self-abnegation we have experienced in giving up on our own sexuality.

My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

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My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity