Mother-Daughter Relationships

I was just wondering what everybody's relationship is or was like with their mothers and/or daughters... No real reason.. Just curious to see how everyone's gettin along...

 

well, as with many of my friends it seems to be the same pattern:

childhood: idolize mom. want to be just like her
adolescence: mom's a tool for usage, a parental unit.
teenaged: the enemy, the jailer, the one who JUST DOESN'T UNDERSTAND, but still controls the cash.
early twenties: mom? what's that? which quickly becomes: holy hell, other people's kids are horrible, teenagers are morons, my mom was an idiot to have children!! i'll never have children!!
mid twenties: mom? i'm getting married!! i'm having a baby!! how exciting! which becomes daily phone calls asking what the hell to do with this feverish infant who never sleeps and has a diaper rash over 90% of it's body. PLEASE HELP!!
thirties: mom is a gilded haloed saint of knowledge, how did she ever accomplish it all?

i don't know what's coming next. but this is just me and my girlfriends.
mid twenties:

 

i dont really get along with my mum at all.. ever since my parents broke up and i went with my dad my mother hasnt been all that nice to me. someday it might work out, who knows

 

I get along with my mom good. I'm not a girl though.

 

My mom died about five and a half years ago when I was 17. Before she died, my mom was super strict and didn't really allow me to do all that much. She worked the graveyard shift at a factory and left me alone (at 12) to care for my five year old sister at night. I did most of the house work. My mom was basically just the breadwinner and I did everything else. This lasted just under five years until she died.

Of course I loved my mother, but she had a lot of problems. She taught me a lot though...

 

My mom is amazing. I'm afraid that, when I have children of my own, I will never be able to live up to the standard that she has set. We get along well.

 

My mama and I are more like friends than mother and daughter. This has been good in some ways, and bad in others. Sometimes I have felt more like the parent in our relationship than her. Often times I get frustrated with the poor decisions she makes in life and actually have to talk her out of some of them. Yes, she is a grown adult, but many times, her way of thinking is so naive that she opens herself up to more and more tradgedy and I hate to see her getting hurt over and over again.

I can recall many a time when I stayed home from school as a young teenager to talk her out of suicidal thoughts. Once, I even drove her to her doctor because I was afraid to leave her because she spoke of going into the garage with the door closed and running the car until the exhaust killed her. Nice, huh?

But I love my mama so much sometimes it hurts.

 

My mother was raised without a lot of money. Once she was older, money became very important. She got married, had me, got divorced, and then left me with her parents. Still not a lot of money laying around, but I came out on the other side of the spectrum. I saw that my Grandmother could make do with almost nothing, and be happy and loving while doing so. My mother saw embarassing squalor.

These two very different outlooks on life, Money vs Love, have lead to some difficulties between us. I love my mother very much, but we are differnt species, and communication is spotty at best.

 

lace_and_feet: the best sig pichtar evar

 

this is a really interesting thread i think...hearing bout the different stories
well me and my moms relationship is pretty normal i suppose...its been through ups and downs.
when i was very young and my parents were still together i cant really remember the relationship we had...but when i was 6 my parents split...and from then until i was 9 it was just me my mom and my lil sis...which i loved. i liked the idea of it just being women...and also my great grandmother stayed with us a couple years to help out.
anyhow my mom got married again when i was 9...and then me and my sis started to distance ourselves from our mom..because the relationship with our step dad was not close once they were married...and since my mom was influenced by the disciplinarian ways of my step dad...we sometimes turned on her because she seemed to be easily changed by him and wasn't the mom we had before..kinda.
anyhow we've been through spells of them not trusting me and my sis...us hiding everything about our lives from them....to them finding out everything and all the shit hitting the fan...
now all that is over my mom knows pretty much everything about me and i like it much better this way. she's more like my mom and my friend now and i can tell her a lot more than i ever thought i would. i like it much better this way and really appreciate her for all she does and cares for us so much. i also like noticing the similarities i have with her and can point out where i got certain traits...and where im also different. we learn from each other all the time. it doesn't always feel like a parent-child relationship...but then somtimes it really does so i guess its balanced out

 

As long as I am not living with my mother we get along pretty well. My mother can be critical and she seems unable to accept me for anything less than what she wants me to be, but I have come to terms with that and I still love her very much...unconditionally.

 

I have a have had some .. large challenges with my mom. ahah. We generally are pretty friendly with each other, we live together, although I've switched back and forth between my parents more times than I'm proud of.. It's nice because she generally lets me have my space, but I get strong feelings of hatred when I'm nagged to do things around the house .. I love her anyhow. She's a really caring mom, even though I don't let her be most of the time.. lol. We've had some reeeeeally big fights in the past where it actually lead to me moving out, but I've learned to keep my mouth shut about some subjects..hahaha.

We used to be a LOT closer when I was little, and I really miss that. She was really more of the nurturing, folky, kinda mom. The type that bakes bread and sews and did everything with me. She really changed since she started dating her boyfriend 3 years ago, right after my parents split. Now she's mostly into going for motorcycle rides with him, working and uh..ahha country music/bars.. And I do everything she used to do. I think her boyfriend really puts a lot of tension on our relationship, because he's one of the main things we fight about, and I feel kinda like he took her away from me. There was a period when I was 12 years old where she either sent me to a friend's house or my aunt and uncle's for a weekend or stay home so she could go out with her boyfriend. One time I asked her to sacrifice one weekend for me and her and she wouldn't. I moved out shortly after that with my dad.

Anyways, she's done some changing since then.. not tooooooooo much, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, maybe because I'm older now, who knows. There's a lot of stuff I wish we knew about each other, adn I'm just trying to figure out how to learn right now. My mom is probably the quirkiest and .. well ok her jokes aren't always funny but she tries..haha.. she's a pretty good mom, but I wish we had a closer relationship.

 

I've never had a mom. She's been "the egg-donor" for as long as I can remember. If you couldn't guess, we don't talk. The only good thing she ever did for me or my brother was to call my dad and say "take the kids or I'm giving them up to the state".

My dad, however, did the best he could at being Mr. Mom. He's the one who gave me "the talk", researched ways to try to minimize my cramps, all those things the mom is supposed to do with the daughter. We always had a pretty decent relationship -- we of course went thru some rough patches when I was a teenager, but it was nowhere near as bad as a lot of my friends went thru with their parents. He always realized I was too much like him, so treated me as as much of an equal as he could, explaining why he made the rules he did rather than leaving any of them to seem arbitrary or stupid. So it was really easy to transition into more of a friends type of relationship when I was old enuf to move out on my own. We don't always see eye to eye, but we can respect one another's opinion without getting into any sort of argument or anything.

 

my mother and i get along. shes a very rational, reasonable, kynd and selfless person (unlike my dad) and i like being around her most of the time. we are alot alike in alot of ways but then in others we are very different and sometimes we get on each others nerves. i love her more than anyone on this earth.

 

once upon a time my mother and i did not get along at all. she was a whack job AND i was a teenager. hard to deal. but now she's all normalized and totally hilarious again.

 

my mom and i live in the same house but rarely talk. she's always in bed when i get off work, or i'm always doing something when she gets home from work. we've had problems, mainly because i always wanted more attention than she could give me, and then i just stopped trying to get it. so, i feel like i miss her, and am kinda scared to move away because i'm afraid i'll never talk to her again. maybe that isn't the case though. she seems to spend a lot of time on the phone, so maybe i'll become one of the ppl on her call list every day. i've felt like this for a loooong time. i remember writing a poem about it when i was 12.

anyway, she's also got some different ideas about life than i do, and can appear to be hypocritical... well, she likes to tell me how life should be lead, and this only after i've done something that i thought was okay because she did even worse at my age. (for example, she got pregnant and eloped at 18, then moved to california with my dad and had another kid a couple yrs later... etc etc, but i went to college and got engaged and she told my brother i was ruining my life... which is a phrase she has used many times with me.)

i'm afraid of disappointing her, but then i don't even know what she really expects of me, so it's tough. i'm now trying to not disappoint myself.

oh and of course.... she really is a good person, i know she is, she helps ppl all the time (she's a nurse, and very good at her job) and has never let us go without the stuff we need, and even stuff we don't need, and she fought to have custody of us when she and my dad split up.

 

I have always loved and admired my mum. When I was younger we used to be great friends. I never saw her much because she worked shifts and for most of my childhood my brothers looked after me because she was a single parent.

After she got together with her partner things started to change dramatically, and because of my age, the pain was enourmous. Suddenly I became the ;last person to get a hug when she got home, if I got one at all... and I started to notice huge injustices in the way our household was run.

These things still go on today, but I guess I have just changed to fit around them. I miss my mum a lot, and I constantly feel like she finds me dissappointing. I feel I am supposed to live up to her standards, and I feel crushed when I dont.

We're quite distant now, she never has any interest in anything I do unless it's something I do wrong.... which saddens me.
I do admire her stoicism, and I think she has done the best job she could given her circumstances, but I have always resented the fact that she has become so cold.

 

I can relate Moonjavaseed. When my parents divorced and my mama started her dating roller coaster, I felt like I was put on the back burner more often than not. It really hurt because before that, I was her sun, moon, and stars. Then, with the various men that she became involved with, I suddenly seemed to fade into the background, feeling like a burden to her more than anything else.

 

Well my mum has a few issues of her own (mental health problems etc) and so, when I was going through a really bad time when I was between 12 and 16, we didn't get along at all. I left home and did some bad things, so I would say at that point, our relationship was non exsistant. But now I'm 17 and we actually get on ok. We hang out together a few times a week and because I do everything for myself (my washing, cooking, cleaning, as well as job related things, like having one hehe) we have a good relationship because its not like mother and daughter, its like friends. Pretty cool actually

 

my mother hated me as a child, and has been wonderful to every since l left the family home..