The New Don't Blame Mother

Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship

Paula Caplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9781138147768
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135958947
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In 1990, Paula Caplan, a nationally recognized expert on the psychology of women, wrote the groundbreaking Don'tBlame Mother. Now, almost ten years later, she finds that we are still blaming mothers. Fully revised, updated with a new introduction, this second edition proposes new ways of mending the mother-daughter relationship.
The NewDon't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-DaughterRelationship shows us that dangerous myths about mothers pervade our culture and have created or aggravated many of the problems between mothers and daughters. Myths of the Perfect Mother give rise to impossible expectations and set mothers up for failure--good mothers don't get angry, good mothers are endlessly giving--and myths of the Bad Mother exaggerate mothers' failings and create a monster figure in her image--mothers are too needy, mothers can't let go.
Caplan shows that if women can identify these myths then they can take concrete steps to build a strong and loving relationship with their mothers. The New Don't Blame Mother shows how the anger and agony of the mother-daughter relationship can be replaced with a new bond based on understanding and respect.
The New Don't Blame Mother is a must-read for all mothers and daughters. Caplan, drawing on over twenty-five years of research, clinical practice, and the experience of workshop participants, will show you how to stop blaming mother and, instead, start loving her.

1
Getting Started

How are we to be the mothers we want our daughters to have, if we are still sorting out who our own mothers are and what they mean to us?

—Letty Cottin Pogrebin

[In the story of mothers and daughters] the plot is not entirely of our own making. We may be free to unravel the tale, but we have not been free to create the social relations upon which it is based.

—Marcia Westkott

You’re reading a book called The New Don’t Blame Mother, so chances are, no matter how sad, upset, or angry you are at your mother, you’d rather improve your relationship with her than simply stay upset. This book is an offering to you, to let you know what has helped other mothers and daughters resolve their difficulties.

If you’re busy blaming your mother or wishing you could “divorce” her, you are caught in a psychological prison. You can’t get free, and you can’t really grow up. There are practical problems. For example, you dread family parties: Your mother might not like what you’re wearing. Or she might love what you’re wearing and say to everyone, “Doesn’t my daughter look gor-geous?!”—and you’d be mortified.

That kind of practical problem is a symptom of the fact that mother-blame limits your freedom: you can’t be an adult who freely considers all of life’s possibilities. You restrict yourself to certain activities, interests, and friends to prove how different from Mother you are. You can’t look honestly at who you are, because you might discover ways that you are like her! Frantic to avoid what you consider her failures, you overreact, throwing out the good with the bad: you grow tough because you think she’s sentimental, or you become a doormat because she wasn’t warm enough. All that reaction against her, that desperate drive to prove your difference, restricts and damages your relationships with the other people you love—your mate, your children, your other relatives, and your friends. You offer them only a part of your true self, a caricature.

Angel in the House or Wicked Witch?

If you feel sadness, irritation, anger, or even outright fury toward your mother, I suggest that you stop right now and let yourself experience it. Look at it. Cry. Scream. Hit pillows. Make a list of the five worst things she’s ever done to you. Then consider this:
the biggest reason daughters are upset and angry with their mothers is that they have been taught to be so.

Most women sincerely but mistakenly believe that anguish in their relationships with their mothers is inevitable because their mothers are so limited, so dependent, or so terrible. Largely unaware that our culture’s polarized mother-images create barriers between mothers and daughters, we have held each other responsible. Mothers are either idealized or blamed for everything that goes wrong. Both mother and daughter learn to think of women in general, and mothers in particular, as angels or witches or some of each. Our normal, human needs, feelings, and wishes are distorted in ways that erode our relationships by making us expect too much of each other and by making us exaggerate the bad or mistake the neutral and positive for negatives. As many mothers and daughters admit, one minute they can overflow with love and admiration, thinking of each other as positively perfect, and the next minute they can be overwhelmed with rage and contempt.

The polarized images have long and complicated histories. In part, in Anglo-American culture, for instance, the idealized ones stem from our Victorian heritage, in which the mother was supposed to be the “Angel in the House” who soothed husband’s and children’s tired feet and fevered brows, spoke sweetly and gently, and considered meeting their needs her life’s mission.

The “Wicked Witch” mother-images familiar to most of us come partly from fairy tales about horrid women. Although they’re rarely called mothers, they are often stepmothers or characters who harm children while filling mother-type roles, like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who lures children with food or the stepmother who offers Snow White (poisoned) nourishment.

Both extremes cause trouble. How can you have a relationship with a perfect being who’s way up on a pedestal? And who would want to get closer to a person she believes has caused all her problems? Even without these images, other problems in mother-daughter relationships would still exist—problems of communication, of sibling rivalry, real individual psychological problems. But each of the two images is supported by a number of troublemaking myths or beliefs; for example, if we believe the “Perfect Mother myth”—that a mother meets all her children’s needs—we feel cheated and angry when our mother doesn’t measure up, and if we believe the “Bad Mother myth”—that it’s wrong for a mother to stay closely connected with her adult daughter—we fear and resent our mother’s offers of help or advice. These myths create avoidable problems that make dealing with the inevitable ones much harder.

The Angel/Witch, Perfect Mother/Bad Mother myths are rooted in a powerful tradition of mother-blame that pervades our culture. Most mothers are insecure about their performance as mothers and desperately need the approval of other women, including their daughters. Yet tragically, as daughters we are taught to belittle the work of mothering and blame our mothers for almost everything that goes wrong. We too easily point out our mothers’ failings, without ever examining how much our negative view was shaped and intensified by the myths that lead to mother-blame. As daughters and mothers, for generations we have been trapped in a dark web we did not spin. But once we are aware of the myth-threads that form the web, as we tell our mothers’ stories and our own, we can begin to pick apart the web. Daughters have to go beyond both kinds of images, taking away the masks of motherhood, as they try to see who their mothers really are.

At some level we all know how hard it is to be a mother, and most of us sense how hard our mothers have tried to do right by us, even if they didn’t always succeed. Understanding societal barriers to good mother-daughter relationships frees you to see your mother’s good and bad points in all their complexity and subtlety, rather than as examples of stereotypes—guilt-inducing mother, demanding mother, needy mother, overwhelming and judgmental mother, cold and remote mother. When you look at your list of the worst things your mother has done to you, after you’ve read Don’t Blame Mother, you’ll probably understand more about why she treated you the way she did, and as a result you’ll feel differently about both her and yourself.

Relationships based on myths and stereotypes have no chance of improving. But when you look at your mother realistically, you begin to break down barriers and reduce the energy you waste on anguish about each other. This book is based on my experiences as a therapist, my research and the research of other people, women’s responses to my earlier writing about mothers and the mother-daughter relationship, my university course on mothers, and feedback about this book’s first edition.

The women described in this book vary by race, religion, class, age, sexual orientation, and such factors as whether the daughter is an only daughter or an only child, or has or does not have children of her own. But my primary focus is on commonalities in mother-daughter experiences, because in so many respects we women are treated alike, regardless of our differences and membership in other groups.

As you read stories from my life and from those of my friends, family members, students, workshop participants, and patients, I hope you will see that you are not the world’s worst daughter, nor is your mother the world’s worst mother—and, conversely, you are not the world’s worst mother, nor do you have the world’s worst daughter. These stories should also help you decide how to apply the principles and research presented here, so you can plan what to say the next time your mother calls or the next time you feel a fight with your daughter coming on.

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Seeing through Mother-Blame

Mother-blame used to come easily to me, and it continues to come easily to most therapists, because that is how generations of therapists have been trained. I spent years seeing therapy patients before I realized how common mother-blame is and how much damage it does. Mother-blame is as rampant today as it was when I began my graduate training in 1969. In fact, it was and is so common that for years I hardly noticed it.

When I worked in the United States and Canada with psychiatric patients of all ages in a general hospital, delinquent teenagers who were mental hospital inpatients, children who had school problems, and various families, I heard my colleagues lay at mothers’ feet the responsibility for most of the patients’ problems. If anyone in the family was depressed or aggressive, the mother was usually blamed: “She’s overprotective,” “She makes her kids so nervous,” and so on. If the mother herself was the patient, she was blamed for her own problems—“She’s a masochist” or “She comes on so strong—no wonder her husband hits her!”

In many settings, we therapists saw patients together and then, in case conferences, heard each other describe them and attempt to identify the causes of their problems. Most of what I actually saw most mothers do ranged from pretty good to terrific; but my colleagues usually described their actions in negative ways. I tended to leave case conferences feeling vaguely ashamed but not knowing why. One day, I realized that it was because, as a mother, I was a member of the group that my colleagues seemed to think caused all the world’s psychological problems. I felt like the child in the fairy tale who knew the emperor was naked while everyone else praised his elaborate clothing.

A most distressing characteristic of mother-blaming among mental health professionals is how few of them seem to be aware they do it. Even when therapists are alerted to mother-blaming attitudes and comments, they usually deny that they themselves could do such a thing. After I became conscious of the clash between what I saw with my own eyes and what my colleagues said they saw, I began in each case conference to ask a simple question: “In addition to the mother’s influence, what could have contributed to this person’s problems?” When I asked my question, my colleagues said I was “soft on mothers” and “overidenti-fied” with them. Their focus remained not on whether the mother had caused the problem but on how she had done so.

In spite of these responses, I was inspired to continue my questioning by the growing literature on mothers, although only a few books—Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Judith Arcana’s Our Mothers’ Daughters, and parts of Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness and With Child—offered positive views of mothers. Most writers continued primarily to find fault with mothers and describe how they ruined their children’s lives. Some began well, pointing out that all women have a rough time in our society, but mother-blaming was still present in essential threads of their writing: mothers can’t let go of their children, keep daughters too dependent on them, are never satisfied, profoundly disappoint us, and burden us with unbearable guilt.

In 1977, in her enormously popular book My Mother/My Self, Nancy Friday presented such a pessimistic view that many women found themselves more hopeless after reading it than before— and thought that meant something was wrong with their mothers and with them, rather than with the book. (Even books from the late 1980s and the 1990s often have this tone. As one reader of the 1989 Don’t Blame Mother wrote to me, the 1990s book When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends “purports to give advice on how to deal with mother-daughter rifts but is laced throughout with mother-blaming and mother-hating passages,” and is “dripping with hatred for her own mother,” which the author was in many ways unable to go beyond. In my own reading of this book, I found little analysis of the way society sets mothers and daughters up against each other. Other recent writings are less mother-blaming but are largely theoretical and include little in the way of practical solutions.)

Despite this continued focus on mothers’ limitations, I noticed the beneficial effects of all the loving, empowering things that mothers were doing—they rocked babies, cooked nourishing meals, soothed hurt feelings. These things were hardly mentioned. For all the inspiration of books by Rich, Chesler, and Arcana, little or nothing changed among mainstream psychotherapists. From my own experience, I saw that simply voicing objections to mother-blame had no positive results. I needed to document systematically the scapegoating of mothers by mental health professionals. In chapter 3, I describe some of the documentation that I gathered, which revealed that mother-blame had not abated, even in the face of the modern women’s movement.

To document the problem and its effects on mother-daughter relationships was one thing; to figure out what to do about it was another. Rich, Chesler, and Arcana had begun to describe what it feels like to be a mother and to be a daughter, and Jean Baker Miller—in her classic Toward a New Psychology of Women—had clearly described the nature of the subordination of women in general. A number of writers had begun to look at relationships between women. But still missing was some idea of where or how to begin to mend the rifts between daughters and their mothers.

Ways to avoid mother-blame and mend mother-daughter relationships still constitute largely unexplored terrain. In fact, until the past decade, almost no systematic research had been conducted on woman-woman relationships of any kind. The focus of nearly all psychological research until recently has been on male-male relationships (competition, achievement in the workplace, aggression, etc.) or male-female relationships—in other words, on any relationship that includes at least one male.

Almost everything said about mother-daughter relationships by experts consulted by women whose daughters range from young adults to old women came not from research but from individual speculations; this lack of research created a vacuum that mother-blame quickly filled. And sadly, even the 1990s surge in research about mothers and daughters has done little to stem the mother-blaming tide (see the preface). It is hard to avoid the influence of stereotypes when we look at the realities of mothers and daughters, and Ph.D. and M.D. degrees do not immunize us against those biases. It is time to cut a path through the myths and toward the truth. We owe it to ourselves, to our mothers, to our daughters, and to other women to accord mother-daughter relationships their due—to declare that they are worthy of our time, our effort, and our respect.

Mothers and Other Strangers

If we can temporarily think of our mothers as strangers, we can more easily put them and their treatment of us into perspective; even when we become very angry at strangers, we can see them in a new light more readily, since we have no long, shared history, we may have no common future, and certainly we do not have the intimacy and complexity that characterize our relationships with our mothers.

I once became impatient because an iron I had left in a repair shop still wasn’t ready six weeks later. I called and told the store manager that I needed to pick it up even if it wasn’t ready. She spoke curtly to me and slammed down the telephone. Dreading an unpleasant encounter, I went to the shop the next day and found that not only was the iron repaired but the manager was also pleasant. I then recalled something I had heard years ago: the manager, a woman probably in her sixties, keeps the shop running so that her ninety-year-old father can keep working. I realized that she must have a terrible time keeping him happy by running the business, while also trying to hold on to some clientele in the face of her father’s slow (but excellent) repair work. When I remembered this, my irritation with her vanished. My perspective changed.

Much of the work of mending the mother-daughter relationship involves placing mother-daughter problems in similar perspective, by looking at the forces that shaped our mothers and the pressures our culture puts on mothers and daughters to have a particular relationship. We owe it to our mothers and ourselves to consider our relationships with the same compassion as we do our business relationships with the neighborhood fix-it store manager. Furthermore, our feelings about our mothers have profound effects on our relationships with our daughters and with women in general. Those of us who believe we are supportive of women but deeply resent our own mothers are probably not as wholeheartedly benevolent toward women in general as we think we are. The better the connections we have with our mothers, the better our connections with other women tend to be.

In thinking through their problems with their mothers, most daughters find that their mothers have seemed worse than they really are; motherhood myths...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE TO THE NEW DON’T BLAME MOTHER
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. GETTING STARTED
• 2. SUCH LOVE, SUCH RAGE
• 3. MOTHER-BLAMING
• 4. MOTHER–DAUGHTER BARRIERS: THE PERFECT MOTHER MYTHS
• 5. THE BAD MOTHER MYTHS
• 6. FEELING SAFE GOING BEYOND THE MYTHS
• 7. MENDING THE RELATIONSHIP
• 8. WHAT MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS HAVE DONE
• 9. IT IS ONLY A DOOR
• APPENDIX A: EXPRESSIVE TRAINING
• APPENDIX B: GUIDELINES FOR MOTHER–DAUGHTER INTERVIEWS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR