It Never Ends

Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters

Nan Gefen, Sandra Butler

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631522796
• Year: 2017

It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters explores the complex challenges and unexpected rewards of aging mothers in their relationships with their midlife daughters. Based on interviews with women between 65 and 85, it illuminates issues of closeness, distance, longing, and need that arise. Mothers speak openly about the ongoing effects of the past on the present, the cultural, familial, and interpersonal conflicts that remain, and the varied and often invisible ways they continue mothering. As mothers enter the last decades of their lives, their roles with their daughters often shift and change in complicated ways. Now that they are no longer central in caring for them as they once were, many experience a recalibrating of authority, autonomy, and independence. Their courage is apparent as they reflect on the mistakes they’ve made, acknowledge their regrets, and search to come to terms with their relationships as they now are.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A Question of Closeness
• Chapter Two: Generation to Generation
• Chapter Three: Under the Surface
• Chapter Four: Mothering in the Present Tense
• Chapter Five: Navigating the Difficulties
• Chapter Six: The Voice Suppressed
• Chapter Seven: The Years Ahead
• Chapter Eight: A Time of Reckoning
• Discussion Questions
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors