Mothers and Daughters Forever?

My Facebook buds post stuff like this (above) all the time. And there's a kind of truth to it, but they leave out the tough bits. A daughter is always her daddy's little princess (unless he's some kind of psychopath or a complete jerk). Her relationship with her mom is always somewhat problematic. Beginning sometime around puberty, mothers and daughters find themselves at cross-purposes. It's biological. God put this "I have to get out of here" gene into all children so that a kind of madness descends in adolescence that drives them out of your house before they realize what a swell deal they've got going and wind up at 45 living in your basement and expecting you to do their laundry.

The first corrective measure God ever took with mankind was to throw them out of the Garden of Eden and to give them homework.

"Go forth, be fruitful and multiply!" God said as He gave them the bum's rush out of the Garden. Remember too, God was unhappy with us when He said it. 

It works much like that with our own children. God wanted us to have kids so we'd understand in a very real way, what He experienced in trying to raise us to be decent, hardworking, kindly people. God wanted us to experience rebellion, ingratitude and distrust as manifest in our own offspring.

The above meme represents a condition that exists beyond a certain point in the mother/daughter relationship. It only happens after your daughter gets over being mad at her Mom for all the supposed motherly atrocities mom committed during her adolescence. Things like making them tell the parents where they are at, where they are going to be and when they are coming home. Horrors of that sort. In adolescence, the youngsters feel this terrible constriction when their parents demonstrate their love for them by demanding they not do things that are dangerous, self-destructive or generally bad for them

There is a strange transformation of the mother-daughter relationship that occurs during a daughter's twenties or thirties. It usually happens at about 2 am some morning after she's had a couple of kids of her own. The daughter-now-mother-herself is sitting up all night with one of her babies that is sick. It may happen the day she drops that first one off at school for the first time and cries about the loss of her "baby" all the way home. It can happen in Walmart when the two year old demands candy in the checkout line and when Mom says "no", the precious child screams "NO" right back in her face and the throws himself down on the floor and has a right old tantrum there in front of the cashier, the manager and 40 or 50 Walmart customers.

It is during or shortly after one of those magic moments, when the daughter is unburdening herself to her mother, that Mom magically becomes her daughter's hero. And it's usually around about this time that Mom offers to take the grandbabies off her hands so she can have  "a couple of hours to herself" and seals the deal.

God, it turns out, is a terrific educator. We just have to get the kids to do their homework is all.

© 2017 by Tom King