In late June I went to Nantucket with my mother and my children for what is probably the twentieth summer in a row. The annual pilgrimage to my mother’s time-share on that lovely island began when my kids were babies and my mother was in her prime – about the age I am now. I’m not sure where I was, except overwhelmed by the classic juggling act.
Over the years I have enjoyed the benchmark that the Nantucket trip offered to monitor my children’s growing up. I see it most clearly in bike rides. First they were strapped in behind my seat; then after a few years, they were on small bikes, weaving perilously ahead of me, getting tired half way to wherever. Not long after that we were a proud string of straight-on cyclists – a mother duck and her little ones. That didn’t last long before I was left in the dust. Sometimes they would wait for me up ahead. Other times they were enjoying an ice cream cone at our destination when I got there. Nowadays I bike alone – they are renting jeeps and scooters.
The same time span has given me benchmarks to monitor my mother’s decline. At the beginning she shared the beach duty, digging alongside one of my kids or standing knee-deep in the water guarding against threatening waves. She would drive the car to meet us half way in our bike rides and help us load the bikes up and get back home. Then she got frailer and feared getting knocked over by the waves; then she stopped driving. In recent years, her slow pace has made us all ungenerously impatient. This trip she and my daughter and I went to a local spa where she had her first facial ever. She seemed to be delighted, but by the time we left, she couldn’t remember what service she had.
Considering the beloved generations on either side of me highlights the nature of mother-daughter bonds and how they have changed in my lifetime. A recent New York Times article reported on the emerging phenomenon of grown-daughter dependency – calling their mothers three or four times a day, consulting with them on decisions small and large, and discussing the most intimate details of their lives without inhibition (the article said nothing about the mothers sharing back, though they did characterize their daughters as “best friends”). The experts attribute this development to technological innovations such as the cell phone and e-mail. I think it is a totally different kind of breakthrough.
My 21-year-old daughter and I don’t talk endlessly or every day, and she doesn’t tell me “everything.” but I would say we have a very intimate, trusting, and fun relationship. I can’t say that about my mother. I have never felt that she knew who I was, and I am sure I made no effort to enlighten her. She had lots of secrets; I had a few too. The only time I took her into my confidence was when I was in college – back when abortions were illegal – and I needed help with an unwanted pregnancy. I must admit she rose to the occasion. But in general I thought of growing up as outgrowing my mother. Now that she is failing, I have to hold her hand when we go anywhere and help her undress in the doctor’s office, but that isn’t the kind of intimacy that I am talking about.
The big difference between the two mother-daughter relationships I am part of is the trust, respect, and honesty that women of my generation have come to expect from each other as a result of the common experience of growing up with the Women’s Movement. My mother never trusted women at all – she saw them as rivals; the conventional wisdom of her day was that in the cut-throat world of man-hunting, the female of the species would let nothing and no one stand in her way. When I was a teenager, it was understood that a call from a boy superseded any plans with other girls. It is hard to look back on those days when my best friends were not valued enough to be a priority. My daughter wouldn’t dream of canceling plans with her girlfriends and in fact often chooses them over invitations from boys.
By the time I was her age, I had learned to be wily with other women because they couldn’t be trusted; I learned to obfuscate with other women, because they couldn’t take the truth – and I was afraid that, being female, I was too fragile to take the consequences. But in my twenties and thirties I worked with women, engaged in political action with women, shared talk about experiences we thought were personal aberrations. Over the years we have become one another’s truth tellers; we watch one another’s back; we enjoy one another’s company -and laugh together like we laugh with no one else. That model, much more than my own experience as a daughter, has guided my relationship with my daughter. In many ways I feel I am growing up alongside her. I’d like to think we bring out the best in each other – even though we also know the worst.