Personal Perspective: If you’re a mother watching a daughter navigate the beautiful chaos of her twenties or thirties, take heart. The woman she is becoming is already there.
I prayed for her survival in a world she had yet to confront. By age 40, daughters have lived enough that the dynamic naturally levels out.
A shared mortality awareness?. Capable of reducing me to tears as she gained a sense of herself. But those tears are not what I want to talk about. Because my daughter, now in her 40s, has turned fully human.
Hang on. I’ll qualify that. As the boomer mother of an only child who happened to be a girl, I often felt more the observer. I doubt my own mother watched me as intently at each stage of life as I watched my own daughter.
Women of that era had no time for such things. They just worked hard, loved hard, prayed hard, and hoped for the best for their girls—that some wonderful man would someday come along and “take care” of them. My baby girl was a force of nature. Impatient.
Persistent. Limit-testing. Ask any of her teachers. Her mind behaved more like a whirling dervish than a candidate for future domesticity.
By her mid-teens, she was so bored with high school that I couldn’t get her out of bed in the mornings. She likened going from class to class and keeping up with what other girls considered important to becoming an automaton. Pavlovian. When I stood back and pictured it all, how could I disagree?
I enrolled her in independent study. I doubted she would ever have the patience for college, but I hoped she would find her way. While I hired tutors for subjects I sucked at, we read books, attended plays, and bonded in a new way. And at age 18, when her dad and I finally split, she was off to the races without me.
Like my own mother, I prayed — but not for a man to take care of her. I prayed for her survival in a world she had yet to confront. And confront it she did. I’ll admit that for the next few decades, as she worked to make an alarming success from her endeavors, I felt like the woman my daughter was running from much of the time, even though she occasionally and graciously took me along for the ride.
Suddenly, however, I’m the one she is running toward. It’s like having a stone in your pocket that you constantly turn over that’s been smoothed from handling. And I am basking in that sensation. The answer, I’ve come to believe, didn’t arrive with any single conversation or tearful reconciliation.
It arrived quietly, the way most true things do—somewhere in the long, ordinary months after she turned forty. I believe there is a shift from thinking your daughter needs your advice to an era of mutual respect. By age 40, daughters have lived enough that the dynamic naturally levels out, and mothers begin asking them for advice as well. Perhaps it morphs into a shared awareness of mortality.
By 40, we begin thinking about our own aging, and a new common language emerges. Time, it turns out, is the great softener of us both.rebellion, and by the fourth decade, I am being let back in in ways I once only dreamed of. Instead of dismissing my own life stories as unrelatable, she is now embracing my journey.
Perhaps she realizes that while we all spring from legacies of our own making, we can indeed learn from what our own mothers went through. And in those moments of clarity, we realize we are not all that different from one another. At times, the similarities are striking. Instead of wondering if I said the right thing in the right way using the right words, conversations are now easier.
Trips together are more like adventures than exercises in posturing, and we need not have days of time together to feel sated. If you’re a mother watching your daughter navigate the beautiful chaos of her twenties or thirties, take heart. The woman she is becoming is already in there—in the quiet strength she shows when things fall apart, in the kindness she extends even when she’s tired.
Forty is not an arrival so much as a flowering, the moment when all those years of becoming finally settle into being. And you, in ways you may never fully know, helped tend that garden. The best is not behind her. It is unfolding, petal by petal, right before your eyes.
Note: I have not contributed to my"Unedited Offspring" blog in several years. And my own daughter was the reason I started writing here in the first place. In expressing this, my life has come full circle. If you’re a mother watching your daughter navigate the beautiful chaos of her twenties or thirties, take heart.
The woman she is becoming is already in there, in the quiet strength she shows when things fall apart, and in the kindness she extends even when she’s tired. The Best Ways to Begin AgainSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist?
Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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