Member-only story
Like Fine Wine: Mother-Daughter Relationships Age Well
And it’s never too late to start repairing them
(Listen to my interview with Dr. Kerry Burnight and her mother Betty on today’s new episode of the Crow’s Feet Podcast here.)
I became a daughter in 1943, a mother in 1969 when my daughter Jennifer was born, and a grandmother in 2002 when Jen had Henry, her first child. From that moment, our bond strengthened. We were both mothers.
We became kindred spirits with similar sensibilities and created a place for mothers and daughters called the Motherhood Union, or Mother U — a website for mothers and grandmothers. Jen came up with the name, and it fit.
We ran focus groups, interviewed other mother-daughter duos, and wrote about what we learned. We posted guest essays by psychologists and famous mothers. In short, we gave motherhood — and the unique, powerful and challenging mother-daughter relationship — a lot of thought.
I am an early Baby Boomer, and Jen, a GenX gal. Unlike my mother and me in our 50s and 30s, Jen and I were swimming in the same cultural waters. We shared taste in books, movies, music and fashion, and possessed the kind of psychological awareness learned through self-help literature and therapy. My mother and her fellow bootstrapping GIs sacrificed and…
