Generations

The always inspiring Carmen Torbus posted this video today, and I was struck by how immediately it brought up thoughts about the lives women live today versus in my mother's generation.  This is a topic that comes up now and then with my friends, and for some reason it has been bubbling up in conversations with greater frequency lately.

Human nature dictates that with each generation there will be vertigo-inducing gaps in our understanding of one another ~ situations in which our attempts at trying to communicate and connect have us craning our necks, squinting, and straining our every muscle.  Maybe, because DNA ties us together, we feel like it should be easier to understand and appreciate one another.  When, instead, we face one another with the feeling that there is an impossible chasm between us, it can be difficult to know how to bridge that gap.

“She’s my mother ~ I thought she was supposed to get me.”

“This is my daughter ~ why are her values different from mine?”

Carmen's video made me think about the abundance of resources, support and channels of connection that are available to our generation ~ how so many of us are claiming our lives in a way our mothers likely never could.  Maybe Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan inspired our mothers to stand up for themselves more than their mothers were ever encouraged to, but our generation is taking the claiming of our own lives to an entirely different level.  I'm not sure our generation feels like we can "have it all" ~ with particular emphasis on finding the perfect family + career balance ~ as much as we believe we can define for ourselves what all means and pursue that in our own unique way.

I think I am talking about two different things here ~ the landscape our generation is now navigating creating versus the terrain our mothers had to cultivate and the difficulties that can arise when a mother and daughter cannot fully embrace the differences between the two.  The problem with these differences is that it isn’t terribly easy to call them different and leave it at that.  Other labels get too easily attached ~ words such as good, bad, silly, and outdated can take what could be a starting point for a fascinating conversation and shut it down before it can even get going.

I know I am teetering on the edge of making inappropriate, sweeping generalizations, but as I try to work through the tangles I sometimes feel caught in with my own mother, I am eager to know what kind of conversations are happening between mothers and daughters these days.  This is an area of my life in which I feel a particular kind of lost-ness, where my search for answers and clarity always feels just out of my reach, on the other side of a fog bank that follows my every move.

As daughters with mothers and mothers with daughters, what conversations are taking place, either in real life or in your perfect-world scenarios?

"Suddenly, through birthing a daughter, a woman finds herself face to face not only with an infant, a little girl, a woman-to- be, but also with her own unresolved conflicts from the past and her hopes and dreams for the future."  ~Elizabeth Debold

Comments

[Carmen]

Your post has me in tears Christine. I think sometimes when I do something (like post that video), there is a bigger reason that I may not yet "get" myself.

I thought I was posting it to share my vision and hopefully encourage and inspire others to take that risk too and step out of their comfort zone so that growth can happen.

But, perhaps the real reason was so you would write this post and help me see a bigger picture.

My relationship with my own mother is strained at times. I was just thinking about her the other day and wondering what really excites her. I get so giddy and excited when I start thinking about or talking about cheerleading. It's not something that I can control. It is my passion and when I'm pursuing it in some manner, my souls lights up and excitement ensues. It makes me really sad to realize that I can't remember my mother ever getting really excited about something... anything. It's painful for me to think about this because getting people excited about their passions is what my own passion is.

Then there's my daughter. She's 8. And I can only hope that the example I'm setting for her is one that I can look back on someday and hope that I was enough. She is full of passion and creativity and drive and... attitude which worries me at times, but also comforts me to know that she stands for what she wants & needs.

This makes me long for understanding of and for my mom. And makes me hope that I can work now to build the relationship I have with my own daughter.

I'm so blessed to know you and to have the technological tools I have in order to search out and connect with my support squad. I think it's so important to have people in our lives that get us and I'm thankful that I do.

Thank you for this post and helping me see something I didn't until now.

xo & belief in all things you.

Your friend always,
Carmen

[gillian]

Oh. Mothers and daughters, sigh.
Well. Issues I have, and issues I'm working on. Myself with my own. Myself with my daughters, keeping my own relationship in mind as I navigate my way through with my own girls.
There are a few lessons learned from dealing with my mom:
1. When my children speak, they tell the truth. They aren't trying to decieve.
2. My children are smart, period. Smart. Not stupid.
3. Every time they need me it is genuine, not an imposition.
4. They don't manipulate, they have no capability of such things...only adults do. Hidden agendas are for those over the age of 20 I do believe.

So, that in mind. I remember how I felt. I deal with my children the way I wish I had been dealt with.

Now, our lives in full swing...I know my mother wishes she had her time back.

As do I, already. My eldest is only ten. We make mistakes. We perservere.
I hope my children are forgiving and in their forgiveness I'm able to forgive.

I hope that makes sense. None of us have any clue when we arrive here how things will unfold. We do the best with what we know.

It's bloody hard sometimes.

xoxo

[Kat]

Thank you, Christine. As always, your musings are exquisitely timed!
I am really struggling to find my peace with this. I am finding myself to be an unworthy daughter and an inadequate mother, sometimes to extents that frighten me.
I am trying to surface from a prolonged period of self-scrunity, flagellating myself for various degrees of not-enoughness, compounded by the barriers that prevent me from sharing my struggles with my mother.
I know this is unfair to her, as I am expecting things that I have no way of articulating, so how could she possibly deliver? But I do not have the vocabulary to convey to her what I am going through in a way that she would understand or appreciate.
It's a realisation that is bringing out unanticipated and unfathomable despair, as I can't seem to untangle the aloneness from the unworthiness.
Thank you for making these struggles a little more universal, as they make me feel a little less out on the (l)edge.

[Marianne]

Another reason I love my mother so much (and give a prayer of gratitude for her every day) is the deep understanding she has of these differences.

When I was in my 20s and deciding what to 'do with my life', my mother was deeply compassionate. She could so easily have said to me: "Marianne, you don't know how lucky you are. The only choices I had were to be a nurse or a teacher." (Which would be true). She could have said: "Your father and I have supported you through law school, now you need to stick with this corporate law job and make a go of it."

Instead she said: "It must be so hard for you. You have so many more choices than we ever had. People used to tell us what to do, and although we had less freedom there was also less stress. Making real choices about your own life is hard. You are doing great."

Compassionate understanding of our differences. She gets 'Mother of the Year', no?

xoxo

[andrea]

"As daughters with mothers and mothers with daughters, what conversations are taking place, either in real life or in your perfect-world scenarios?"

wow. what a question!

in the real world my mother mostly encourages me to play it safe and forget about my dreams. and i am still longing for the perfect world where she supports me unconditionally. but actually, she is starting to come around and it seems like she's starting to get used to the idea of me living my dreams and seems almost encouraging some days.

and even in her discouragement i can feel it's her own stuff - the way she put her dreams aside for her family, i guess because she didn't know what else to do and that's what women did then.

i am so happy to have options.

[Di]

Loved this! M baby is 24 and my granddaughter is 6 ... the girl-child thing is something else. My mother and I, I think we were starting to 'get' each other as she died.

It's all much more difficult than we are led to believe.

[Christianne]

I want to start by saying that I love the terrain you traverse in this space. One day we are oohing and ahhing over Tilda and her delicious cuteness ... another day we're talking about generational gaps between mothers and daughters. It's amazing. (Although, really, I suppose we could create a link between the two ... you are, after all, Tilda's mama.) :-)

For some reason, I feel like the generation of mothers raising children right now (ie: people my own age and a little older, whose children are newborns, toddlers, grade school, or even middle or high school) are doing so with an intentionality of connectedness and relationship. True, there are tons of mothers NOT doing this, but I do see an ability and desire among many mothers these days to take time to know the true personalities and abilities of their children and to take the time to really see and listen to them. There's a relational intentionality of gentleness in place.

I think this has a lot to do with the path each generation has walked that leads us to today. Blogging reveals a vast sum of women expressing their hearts, reaching for their dreams, going after their creative hopes in many new ways, all because technology makes it possible for them to connect with likeminded people who want to hear each other's stories and support each other's work. That value proposition (of valuing one's personal creative expression) is making its way into parenting life.

Just one small perspective among the many that could be offered in response to what you've presented here ...

[linda]

oddly, after all the years of counseling, arguing, silences punctuated with yukkiness or awkwardness, it was knitting that brought us together (such as it is). we built a bridge of yarn and that was our tentative starting point...something outside the battlegrounds...something that simply couldn't be argued about, and something she was better at than me - by design. we aren't ready for a big ol' Waltons family hug, but we found some peaceful, common ground that we can share. and that's a good enough starting point. and if it never ventures outside the knitting and purling, at least we've accomplished that.