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Journalism of Courage
Daughter: You let father humiliate me in front of everyone. How can I ever trust you after that betrayal?
Mother: I am just trying to hold our family together. Why do you make such a big deal about everything?
Daughter: There you go gaslighting me again!
Mother: Why don’t you try to understand me?
Daughter: Why don’t you try to understand me first?
Mother: I just want you to be happy. Can’t you see I am trying to protect you? I just want you to become better.
Daughter: What does better even mean? Like that ideal daughter you have always dreamed of? Why am I never enough for you? Why am I never up to the mark?
Mother (with tears in her eyes): I am trying to do my best but everyone blames me.
Daughter: I cannot believe how you manage to make everything about yourself!
Mother: I don’t want you to mess up your life.
Daughter: I know you think I am a mess and I can see that disappointment in your eyes for the daughter you never had (now choking with pain and tears in her eyes) – beautiful, happy, good at everything. But why don’t you get it – I am not you and never will be!
This is a glimpse of the theatre of the mother-daughter relationship that plays out in our homes and at times spills over to my therapy space. I have been a witness to this for years and even now, it wrenches my heart at the poignancy of it. The drama of love, seeking connection, pain, rejection, betrayal and so much more. It echoes of pain women carry across generations. More than a witness, I have been a participant in this drama, too. I remember my relationship with my mother while growing up, where there was so much love but there was a rankling ache that I had failed her in some way. I still remember telling her often, “I cannot be like you, I am not you.” After my marriage, having a son was so beautiful, and despite the challenges, our relationship did not have the agonising complexity. His journey was not that familiar to me and neither was the territory that came with it. But then having a daughter changed everything and I was filled with immense wonder at this little being who seemed to be a reflection of me. As a child, being shy and tongue-tied in social situations, when oblivious to our calling out her name we would find her snuggled up with a fat book in a corner. Or, when she would pick up a silly word and keep repeating it gleefully, giggling so much that she would choke and fall off the sofa. She was me and I was her.
I waited for the day when she would turn around and tell me, “I am not you.” And it did come soon enough and I watched with a mix of awe and pain as she drew the line and marked her territory, “I am not like you, Mum.” Maybe she carried that ache, too, and was standing up for herself and refusing to be the daughter I wanted her to be.
Politics of it: Though this theatre is played out in our homes, the problem is not located there. It is located in the patriarchal and gendered structures which define our roles and our worthiness – of a good mother, of a good daughter, of being sanskari women. It creates divides between us as we churn under pressure to perform these socially defined roles and expectations of the ideal mother/daughter. Mothers desperately trying their daughters to fit into society’s idea of worthiness – get good grades, wear decent clothes, look pretty, stay respectful, so that they could be safe, happy and protected. Daughters fighting back against this indoctrination and at the same time trying to keep their feet on this ever-churning treadmill of social pressures. These conflicts become even more complex when we take the lens of intersectionality – when there is a disability, neuro-divergence, gender or sexual expansiveness, poverty etc.
We heal in kinships and not in silos: Psychiatry and psychology have a murky history in terms of mother-bashing in the name of “healing childhood wounds”, causing more damage than succour. Our mother-daughter conflicts carry complexities. They cannot be seen in binaries of good-bad, fair-unfair, or wrong-right. In my work, I have learned that it is crucial to separate the intent from the impact, as the intention is rarely about hurting the other person or diminishing their sense of self. Healing can happen when we expose the ruse and align ourselves together against patriarchy and not against each other.
Rite of passage*: I also wonder if this rite of passage is inevitable – the first phase of separation at about early adolescence as we intentionally start stepping away to explore our identities as separate from our mothers. The second liminal phase can be confusing and disorienting as we move away from the familiar and stand in strange territory. As a 15-year-old Pia shared with me, “It is scary as I cannot go back and I have no idea what I am heading towards. Home does not seem like home.” It is this “betwixt and between” stage that can bring with it so much of anxieties, a sense of despair and loneliness. The final phase of reintegration is where we reunite with a sense of coming home without at times even having left home. I am not sure when I reintegrated with my mother, maybe it was only when I became a mother I started seeing so much of her in myself and so much of myself in her. I am aware of her voice that I carry with me everywhere. My mother being the person she is, has made this voice a mellow yet expansive presence. She is me and I am her. There is a yearning in me to find my little girl in my daughter and my heart soars when I hear that same childlike laughter, her clowning around and I want to hold the moment. But then I remind myself of what she told me, “Maybe you should not look for the person I was, but appreciate the person I am now.” And as I struggle with my “betwixt and between”, I marvel and respect her fierce feminist politics, or how she stands up for what she believes in and her passion for ideas that are so new and strange to me. I am reminded of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem – “Tomay notun kore pabo bole harai khone khon” — I keep losing to rediscover you in a new way.
*Acknowledgement to Michael White, co-founder of Narrative Therapy
(Shelja Sen is a narrative and family therapist, writer, co-founder of Children First. In this column she curates the know-how of the children and youth she has the honour of working with. Email her at shelja.sen@childrenfirstindia.com)
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