Breath the fresh air by Sammy Ekker (Intermittent) on Flickr.
“…[M]others and daughters can have a close bond, but should never take it to the level of being best friends…” say Susan Morris Shaffer and Linda Perlman Gordon, co-authors of Too Close for Comfort: Questioning the Intimacy of Today’s New Mother-Daughter Relationship.
“A best friend is different than a mother-daughter relationship,” says Shaffer in her interview with Susan Mitchell, Improve Your Mother-Daughter Relationship for Oprah.com. “It requires common experiences…rais[ing] your kids together...[attending] the same college…you’re in the workplace together. Mothers and daughters are never in the same stage of life at the same time, so the relationship is never equal.”
Thank goodness for the latter. How could I ever reach a point of leaning upon my daughter and allowing her the opportunity to give back to me what I have shared with her?
Not that all parents or mothers share this perspective.
But I perceive the parent-child relationship as one, like many aspects of life, that move in a circular or rather spiral fashion through the various stages and processes of evolution.
If human interaction involves give and take, finding common ground and mutual goals that require cooperation, then establishing and maintaining relationship sits upon the foundation of a person’s willingness, if not out right commitment to growth and transformation.
Buddhism teaches that an individual is not the person she or he was in the previous moment.
Each breath we take and release, delivers an increment of evolution.
The number of inhalations and exhalations a woman undergoes during childbirth could be said to completely transform her.
Those breaths form a bridge delivering us across nexus of our journey wherein we start out as a woman and we emerge nine months later, a mother cradling her newborn.
At the farthest edge of this trek we, ideally, edge closer to the ultimate transformation, that of leaving the life of this world and entering that of they beyond.
Our travels on the terrain leading from the birth of our child/each of our children and ending ideally with our death preceding theirs brings with it the necessity for our ability to reverse roles.
The old adage, “Once an adult and twice a child, ” offering the image of life as a steep hill or mountain with flat land on both sides provides a most appropriate description of how time and circumstance ask that parents and children adapt.
Every dog has her or his day. And no one stands tall and strong forever.
Perhaps this is the problem with the belief that mothers and daughters cannot serve as best friends to each other.
No, a mother and daughter do not experience or undergo the same life stages at the same moment.
But as surely as everyone who lives will die, so too, children, should they live as long as their parents, will enter and move through the various phases of life common to all humans.
Parents and their children experience the child as a minor for 18 years.
Should the parent witness that child reach 36 years of age and beyond we will have known our daughter or son longer as an adult than when a child.
And while we have encountered phases of life earlier than our children, they, our daughters and sons, are not the children we knew and they once were during their childhood.
The challenge of parenting is that of serving as authority and guide from the entrance of our daughter or son into our lives, while at the same time, transitioning them into the place we have occupied, that of the person in charge of their life.
With each breath we take as we walk alongside our daughters and/or son, we hand over one more strand of the reins controlling the horse pulling the carriage of their life.
The horse that pulls the carriage in which they ride through life is their purpose and passion.
The greatest gift any parent can provide a child is assistance in uncovering that which gives their life meaning and attaches direction and intent to their living.
We do this most fervently as a parent when acknowledging the contour and stability our children and their presence circumscribes to our lives, both during their youth and most importantly when we reach the autumn and winter of our living.
For it is in handing over that last rein of control, surrendering ourselves into their care that we allow ourselves to experience that which we have built, arms of love that embrace us when our eyes no longer see clearly as during in our youth and what we knew so fervently escapes our memories.
Who, but the greatest of friends, and younger than we, can provide this? Any one our age will face the same challenges if not more.