With moms, girls, expect differences

Your mom might hate your hair but she still loves you.
By JOCELYN NOVECK
ASSOCIATED PRESS
When Lori Love, a Maryland yoga and Pilates teacher, gave birth to her daughter 12 years ago, her head was filled with visions of her sweet girl in dainty outfits and lovely little hats.
Trouble is, baby Audrey wasn't buying into Mom's fantasy. Starting at 1 year old, she'd exert her independence by ripping every adorable hat off her head within seconds.
Sound familiar, moms everywhere? How many times have you tried to inject a little sense into your daughter's wardrobe, only to be rebuffed? And daughters, what is it about moms that gives them the right to meddle and judge every chance they get?
Mother and daughter -- it's one of the closest, deepest, most influential relationships in life. Yet it can also be the most fraught, the most challenging, the most prone to misunderstanding. One of the hardest things is that the ideal is so wonderful: Mothers and daughters are supposed to be best friends. When reality doesn't match up, the guilt, disappointment and blame abounds.
Looking at relationship
This Mother's Day, there's some extra food for thought on this meaty subject that's sent countless women to the therapist's couch. Deborah Tannen, the linguistics professor who gained best-seller status analyzing male-female communication in "You Just Don't Understand," has turned her attention to mothers and daughters -- what she calls "the mother of all relationships." It's a subject that evokes enormous passion, and it's also a personal one for Tannen: Her own mother died at age 95, while she was writing the book. "The book became a way to honor her memory," Tannen says.
The title -- "You're Wearing THAT?" -- is likely to draw an anguished laugh from virtually any daughter. And that's because mothers, when it comes to their female offspring, are drawn to what Tannen calls the "Big Three" topics: hair, weight and clothes. Why? Mainly because they care, Tannen said in an interview.
"In our society, women are judged so much more by their appearance," Tannen said. Mothers want their daughters to succeed. And so they express their opinions -- but so often, daughters take it as criticism.
Can be tense
Caring vs. criticism: It's a constant tension.
Example: When Tannen was doing a national book tour for "You Just Don't Understand," she had friends videotape her TV appearances so she could proudly show her parents. When she did, her mother was upset: Tannen had worn the same suit on every show. "She was not mollified by my explanation that no one else watched all the shows," Tannen says.
She gives a more extreme example of a mother's concern over her daughter's weight. Jenny, a woman she interviewed for her book, had just given birth to her first child and hadn't eaten solid food in three days when her mother walked into the hospital room.
As she lifted a buttered roll to her mouth, her mother said: "I could rip that roll right out of your hands."
It might be hard to see the ambiguity there, but Tannen, who has no children herself, says mothers and daughters both complain constantly of being misunderstood. "She takes everything the wrong way," is a frequent refrain she heard when researching the book.
What's different?
And yet the key difference between mother-daughter relationships and other types -- mother-son, father-daughter -- is that so much talking does occur. "Among girls and women," she writes, "talk is the glue that holds a relationship together -- and also the explosive that can blow it apart."
And it starts very early in life. Talk to mothers who have both young daughters and sons, and they'll tell you more than any book can how different the dynamic is.
Susan Margolin, a New York film distributor, has an 8-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. "The relationship with my daughter is much more fraught because she's so much more like me," says Margolin, 43. "Her relationships are so similar to my relationships. The social interaction between girls is very intense."
Love, 44, the yoga and Pilates teacher from Frederick, Md., has two younger sons along with her daughter, Audrey. "It sounds cliche," she says, "but it really is so different. It's really much easier to raise boys. Maybe we have fewer or different expectations of them."
A comparison
When Love looks back on her own life as a daughter, she acknowledges there was a long period where she sought distance from her mom. "I felt the need to get away," Love says. "I needed to work on some things for myself and by myself." But things gradually changed, and a couple of years ago, when Love went through a divorce, her mother was her rock. "It was incredible," she says.
Now, Love says, "we've come full circle." Illustrating the point, she says she recently asked her mom to return a decorative basket of pine cones -- one that Love had rejected, in her rebellious 20s, as "too perfect" when her mother bought it for her apartment. (Too late, Mom said.)
And as for Audrey, there are wonderful, "golden" moments when she plops down on her mom's bed and talks for ages. And then there are the other kind of moments. Like when Love came home to see that Audrey, then 11, had sponge-painted her room red and purple, with no warning.
The trick, then as now, is to find the positive in those moments -- to see that her daughter, like when she ripped off those hats as a baby, is asserting her independence and becoming a great individual. Just like Love herself did.
"Sometimes I'm reacting to my daughter, and I suddenly I realize I see parts of myself in there," Love says. "It's a very humbling experience."
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