67 Quotes by Victoria Secunda

I have always tried to be all the tings my mother wanted me to be; ever the lady, always polite, never inconsiderate. I run my business the way my mother ran our house – everything just so. In some ways I am my mother – full of life when I’m happy, very cold when I’m angry. People say I look just like her. I’ll tell you a secret: every time I pass a mirror, I gasp. I wonder if there’s more here than meets the eye.” – Karen, thirty-nine.

Integral to being emotionally healthy is to have a mother who has the ability to respect her child’s differences and not perceive them as betrayals.

Another reason it’s dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.

It isn’t just the physical presence of the father that matters- it’s his engagement and involvement. An emotionally remote or rejecting or actively punitive father leads to girls’ feeling pretty apprehensive around men.

Little children require their parent’s unqualified love in order to survive and feel secure. Very soon, however, they need a tempered version of that devotion- parents who can give them the freedom to fail or feel sorrow or taste frustration, to fully experience their own pain and pleasure and learn from them. Therapists call this phenomenon “ownership.

When a mother attempts to bind a grown daughter to her, whether by fear or neediness or illness or rage, the consequences can be devastating. To continue trying to please an unpleasable mother threatens an adult daughter’s mental health and all of her relationships. And yet such daughters keep coming back to their mothers, without the daughters’ altering that relationship and their bitter or anguished reactions to it.

We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents’ goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.

At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers – which many daughters do not – in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothers’ parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.

Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It’s humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother’s bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.