Importance of a Mother-Daughter Relationship

Endia Crawford
February 5, 2012
English 1301
Professor Farnoosh Moshiri The Importance of a Mother and Daughter Relationship Throughout my life, my mother always reflected a very close minded person that was scared for her children to find out anything about her or her past that she was ashamed of. In the duration of my life, my family members that did have knowledge of my mother’s business started telling me shocking things that, for some part, I should have learned years ago. Its almost as if my mother wanted to make her children think she was perfect. I guess that is the goal for all parents but in my mother’s sense, it is weird and unusual . At this moment in time, I am an adult, and most of the things that I learned from everyone else about my mom, she still haven’t opened up and informed me of these stories, which is one reason why me and my mother never really had a bond like a mother and daughter should. I have prayed to my Lord and Savior to bless me and my mother with a close relationship, but I guess my faith just isn’t strong enough. Mothers don’t seem to realize that men of today are very cocky, manipulative, and disrespectful, and as the job of being a mother, daughters should at one point before the age of 16 learn of their past in some kind a way and should be informed on the dos and don’ts when lifelong decisions come into play. When it came down to men, my mother thinks that boyfriends or husband she not be a factor in a woman’s life. However, she didn’t tell me why she felt so strongly about this, all I knew was that I must never use the word “boyfriend” around my mother when it is pertaining to me, even when it is obvious that a male that I have been dating for the last two years is my boyfriend, yet she still calls him a “friend” just to make herself feel secure. But now, I have come to understanding why my mother is so insecure when it comes to men and relationships. I learned from my sister that my mother was once married before she and my father were to a manipulative man. His name was Christopher, I believe, and to confirm this was true, my sister showed me a picture of them at their wedding that was hid in our apartment. He controlled my mother and almost forced her into marrying him. They were married only three months after dating and then after about a year of a controlling marriage, he divorced her. Truth is, he was not a United States citizen and he tried to gain citizenship by marrying my mother. They had no children together, only a marriage that lasted no longer than enough time for a fetus to form in the womb and be birthed. Soon after that marriage, she met my father. He was the type of man that approaches you in a very sweet and caring way but later on turns out to be nightmare. But during my childhood, my father was always an angel in my eyes, I had no idea he was this type of monster he was toward my family. My sister told me stories of how he used to get drunk, come home, and drag my mother by her hair through the apartment in front of her children with no care. I mostly started after my grandmother, his mother, died which made his anger grow stronger. I don’t have any memory of my father doing this so the day my mother had enough and called the police on him, I blamed her up until the age of 16. Her informing me on this and what to look out for in future would be a great lesson for me and also make our relationship stronger. I may not be a mother just yet but I do understand that being a mother can be a very trying job for one to take on, especially by alone with no other parental help. You always worry and ask yourself, “Am I doing a good job?”, and when your child does something wrong or messes up, then that is when the doubt happens. The problem with that is that most parents are not building a relationship with their children. Failing to do this causes the child and parent to not feel comfortable with sharing advice or information that is important to their relationship. The child is the left unknowledgeable and experiences things on their own that the parent had no clue about. This is why this parental bond is so important in a child’s life and will affect them as life goes on.
Another factor to me and my mother’s weak relationship was our household. During my early teen years, a lot of my family was moving in with us. We live in a two bedroom apartment that was once housing seven people. My mother was so worried about trying to support everyone in the house that she almost didn’t have time to raise, even more so that I have an adopted young brother that she also has to make time for. What made me realize how strong of a person she really was, was her dealing with my thieving uncle. While she was at work or gone and everyone was either gone or sleep, he used to go in her room and search for money, jewelry, or other valuables that could benefit him or get him drugs. She even tried locking her room door quite a few times but he always found a way to get in. Dealing with this betrayal really made me less of a factor in the household because she had other issues to worry about. The only thing she was ever really worried about when it mattered was me being dressed decently for school, cleaned, fed, and making it to and from school safely. Simple things that could have contributed to us building a relationship such as cooking, cleaning, or other household duties, I had to depend on myself to learn. By the age of 14, my mother expected me to know everything, mostly things she didn’t even teach me. She expected me not to ever tell her I had a boyfriend, though she had never said one word to me about relationships or never sat down and had a mother-daughter talk with me about boys. One day I was approached in a very disrespectful way by a man. He was at least about 24 years old, so he said, and had a ‘thing” for younger girls. Being so naïve about the real world, I thought it was totally normal that way he disrespected me, as I guessed that it was the way older men approached women they were interested in. I went on with it and later on in the relationship, he began to talk to me in a very inappropriate way that made me very uncomfortable and became sort of abusive, but I didn’t know how to tell him how I felt. Given that I am uncomfortable with telling my mother anything, I informed my older sister whom played a very big mother role in my life. Furious about this, she told him to lose my number and leave me alone while he is still able to. I was so disappointed in my mother for being so uninvolved in my life, that I cried the rest of that day. I wanted to tell her the way that I felt but it seem extremely awkward to even hold a conversation with her so I kept it to myself. There was so much going on in my life at that time, I just wished she would have known and made me more knowledgeable about how to handle situations, but unfortunately, I had to depend on my sister. My mother have no idea that she is a very mindful person that could teach me so much and I have even more to tell her, but I am afraid that we won’t build this sort of relationship until I am a little bit older. She acted this same nonchalant way with my sister, who was a really naïve teen that had to learn from her own mistakes. I am still wondering in what way can I open up to her about things in my life that she should know, and how I could make her feel more comfortable with telling me things of her past and the lessons she learned, but I guess if I let go of my uneasiness of talking on a personal level with her, the she will open up to me. There is so much that I still am wondering about in life that I need to be taught, but for the mean time, I will just learn from other people’s mistakes. Luckily, though she was lacking in communication, she teach unintentionally teach me a valuable lesson: Family relationships should always come first.