⏱ 5 minutes to read • June 24, 2026
Why are mothers and daughters so energetic, often equal in love, frustration and understanding? Find out what expert Dena Kouremetis has to say about this relationship!
Personal Perspective: Midlife can mark a turning point in a relationship.
Highlights
- I doubt my mother looked after me as closely as I did my daughter.
- I prayed for her to live in a world she had never encountered.
- By the age of 40, the daughter had lived enough that natural vitality. Awareness of collective death?
The Truth About Dynamic Mother-Daughter
She was never easy. The words I will use are: colorful. Competition. Interesting. Never get bored. Has the ability to make me shed tears when she wakes up. But those tears are not what I mean. Because my daughter, now 40, has become completely human. Wait. I will qualify.
As a progressive mother of an only child born at a young age, I often feel like an observer. I doubt my mother watched me closely at each stage of my life as I watched my daughter. Women of that time did not have time for such things. They just work hard, love hard, pray hard and hope for the best for their girls – that one day great men will come along and “take care” of them.
My daughter is a force of nature. Impatient. Struggle. Level testing. Ask any of her teachers. Her mind behaves more like a lazy person than a candidate for the future of the nation.
By mid-adolescence, she was so tired of high school that I could not get her out of bed in the morning. She likened walking from class to class and following what other girls considered important to becoming a robot. Paul Lowian. When I took all the photos, how could I not agree?
I enrolled her in an independent study. I doubt she will have the patience for college, but I hope she will find her way. While I hired teachers for my favorite subjects, we read books, participated in games, and interacted in new ways. And at the age of 18, when her dad and I finally broke up, she went racing without me. Like my mother, I prayed — but not for men to take care of her. I prayed for her to live in a world she had never encountered. And face it, she did.
Read more here: Is your mother secretly jealous of you? 7 Signs You Should Not Ignore
I will admit that for the next few decades, as she worked to achieve an astonishing success from her efforts, I felt like a woman whose daughter was running away from time to time, even though she occasionally and kindly took me on a ride. After all, I am the one she is running for.
It’s like having a stone in your pocket that you constantly rotate that is smooth from the handle. And I’m drowning in that feeling.
The answer I believe does not come with a single conversation or a tearful reconciliation. It arrived quietly, as most real things do – somewhere in the normal months after she was forty years old.
I believe there is a shift from thinking that your daughter needs your advice to the age of mutual respect. By the age of 40, the daughter was living enough to have a natural level, and the mother began to seek their advice.
Maybe it becomes a common understanding of death. At the age of 40, we start thinking about our old age and a new common language emerges. Time turns out to be a great softening for both of us.
Behind her was a “proven year” of unconscious rebellion, and in the fourth decade I was allowed to return to the way I had always dreamed. Instead of dismissing my personal life story as irrelevant, she is now taking my journey. Maybe she knows that while we all start from the legacy of our creation, we can really learn from what our mother went through. And in that moment of clarity, we know that we are not all different from each other. Sometimes the similarities are striking.
Instead of wondering if I was speaking the right way, using the right words, the conversation is now easier. Traveling together is more like an adventure than a behavioral exercise, and we do not need to spend many days together to feel satisfied.
If you are a mother watching your daughter explore the beautiful chaos of her twenties or thirties, take heart. The woman she is becoming is already there – in the silence she shows when things fall apart. Kindness She extends even when she is tired. Forty is not a massive arrival like flowering, it is when all the years of being finally become.
Read more here: 8 Ways to Deal with Mother’s Day When Your Relationship With Your Mom Is Complex
And you, in a way that you may never completely know, helped maintain that garden. The best is not behind her. It is exposed by coral in front of your eyes.
References
Note: I have not contributed to my “unedited child” blog for many years. And my own daughter is the reason I started writing here from the beginning. In this expression, my life came full circle.
If you are a mother watching your daughter explore the beautiful chaos of her twenties or thirties, take heart. The woman she is becoming is already there in the silence she shows when things are going, and with kindness she extends even when she is tired.
Written by Dena Kouremetis
Originally Appeared On Psychology Today
