It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters

by Nan Gefen, Sandra Butler

Overview

It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters explores the complex challenges and unexpected rewards of aging mothers in their relationships with their midlife daughters. Based on interviews with women between 65 and 85, it illuminates issues of closeness, distance, longing, and need that arise. Mothers speak openly about the ongoing effects of the past on the present, the cultural, familial, and interpersonal conflicts that remain, and the varied and often invisible ways they continue mothering. As mothers enter the last decades of their lives, their roles with their daughters often shift and change in complicated ways. Now that they are no longer central in caring for them as they once were, many experience a recalibrating of authority, autonomy, and independence. Their courage is apparent as they reflect on the mistakes they’ve made, acknowledge their regrets, and search to come to terms with their relationships as they now are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631522796
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	506 KB

About the Author

Nan Fink Gefen is the author of Stranger in the Midst: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, Discovering Jewish Meditation, and Clear Lake: A Novel, winner of the IndieFab Gold Award for general fiction. After fifteen years in practice as a psychotherapist, she became the cofounding publisher in 1986 of Tikkun magazine, a journal of politics, culture, and society. In 2007 she founded Persimmon Tree: An Online Magazine of the Arts by Women Over Sixty, where she remains as publisher. Nan lives with her husband in Berkeley CA. Their blended family includes seven children and ten grandchildren.

Sandra Butler is the author of Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest. Her second book, Cancer in Two Voices, coauthored with Barbara Rosenblum, was the winner of the 1991 Lambda Literary Award. She is also the co-producer of the award-winning documentaries Cancer in Two Voices and Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House. She has two middle-aged daughters and a rich community of women friends.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 A Question of Closeness 9

Chapter 2 Generation to Generation 43

Chapter 3 Under the Surface 69

Chapter 4 Mothering In The Present Tense 95

Chapter 5 Navigating the Difficulties 122

Chapter 6 The Voice Suppressed 147

Chapter 7 The Years Ahead 168

Chapter 8 A Time of Reckoning 191

Discussion Questions

Acknowledgement

About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

2018 IBPA Ben Franklin Awards Finalist in Psychology 2017 USA Best Book Awards Finalist inHealth: Aging/50+ “An insightful look at the relationships between senior mothers and their middle-aged daughters . . . An important personal and sociological perspective on women’s lives.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A brave book, and one that I admire—a book that will help many aging mothers feel less alone and lead to more open exploration, both in literature and in life.”
—Ellen Bass, poet and author of Like a Beggar and coauthor of The Courage to Heal

“A rich, thoughtful, multi-layered look into the ways that mothers experience their relationships with their middle-aged daughters variously with love, joy, fulfillment, sorrow, anguish, and longing . . . a warm, clearly written, sorely needed exploration of a topic of profound importance.”
—Paula J. Caplan, PhD, author of The New Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship and Associate, W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, Harvard University

“A book to learn from and savor. The complex, nuanced stories of these women’s relationships with their adult daughters over time form the core of this revealing book as the authors probe the mothers’ yearnings for intimacy, issues of distance and alienation, and modes of forgiveness and renewal.”
—Joyce Antler, author of You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother and Professor Emerita, Brandeis University

“An important work. For every second-wave feminist, this book is a continuation of the consciousness started in the 1960s, and an expansive and intimate story for anyone who has been or intends to be a mother.”
—Ruth Rosen, author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America

From the Publisher

2017-08-29
An insightful look at the relationships between senior mothers and their middle-aged daughters. Butler (Cancer in Two Voices, 1991, etc.) and Gefen (Clear Lake, 2013, etc.) are both mothers in their 70s, navigating the shifting dynamics with their adult daughters. They note, in an introduction, the current lack of resources for older mothers and the lack of books on motherhood in general that simply describe experiences rather than criticize them. For this collaborative work, they interviewed 78 mothers, ages 65 to 85, all of whom have daughters in middle age. Most of the interview subjects live in the San Francisco Bay Area but are diverse in terms of ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. To protect their subjects' privacy, Butler and Gefen wisely created six composite mothers "who represent the demographic characteristics of those in our study." Each chapter discusses one of eight themes that emerged over the course of the interviews, such as how mothers define their closeness to their children, how they accept changing roles and navigate traumas, and how they prepare themselves and their kids for the future. In general, the authors found that older mothers understand their children's many commitments but still want more from their current relationships: "We are struck again and again with their strong yearning to be close to their daughters at this time in their lives," the authors note. To relate these findings, they aptly weave their conversations with interviewees into their general conclusions. For example, "Margo" tells of her daughter "Elise," who lives in a cottage in the backyard, and she provides an exception to the aforementioned pattern of wanting more closeness: "She's right under my nose all the time," she says. "I suppose that's being close." Such frank admissions bring this book to life, because although readers know that Margo is a composite, her comments, and those of other mothers, ring true. And even though Butler and Gefen often search for patterns, they recognize that "no two mother-daughter relationships are alike," nor should they be. Most older mothers of daughters will connect to at least one narrative in this book, which also includes discussion questions. An important personal and sociological perspective on women's lives.

Kirkus Reviews