Domestic Intelligence

I think the issue of envy occurs when the mother has some unresolved desires/ unattained personal goals, or depression in her own marriage, and the feeling of powerlessness to address these marital problems.
I think that if a mother has led somewhat of a fulfilling life, and believes in the process of her own ongoing spiritual and psychological evolution, then there is no need to envy anyone, especially your own daughter. Of course there are times when our happiness for someone else has traces of envy, especially if we are feeling particularly vulnerable that day or that week, or if we have suffered one too many losses in the recent past.
I have always worked hard at conquering my own feelings of envy, because I feel envy is generally an unproductive emotion, unless I am using those feelings to figure out what is lacking in my life. To feel envy, implies that we are somewhat less happy for our daughter than is possible. I think that I genuinely and thoroughly enjoy other peoples happiness, knowing that happiness is often times fleeting.I think I also can feel happiness for others(with the absence of envy)because I have confidence that I can generate my own happiness, if not now, then tomorrow.

Dear Dr. Terri Apter:

Greetings! As you may know, I am a psychologist and the author of many books, including Women and Madness (1972) and Woman's Inhumanity to Women (2002) which contains three chapters about the mother-daughter relationship.

I am writing because you seem to have misunderstood and even reversed what I wrote in Salon about mother-daughter envy. My point was, sadly, quite opposite from the subject of your article. In my instance, the daughter, Rebecca Walker, seems to have based an entire career on criticizing and shaming her mother, the great, and greatly talented, Alice Walker. Indeed, like some other historical daughter figures, which is what I wrote about in my article at Salon, Rebecca has embraced more traditional views and castigates her mother for not sharing them. The mother remains silent. It is true, that many mothers also envy their daughters' youth, sexuality, ambition, and freedom. I have written about this. But not in the context of the unfortunate and one-sided Walker feud.

Sincerely yours,
Dr. Phyllis Chesler

My mum; everytime I be myself with my OWN opinions, I get a vibe from her, this vib telling me that he's depressed becuse I'm seemily, not like HER. She dosn't think about anything, to have an opinion. he i mentaly handycapped, I think so. Thn if I show som vonrability, she's ine, she's on top ofthe world lol. thought it was just soemthing to do with HER.

mother envy is very common. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

Dear highly educated ones...DR. Apter, DR Chesler...

I think the most frustating portion of the small article is the lack of focus on a divorced woman with daughters.

Being in my 40's I have found many of us with extremely jealous mothers. It is a very big topic. Life was different for them.

Sons are allowed go off and marry and are expected to support a wife.

Daughters of a divorced mother are expected to not have childrem.
so they can have a career to financially take care of there mother.

A good portion of mothers hated having families during the 60's and many of them entered career fields and left us off to be raised by grandparents. (I only have one girlfriend who's parents did not divorce during the 70's) The rest of us are saddled with the burden of manipulative mothers who feel we are there cash cows.
We replaced the the exhusbands as support systems while our mothers say I made the ultimate sacrifice so you need to respect your mother. Basically we are the supllemental income.

My lay off was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Without anything to be envies of my mother is happier than I have ever seen. Now she tells her friends my poor daughter she has no life she never dated, always worked and now she is laid off.
She is a good girl etc..

When I sat in a corp chair my mother panhandled me for every dollar she could get her hands on.

But you ladies aren't going to write about this topic are you ?

Dr Terri Apter,

Damned if we care for our children, damned if we don't. The subtext of your article is Freudian. Freud was a notorious misogynist who claimed that "biology is our destiny" AND that we mothers are rubbish at this supposedly nature-assigned job. We are either cold, remote and punitive, or "overaffectionate" and "suffocating". Bizarrely, he claimed that little girls have "penis-envy" at a time when most little girls had never seen one. As a little girl, I wanted a push-bike, like my brothers. I hadn't seen even a drawing of a penis until I started learning about human biology and I wasn't impressed at all with a "turkey neck".
In the mid 70's the BBC 2 ran a series of interesting documentaries about how babies learn and one of these documentaries revealed that baby girls learn as early as 18 months that the male is validated more than the female. Can I hazard a guess that you had learnt that lesson even earlier?
You say that boys and men's "highly charged love and empathy for their mothers...." No, you don't say it, you paraphrase Freud and allude to his Oedipus complex. I suggest you study the Greek myth and see that he had misunderstood it. Homosexual men are famously good to their mothers and they don't want to have sex with any woman, least of all with their mothers. Homosexual men understand, support and empathise with their mothers because they experience the same kind of patriarchal oppression. Patriarchy as an enduring political system would crumble within ten days if it weren't for its effective separation between mothers and daughters and women from women. It rewards Athenic women like yourself simply because you act as their most effective agent. Of our oppression.
I am a bit surprised however, that such a one-sided article which starts by asking a loaded question and not an open-ended question should have been deemed worthy of publication in an othewise good quality magazine. Your portrayal of teenage girls as long-suffering "victims" of their awful mothers makes me wonder if we are sharing the same planet. Oh, how I wish I could have the "other side of the story" from your mother!
The excessive projections and externalisations could be signs of a pronounced NPD.
To claim that "difficult mothers" are the norm is propaganda, not a fact. Difficult teenagers are the norm. Gather any number of parents and ask them. I have observed that teenagers of such difficult mothers do not challenge them. The authoritarian parents get the respect from their offspring, whereas teenagers of liberal-permissive parents get abuse from their teenage children during the dictatorship of Adolescent Narcissism. Most Guilt-Peddlers (they earn a lot of money by blaming the mothers)focus only on mother-blame for everything whilst disregarding a myriad of other factors which shape the human personality. Mothers are easy targets. There might be "dysfunctional" mothers but I have never met one who threatens her child with abandonment, explodes into rages, issues ultimatums, puts conditions on her love, etc. etc. Let's speculate what would happen to your article if you had reversed the gender of the parent and included a picture of a teenager girl on a bed and her father reclining on it in a suggestive pose! Would it be published?
What about the peer pressure? The media? The obsession with celebrity "lifestyles". Don't you know the young live in an Age of Entitlement?" Not the Age of Enlightenment. The pervasive lack of respect for parents amd older people generally in the western culture, not a word about it. The young respect old age only when it comes in bottles. Mother-envy? Balderdash. Freud again. Some do and even pinch their daughters' boyfriends. They are pathetic just like fathers who pinch their sons' girlfriends or chase young girls who are even younger than their daughters. However, majority of parents are decent human beings who deprive themselves in order to provide for their children not only commodities but better life chances than they had had. This is a pretty universal phenomenon.
Helene Deutch? A Freud's "disciple?" A classical "fille a papa". Wasn't she one of "the freud/fraud's babes" who were entrusted to take the records of widespread sexual abuse of little girls by their male relatives in Vienna to the French National Library to be kept under lock and key until the year 2000. Did you know that freud/fraud had invented his theory of child sexuality to divert the blame from men? The patriarchal "blame the victim" still rules.
Identifying with the opposing gender is the epitomy of the Sartrian "mauvaise foi".

I can just imagine what you will make of my mistake re the word "teenagers" in the wrong place. Being Freudian, you are likely to find it very significant. Be as it may. I am not Freudian.

I can just imagine what you will make of my mistake re the word "teenagers" in the wrong place. Being Freudian, you are likely to find it very significant. Be as it may. I am not Freudian.

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth is to have a thankless child" (From King Lear)
We parents do make mistakes, of course, but not out of the freudian idea of the "chamber of horrors". Him and his ilk had been projecting everything they despise about themselves upon the hated [M]other. What about the envy of older men who send young boys to war? Would you get many journalists ringing you up to do a feature on that?

The teenage daughter does not wish to identify with an "inferior" [m]other so she gives herself up willingly to patriarchy. If she had power outside home, she would not need to compensate by becoming her mother's oppressor. In your articles all this is heaped upon the mother. I am not the only mother who is rejecting this corrosive ideology of mother-hatred. Can I recommend a book called "The Narcissism Epidemic" by Jean M. Twenge, PhD and W. Keith Campbell, PhD? And another one: I Am ok, You are a Brat?" about Myths of Motherhood

Due to house prices my partner and I live with our 2 children in my parents house. My mother and I have always had an up and down relationship but nothing bad.

When my children came along, things changed. My way of bringing them up is very different to how my mother brought us up. The problem seems to be she's fighting me every step of the way.

For example, this morning she didn't like the skirt I put on my baby girl, and this sent her into a mood. I put a blanket down for my baby to lie on as she'd just been fed, she rolled over and managed to bring up a little milk just off of the blanket and onto mums rug. She started swearing, then saying in a nasty way what a mess the house is, etc, etc. I said don't swear in front of them and suddenly it was world war 3. This is just one example of nearly 2 years of what I now see as bullying almost.I don't know how to deal with it anymore and we can't afford to leave. Please help.

I read with interest the previous comments about a mother wanting to sabotage her daughter's happiness, and I can certainly relate to that. Although I am in my 40's, I still have a mother who is unpleasable. I have gone through immense successes and difficult times, and I have always felt that my mother enjoys my difficulties and belittles my successes. This is not enjoyable to experience, and I am the only one of my siblings who experiences this treatment.
I barely have a relationship with her anymore because conversations with her are bad for my mental health. Our fragile relationship has suffered most recently after an attempted reconciliation in which it was necessary to admit all my wrongs and therefore rectify the situation.
I think I am the one who suffers the most severe tongue-lashings because I generally don't agree with her overbearing opinions, and that leads to trouble. She also has control-freak tendencies, and after my father left her, she blamed him entirely. He subsequently returned and confided in me that she blackmailed him (it is probably financial because he is too kind and gentle to do anything sinister).
I find the saddest part of this not that I don't see my mum, because she is such unenjoyable company, but that I don't see my dad. He's getting quite old a fragile, and stays in her shadow for a peaceful life (after she and I have a fight he must cop it horrendously).
Oh, to top it off, she has recently become religious, so that makes her demeanour christian and therefore superior to my awful conduct.
I am a teacher with three lovely children, financial security, a happy marriage and marvellous husband. I think she hates my happiness and loves it when things go wrong for me.
But, how can I have a relationship with my Dad? Any ideas?

My Mother plays a game to get just what she wants. I work in a family business and I can sincerely say jealously is very prevailent and disruptive to the business. I have learnt not to answer to her games and just keep quiet.

My Mother plays a game to get just what she wants. I work in a family business and I can sincerely say jealously is very prevailent and disruptive to the business. I have learnt not to answer to her games and just keep quiet.

My mother is also very mean and always compares me to her friend's childern. I'm extremely successful, and everything I achieved was by myself, but she still claims that if it was not for her I would not be anywhere.....
She abused me both physically and mentally since I was a child. I remember coming home after school and being beaten because I was left handed... She always told me I'm a nobody and I'll always be a nobody and I should never have kids because they are just a constant source of misery.
Recently she is fighting with my dad regarding the house they still own together. My mom wants to get 100% of the profit once the house will be sold, and my dad wants to split it 50-50.
I told both of my parents that I do not want to get involved in this conflict, and now my mother plays a victim and makes me feel like I'm the one responsible for all her problems.
Our last conversation ended in me telling her to have a nice life. I simply cannot take the abuse anymore. I'm 30 years old and do not want to have this negative energy in my life anymore.
I'm trying to forgive her for all the horrible things she did to me, but it's very difficult.

I find these comments very interesting, especially the one from children of envious mothers. In almost all instances, the mother is either divorced or in a bad marriage. In my case, my mother is married to my father still, who is cold, inconsiderate, and rude. Like another commenter related, she often seems happy when things go wrong for me, especially when it comes to relationships.
Thanks for sharing. I don't feel so alone now and realize it's because of her own misery that she tries to make me suffer. So sad...

When I found that out at age 44 (I am now 45)it was a shock to say the least. I didn't know. It does explain a lot and also why my sister is so meanly jealous of me (she admits it openly too - aggressively! - like it's my fault that she's jealous of me).

How I deal with this? How do I come to terms with all of this?

You hint at "what circumstances, under what conditions, might a mother envy her daughter? Well, envy would arise only if a mother lacked that central identification as mother of this daughter, and saw her daughter more as a peer. She would have an unformed view of her life phase, and be oblivious to her emotional input in her daughter's well-being. A woman who suffers envy of her daughter is likely to be powerless in many areas of her life. And a daughter is likely to be terrified by this terrible response, for envy contains a primitive anger, a wish to destroy. It can co-exist alongside love (as it does in siblings), but it marks dangerous relational territory.", but what are the implications given that I was adopted? How does this apply to such a relationship? My sister still "hates" me and my mother and I don't talk.

It's hard for me to understand this whole jealousy mess.

Also, could you tell me how many women {mothers and daughters) you interviewed for this article? Because my counselor expressed that this is pretty common. Is it or is it not?
I'm confused.
Please help.

I'd love to talk it.

Suzanne