As mothers and daughters age, their relationship shifts and changes in complex and often demanding ways. Here, women speak openly about the challenges and rewards of mothering mid-life daughters, offering an exploration of how these relationships change with aging.
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.