Mothers, daughters and friends

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By DAVID YOUNT
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 09, 2007

When social commentator Rachel Johnson announced that her daughter was her best friend, the 12-year-old snapped back, "No you're not, you're my mother."

Still, the 41-year old mother persists in acting like her daughter's pal. "I love dancing around the kitchen when I'm cooking," she confesses. I love screeching like a castrato along to her Mika album. I love chatting to her amusing boys/girlfriends. I love watching television with her."

All of which "bring her out in goose bumps," prompting the outburst: "I'm warning you. If you ever, ever do that in front of any of my friends, I swear I. Will. Kill. You. Face it, Mum, you're sad."

With some resignation, Rachel Johnson acknowledges of the mother-daughter relationship that "She is a girl, I am a woman. She is a chick, I am the hen." And the mother wonders, "Why is it that fathers never claim they are best friends with their sons?"Rachel theorizes that "The current generation of parents is full of (1) aging baby boomers and (2) single mothers, and both these sorts of parents are predisposed to treat themselves like the children they should themselves be preparing for adulthood."

Single mother Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, actually socializes in public with her daughters as if they were sisters on the prowl for boyfriends.

Then there are mothers who demand not friendship but dependency of their daughters. The novelist A.M. Holmes, abandoned in infancy by her mother, was adopted by strangers and became obsessed with fantasies about her birth mother. "In my dreams," Holmes reveals, "my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, movie-star beautiful. Incredibly competent, she can take of anyone and anything."

Reality intervened 31 years later when a woman named Ellen tracked down Holmes through the lawyer who had handled her adoption. Out of the blue, Ellen, Holmes's birth mother, phoned her daughter. "Your cover is blown," she announced. "I know who you are and I know where you live. I'm reading your books."

Thus began a classic shake-down on the part of an unmarried, neurotically needy and financially insecure woman who, after all these years of anonymity and separation, demanded that her daughter take responsibility for her.

"You take better care of your dog than you take of me," her mother complained. "You should adopt me _ and take care of me."

The mother stalked her daughter until her death in 1998, revealing the identity of Holmes's father, who was married when she was conceived. Holmes finally met her birth father, Norman, who revealed that he and his wife had offered to adopt her at birth, an offer her mother refused in favor of anonymous adoption.

Despite these exceptions, we honor the vast majority of mothers, who demand neither friendship nor dependency from their children, but simply love and cherish them. Happy Mother's Day.

(David Yount's 10th book, "How the Quakers Invented America," will appear this summer. He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com)