Mothers and Daughters Anonymous

With the door shut gently but firmly and the blinds drawn against hectic Ventura Boulevard, the women were left with few distractions. Only an oversize jar of low-fat pretzels and cups of purified water offered something to gnaw on and swallow besides their own grief.

“She dropped me off and that was about it,” Rona began, describing her sense of neglect during recent surgery. “And then she said some unkind things to me and then never called me.”

“She does not ask anything of us and that’s one of the things that’s so painful,” said Irma, next in the semicircle.

“My daughter is also very independent,” said Lenore, adding to the litany of confession-complaints. “From the time she was growing up, she was pushing me away. . . . We’ve never been close, but now I want more closeness.”

And so it went one extended lunch hour in the office of Dr. Charney Herst, an elfin psychotherapist who runs a weekly group session unofficially known as Mothers of Difficult Daughters. For $15 per two-hour session, members can unload their disappointments, find comfort in each other’s experiences and reap Charney’s assurances that tensions between mothers and daughters are universal.

Maybe not universal, but common enough are daughters suffering from substance abuse, Electra complexes and jealousy of their mothers’ success, according to Charney, herself a mother of three who seems to have heard or seen it all through her spiky, brown bangs.

Charney’s a good listener but talks to her clients, too, with a New Jersey accent that seems automatically streetwise.

She assigns them homework aimed at improving communication and maybe heal the relationship. One week, the mothers sent their daughters valentines. Another week, Charney told them to use a “feeling statement” in a conversation, whether in person or on the phone. That meant saying things like, “It really hurts me that you only visit when you need money,” or “It makes me sad that you don’t want to spend more time with your father and me.”

“Everyone creates an idealized mother figure,” Charney told the group, urging members not to be afraid to show their daughters their human, fallible sides.

*

The half-dozen clients gathered in her homey Encino office one recent Tuesday fell into two broad categories--those with overly dependent grown daughters in constant need of (mostly financial) rescuing, and those with daughters who are so supremely self-sufficient that they want little to do with their families.

Both sides of the divide were wracked by regrets, as stricken as any jilted or abused lover. This particular group comprised women over 50--several over 60--and an overriding theme seemed to be growing old alone, without the gratification of grandchildren or the simple companionship of a happy, grown child.

These were educated women in good wool suits and carefully chosen jewelry who, despite successful husbands and materially comfortable lives, yearned for more meaningful relationships in one of the most important and complex areas of their lives.

None was more stark in her anguish than Irma (whose name, like the others, has been changed here). A newcomer to the group, with a porcelain complexion and short, white hair, Irma’s only son is dying of AIDS. Her husband, whom she described as “my best friend,” is older than she and in poor health.

Her only daughter, a financially secure, middle-aged artist who has never married, lives locally but has made it clear she doesn’t “feel it’s a good idea for adult children to be friends with their parents,” as Irma put it.

During a rare but perfectly pleasant shopping trip, Irma recalled, her daughter suddenly predicted her father would die soon, but she expected her mother to adjust to widowhood just fine because of her many friends and activities. A “pulverized” Irma interpreted this to mean: “Don’t count on me, your daughter, to be there for you.”

“I feel like she’s preparing herself to lose a family,” Irma said, dissolving in tears. “But she’s depriving me and my husband of the love we need and she won’t let us give it to her. . . .

“I feel like I will be left totally alone, and I’m just terrified,” Irma continued. Charney replied with gentle insight:

“And you and she are sharing that terror.”

On the other side of the dependence-independence divide was Betty, whose middle-aged daughter suffered a nervous breakdown after failing to become a successful entertainer. For nearly two years, she lived off disability checks and her parents’ largess, until Betty and her husband finally told her they had run out of savings and could help her no more.

“We were becoming a victim of our own daughter,” Betty said. She admitted that she and her husband were so afraid of triggering another breakdown, they became virtual captives of their daughter’s demands.

Charney nodded knowingly. “There is this myth of Mom being an ever-giving, all-encompassing, big-breasted woman, and they think they should be able to suckle on us,” Charney said.

“What she needed,” Charney said of Betty’s daughter, “was a feeding.”

Some women couldn’t help but smile at the image, though humor was hard to find during the emotionally draining session. Another glimmer of comic relief broke through when a couple of the women compared parental injustices as perceived by their daughters’--seemingly minor incidents that still stoked major grudges 30 years later.

*

There was Irma’s daughter’s “orthopedic shoes,” which Irma remembers as nothing more than the “good Oxfords” she insisted her daughter wear instead of the flimsy slippers that were popular at school. And the chipped tooth Christine’s daughter suffered as a young girl, which prompted her to charge her mother--decades later--for the insurance deductible when she got it fixed.

Loretta’s daughter felt so “abandoned” when her parents and younger siblings moved from their Midwestern hometown to Los Angeles that she put up a wall between herself and her mother, turning from a good daughter into a rebellious one. She was in her 20s when the family moved, finished with school and already married, said an incredulous Loretta.

Maybe because of her professional training--she’s a therapist herself--Loretta was otherwise comparatively quiet during the session.

But afterward, leaving the office building for home, she mused on the myriad causes of mothers and daughters drifting away from each other and offered some counterbalance.

“There’s always more than one side to every story.”