The series Moria crossed the screen and brought to the forefront a bond as intimate as it is complex: that between mothers and daughters. Because every woman was a daughter before becoming a mother, and in that story she learned a way of being a woman as well. “A mother and a daughter, what a terrible mix of emotions, confusion, and destruction.”
Everything is possible and will be done in the name of love. The daughter will inherit the mother’s wounds,” says Eva in Ingmar Bergman’s Love Sonata. What do we take from our mother? What do we repeat? What do we question? What do we need to transform? Reflecting on that bond can help us find answers to questions that we often continue to project onto others.
The loving decisions of a woman in her adulthood are never completely detached from the bond she has established with her own mother. We learned from our mothers how to be women: how she solves problems, how she takes care of her body, what she dedicates her time to, how she organizes her life and her projects, what place she reserves for herself, what place she gives to a partner and to children, what conception she has of love. As daughters we have consciously and unconsciously absorbed that information from a very young age. Let us think about it for a moment.
What Kind of Mother Did We Have?
A loving mother who did what she could to support, care for, and recognize her daughter as another person with different interests and values? A ambivalent mother who, for fear of being excluded from the family, did not intervene when her daughter drifted away from what the family group expected?
A mother who collapsed, mentally and physically, with no capacity to choose or sunk in depression? A narcissistic mother who used her own daughter, trapping her in a relationship of dependence? A silenced mother, inhibited in her speech, unable to name her own distress?
An immature mother who, from her own deficits, leaned on her daughter, reversing roles and giving her responsibilities that did not belong to her? A domineering mother who controlled and imposed her own desires over those of her daughter, privileging submission and obedience?
This is not a normative or moral critique of the maternal role. Each mother did what she could with the resources she had. This distinction, far from seeking to highlight errors or faults, aims to read the effects of that transgenerational transmission.
Mom’s Voice
The mother is the first other from which we organize our subjectivity. She is not only the one who nourishes and cares for us but also the one who introduces us to the world. For a daughter, the mother-daughter bond is the most enigmatic and complex. It is her voice that we internalize, the one who presents the world to us, describes it, and tells us “how things are.”
Mom’s voice shapes the reality in which we begin to live, not only in what she “says” but in an inner word that dwells within us. And so we begin to understand the world along those coordinates: we grasp what it means to love, what is expected of us, of a partner, of love itself.
We learn to keep silent, to endure, to stay quiet, to empathize, or to disappear into the other, to wait. All of that information is absorbed into our lives consciously and unconsciously.
Separating Is Not Breaking
A later time arrives when the girl we were reaches adolescence, and in the mother-daughter dyad a necessary rupture takes place. It is discovered that there is another world beyond the primary family, a new universe where we encounter other perspectives.
The possibility of joining the world, another world that is no longer defined by our primary parental figures: a partner, friendships, personal projects independent of the family, communities or groups, new symbolic referents we admire, those others who stand in difference. This movement makes it possible for us to build a life that is not entirely determined by the coordinates of origin. That we can differentiate ourselves.
We are not talking about discrete actions like stopping talking or not answering mom’s calls, but rather a psychic process of separating from the parents of childhood. A necessary separation that will allow us to begin writing our own story.
Does this exit occur in the same way for all women? Definitely not. Each woman finds her own way to make this passage. There is no universal way to do it. However, in my years of clinical practice, I have worked with many women who, even in adulthood, encounter the mother’s voice breaking in forcefully, giving opinions, imposing, warning, and judging.
Women who even live geographically far from their mother and yet cannot make decisions without consulting her; women who live with their mother and could never leave the family home; women who feel they owe explanations for every choice they make. The mother becomes the main interlocutor, her voice—present or physically absent—determinant or conditioning for any decision of this adult woman.
Mother and Daughter: Two Women
This is psychic work that allows us to stop living the mother as an absolute whole, as a guarantor of meaning and a unique model of what it means to be a woman. In this way, mom reveals herself not only as a mother but as a woman: with desires, with flaws, with her own history.
A woman who does not know everything. Thus unfolds the possibility of a separation that does not break the bond, but transforms it. No longer from fusion but from the meeting of two women, with differences, with boundaries, with individual histories and desires. It does not imply stopping loving each other, but loving each other in a different way.
We are like matryoshka dolls. Our present contains versions of ourselves that we shed and wrestle with along the way, shaping the woman we are today. Processes of gradually shedding what has been deposited upon us to gain greater freedom to move, choose, or make mistakes as many times as necessary.
We do not speak of blaming mom or of lingering in the search for the “inner girl” because we are adult women. Rather, we revisit the history with the aim of putting it to work and thus freeing ourselves from the layers that prevent us from moving to the beat of our own desire.
In the End, It Is About Living One’s Own Life
If you watched the Moria series, you likely walked with the characters across more than one runway of emotions and were moved by many themes (love, sexuality, work, independence, friendship); now I invite you to this space for reflection: did you ask yourself questions about the mother-daughter bond, and could you carry them into your personal marks?
Source: Lorena Baena holds a degree in Psychology (UCA, Paraná, Entre Ríos), a reference in specializing in issues of bonds and traumatic experiences. Author of the book “Separated. Romantic breakup, grief, and reconstruction,” forthcoming to be published @lic.lorenabaena.
