A frank portrayal of the challenges and rewards of mothering midlife daughters and 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.
2018 IBPA Ben Franklin Awards Finalist in Psychology
2017 USA Best Book Awards Finalist inHealth: Aging/50+
"An insightful look at the relationships between senior mothers and their middle-aged daughters . . . An important personal and sociological perspective on women's lives."
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Kirkus Reviews
"A brave book, and one that I admire-a book that will help many aging mothers feel less alone and lead to more open exploration, both in literature and in life."
—Ellen Bass, poet and author of
Like a Beggar and coauthor of
The Courage to Heal
"A rich, thoughtful, multi-layered look into the ways that mothers experience their relationships with their middle-aged daughters variously with love, joy, fulfillment, sorrow, anguish, and longing . . . a warm, clearly written, sorely needed exploration of a topic of profound importance."
—Paula J. Caplan, PhD, author of
The New Don't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship and Associate, W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, Harvard University
"A book to learn from and savor. The complex, nuanced stories of these women's relationships with their adult daughters over time form the core of this revealing book as the authors probe the mothers' yearnings for intimacy, issues of distance and alienation, and modes of forgiveness and renewal."
—Joyce Antler, author of
You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother and Professor Emerita, Brandeis University
"An important work. For every second-wave feminist, this book is a continuation of the consciousness started in the 1960s, and an expansive and intimate story for anyone who has been or intends to be a mother."
—Ruth Rosen, author of
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America
