Was talking to my oldest friend today - someone who has known me for over 40 years but who I don't speak to often as we live a long way from each other and life tends to get in the way. As she has been around my family when we were growing up, she knows the problems that my brother and I had with our mother...namely that she is completely self-obsessed an narcissistic, likes playing the martyr and is totally unsympathetic to anyone who is having problems. I could go on!
Anyway, was talking to this friend about some work that I've got coming up that will take me to France and then Italy for several weeks and she asks what will happen to the girls when I'm away - so I said that DH will look after them as he's retired now and home most of the time and enjoys being a SAHD and reminded her that he looked after them alone for 3 months last year when I was in New York so could easily manage for a few weeks. She then completely turned on me an accused me of being a bad mother and not being emotionally attached to my DC and then went onto say that she's not surprised and doesn't blame me because how could I actually know what it's like to be a mother when I had mine.
I was outraged, but now, thinking about it, I'm wondering if she's right. To be brutally honest my mother was never a "mother" to me and so I don't really have that experience of being a daughter and doing mother and daughter things. TO this day we have never done things like go out together for the day or spend time together alone. So when I hear about mothers doing things like that with their daughters I kind of feel envious. And, because I had the girls late and because I had this experience myself, I always made a point of making sure that I was a different mother to mine. I often ask myself "what would my mother do" in a situation and then do the opposite. But I guess it isn'''t working and maybe I am emotionally detached and repeating her mistakes because I'm putting my career first (she hated being at home and so put us in boarding school at 8y so she could return to work) and leaving everything to their father (who is fab btw). But I know that, like my mother, I would resent them if I stayed at home so the life that we have seems the ideal to me - the girls are close to both of us and I intend on doing all the mother-daughter things that I never got to do and they don't seem damaged by me....I just don't want the relationship with them to be like the one I have with my mother....which is a non-relationship really.