My Mother/My Self Quotes

“Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else.”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“Nancy, you know I’m not really good at this mothering business,” she says. “You’re a lovely child, the fault is not with you. But motherhood doesn’t come easily to me. So when I don’t seem like other people’s mothers, try to understand that it isn’t because I don’t love you. I do. But I’m confused myself. There are some things I know about. I’ll teach them to you. The other stuff– sex, love and all that – well, I just can’t discuss them with you because I’m not sure where they fit into my own life. We’ll try to find other people, other women who can talk to you and fill the gaps. You can’t expect me to be all the mother you need. I feel closer to your age in some ways than I do my mother’s. I don’t feel that serene, divine, earth-mother certainty that you’re supposed to that she felt. I am unsure how to raise you. But you are intelligent, and so am I. Your aunt loves you, your teachers already feel the need in you. With their help, with what I can give, we’ll see that you get the whole mother package-all the love in the world. It’s just that you can’t expect to get it all from me.”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“The primary rule is always that a mother can’t go wrong, ever, by encouraging her child after age one and a half to be as individuated and separated as possible. If she was not as good a mother before as she would like to have been, she must get over her guilty desires to overcompensate, and place herself on the side of the child’s developing”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“Love is not an indivisible emotion,” says psychoanalyst Richard Robertiello. “Our job as adults is to separate out the elements in this big package we got from mother which she called love, and to take in what she did give us, and to look in the real world for those other aspects we did not get from her.”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity