The Strained Relationship Between Black Mothers And Their Daughters

I know my mother loves me. Not because she was the most loving, affectionate mother in the world or because she was fluent in all five love languages. But mainly because I choose to believe that everything my mother did she did out of love, even the things that didn’t feel too much like love.

Growing up, my mother had three jobs: provide the necessities, keep me from being “fast,” and remind me that we weren’t friends. And boy did she do her job, so well at times that it felt like being her child was just as much a job as her being my mother. For a while, I thought it was just my childhood experience that left me longing for the dark-skinned Aunt Viv meets Claire Huxtable mother I never had. But as I became an adult, I found that the relationship dynamic between my mother and I was far more common than I’d anticipated. This secretive, temperamental, unapologetic, tough love expert wasn’t just my mom, she was a lot of our moms.

As I found myself sitting amongst friends, exchanging stories about whoopings so severe they took your breath away, I couldn’t help but wonder how long we’d normalized maternal abuse in our community. After all, this was abuse, right? Sure, our mothers weren’t locking us in the attic, but we’d be lying if we said a lot of them didn’t use discipline as their personal stress reliever. And if we deemed these behaviors normal, what was the likelihood we were guilty of them as well, perpetuating a cycle of abuse towards our daughters simply because we “made it out alright”? When did maternal toxicity in the home become the acceptable standard and why had the Black community been so hesitant to condemn it? Black mothers certainly loved their daughters, so why didn’t it feel like it?

“You better watch them lil’ girls you call your friends.”

A lot of our mothers are the reason we don’t get along with other Black women. And a lot of their mothers are the reason they didn’t know any better. I was raised in a home where I learned two things about women very early on, the first being that they were not to be trusted and the second being that you didn’t keep too many around.

Although my mother had friends that were women, she often spoke of them with distrust and anxiousness. Despite her…