I’ve shared a lot about my mental health challenges which do stem from my childhood and how my mother raised and treated me. I’ve written about my absent biological father which also lends to my mental health challenges. And while mental health is a journey of its own, I haven’t written about the journey a daughter herself takes through life. This journey begins at birth. For our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, some become daughters later in life. However and whenever you “become” a daughter, you enter into a complex journey of your own, mixed with so many emotions I won’t even bother trying to name them all right now. You know the emotions you have felt as a daughter and those emotions change sometimes by the second, at least for me they have and certainly still do. But how does this relate to being a daughter? Don’t we all experience changing emotions?
The answer is yes. Of course, yes. I am writing from the perspective of being a daughter, from the inner soul of infants who become daughters from no choice of their own to children, teens and adults. As daughters we are “assigned” many expectations from a very early age, and for the purpose of this blog those assignments come from one’s mother. I can only speculate what it feels like to be a daughter as an infant. But that infant is still a daughter, and the daughter’s journey has begun as she takes her first breath. As a daughter grows, so does her journey. And how she travels that journey is so dependent on her mother. Actions and inactions, emotional maturity, parenting style, and mother’s own mental and physical health shapes her daughter and how her daughter travels her journey. How should the daughter look, feel, behave, perform, etc. as she walks through her journey? One may say, “Well, the daughter travels it however she sees fit.” Wrong, I say. Mother is so deeply entwined with a daughter’s journey. As I write about the daughter journey, I’m writing it from the perspective of a daughter who has been raised by an emotionally absent mother. While I’m not an “expert” in the field, I believe I have my own expertise because I, Kristin, am the adult child of an emotionally absent mother.
Yes, my journey is my own. My journey looks differently than your your journey. However, daughters with emotionally absent mothers have soooooo much in common with one another. When I talk to other daughters with emotionally absent mothers, our journeys seem to parallel one another’s. It’s both sad and refreshing, but oh my how it is validating! Every encounter on our journey and how we feel and interact with that encounter has too often been prescribed to us daughters by our emotionally absent mothers. Fuck the “journey”, emotionally absent mothers prescribe everything about their daughters’ lives. I’m here to share my story and I hope you come along with me on my own journey.
With joy,
K
