Summary of Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I have always lied to my mother. I was not her whole life, and she knew it. I was not the woman she wanted to be, and she knew that too.

#2 Mothers may love their children, but they sometimes do not like them. The same woman who may be willing to put her body between her child and a runaway truck may resent the day-by-day sacrifice the child unknowingly demands of her time, sexuality, and self-development.

#3 The hardest thing to face in mother is her sexuality. We took on her anxieties, fears, and angers, and we weave the web of emotion between ourselves and others based on what we had with her. We never escape the image of how she was in our sexual lives.

#4 The mother-daughter relationship is often filled with confusion and distrust, which is caused by the mother’s difficulty in communicating her true feelings and intentions to her daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669399834

IRB Media

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Insights on Nancy Friday's My MotherMy Self

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I have always lied to my mother. I was not her whole life, and she knew it. I was not the woman she wanted to be, and she knew that too.

#2

Mothers may love their children, but they sometimes do not like them. The same woman who may be willing to put her body between her child and a runaway truck may resent the day-by-day sacrifice the child unknowingly demands of her time, sexuality, and self-development.

#3

The hardest thing to face in mother is her sexuality. We took on her anxieties, fears, and angers, and we weave the web of emotion between ourselves and others based on what we had with her. We never escape the image of how she was in our sexual lives.

#4

The mother-daughter relationship is often filled with confusion and distrust, which is caused by the mother’s difficulty in communicating her true feelings and intentions to her daughter.

#5

The first lie is that a woman’s sexuality may be in conflict with her role as a mother. We are left with the perception of a gap between what mother says, what mother does, and what the girl detects mother feels beneath it all.

#6

The child’s desire to believe her mother loves her unconditionally is in fact what allows her to deal with the disappointment of finding out that her mother isn’t so perfect. The child needs to feel her mother is real and authentic.

#7

The word love is extremely ambiguous. It can be used to say anything we want. We often use it to describe our relationships with our mothers, and we automatically apply this same pattern to every other relationship we have.

#8

Intimacy is just an old record we replay. We introject our mother’s tangled-up idea of what love is, and then we project it onto our lovers, husbands, and our own daughter.

#9

The daughter may have patterned her own career upon her mother’s, but she will never get the chance to be with her and learn from her. She will always be protecting her mother, which may inhibit the full use of the admirable traits her mother had.

#10

The maternal instinct is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip. It is outside the purpose of this book to prove or disprove the reality of the maternal instinct, but most women enjoy having children and want to be mothers.

#11

The idea of maternal instinct, which idealizes motherhood beyond human capacity, creates a gap between what mother says and what she feels on the deepest level. She is unsure of herself because she cannot be sure of her feelings.

#12

We must give women emotionally, on the deepest level, the alternatives and options of contemporary life. We must enable both sexes to believe that some people have the desire to take care of small creatures like babies, and that this has nothing to do with their sexual identity.

#13

The idealization of motherhood, infancy, and childhood is an invention of modern times. Recent books suggest that only when the desperate struggle for existence had been won could society afford to apportion sufficient amounts of time, emotion, and money to the care of babies.

#14

The glorification of motherhood demands that when a mother gives birth to a child,