No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.
Daughters can lift the heart by merely speaking on the telephone, or sharing in a shopping expedition, or calling in for coffee.
My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
The father of a daughter, for example, is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, Daddy, I need to ask you something, he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan. The butter thinks to itself, This time I really am going to remain rectangular, and then it feels very relaxed, and then it smells smoke.
Over time, we would learn each other and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots.
Of all the haunting moments of motherhood, few rank with hearing your own words come out of your daughter's mouth.
I knew then that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how many jars of honey you threw, no matter how much you thought you could leave your mother behind, she would never disappear from the tender places in you.
A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.
My mother hasn’t asked the questions that a normal person would ask, and I’m grateful for it. It’s like the world has become so crazy that it makes sense to her now. I turn on the engine and drive us out. ‘Thanks, Mom. For coming to rescue me.’ My voice comes out reedy and a little wobbly. I clear my throat. ‘Not every mom would do that in a world like this.'
Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.
And thou shalt in thy daughter see, This picture, once, resembled thee.
But no matter what's said, there's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.