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Rosie Thomas, a mother of two, looks at the new breed of confident, successful young women and the predicaments and problems confronting their mothers

On Sundays this empty nest briefly fills up again. Back home they come, nipping in to see mum, sometimes agreeing to lunch but usually preferring dinner, because lunch tends to arrive too hard on the heels of a Saturday night’s partying.

My son turns up hungry for Sunday roast, often with his girlfriend and invariably with his characteristically sharp take on the week’s events. Charlie has a flat of his own, a serious job and a measured routine, and he seems much more like an old friend, a very funny and rewarding one, than my child. Well and good. He’s an adult now.

His sister Flora is 24, two years younger and still only on the margin of adulthood, and our relationship is much more complicated. It is deeply intimate, and at the same time more circumspect because we both understand how easy it would be to hurt each other.

It is Flora’s life that I monitor most carefully, but surreptitiously, with a mixture of amusement, apprehension and – possibly – awe.

First there’s the key in the lock, then the call to announce herself – "I’m here" – then the shedding of some little nipped-in jacket and a yard and a half of scarf, the skitter of high heels or the clump of boots and a quick kiss on the way to the oven to see what’s cooking.

“Oh, yum. I’m starving. You’re the best mum in the world.” A second’s pause, with a stand-up’s timing, before she adds, now with her head in the fridge, “Well, except for Suzanne, obviously. And Barbara. And Jen and Linda and Gay.” The desirability of her friends’ mothers compared to me is an old joke, but it never fails to make us laugh.

She butters a cracker, liberally crumbing the floor, and perches on a high stool, crossing her legs in her tiny skirt. I might have inquired whether she was warm enough in just that, on a day like this, but I don’t.

That’s what it’s like, this mother-daughter relationship. It’s outwardly flippant, quietly concerned, ripe with affection and so important that it takes my breath away.

“So,” she asks, ready to hear and to divulge in turn. “What’s happening?”

What’s happening is that I’m stirring a pan, listening to her, watching sidelong, a hands-on mother again for half a day.

And she is snacking, yawning, flicking through her text messages between remarks, even though she knows the habit infuriates me, and generally reverting to adolescence for just a few hours, before Monday Morning and the demands of The Job come round again.

If we were in a restaurant we’d never visited before, she’d be asking me where the toilet is. Yes, toilet. I’ve given up on that one, and on the nose stud, and on minding when she chooses to dye her blonde hair the colour of Victorian furniture. These details don’t matter, just as my obsessive tidiness, or my part-time melancholia, or resistance to having my clothes borrowed and returned in tatters, don’t matter to her.

The connection itself is everything. Now that I am ageing, I sense ever more strongly how it stretches backwards from the two of us, daughter to mother to mother through unknown generations, and also the way that it is briefly poised, catching its breath before plunging into the future.

My friend Jane Simons is a journalist in her fifties. In the midst of her mature success she still says, “The central part of my life was my marriage, and motherhood. I want Amy to have that too. If only she can parlay her career into the mix.

I know what she means. At 27, her daughter is beautiful and brilliant. Amy has an Oxford First, works for a major charity, will shortly be moving to live in Brazil, and will almost certainly end up ruling the world.

They are Amazons, these girls. The inheritors of decades of feminist achievement and educational opportunity, it doesn’t occur to them to hesitate or to hold back in self-doubt.

They pass out top of the law and medical schools and they stride though the City. And, because they are young and full of energy, Flora and her friends play as hard as they work. They are party girls, fluent in Sex and the City-speak.

They know how to dress, how to use make-up, what jewellery to choose, where to eat and which wine to order. They download and blog and network, and airily pick and choose from their parents’ cultures as well as their own.

Men are a matter of choice for them, like sushi or Marc Jacobs. They are much more confident, informed, more sorted, than we ever dreamt of being at their age.

The only stumbling block for them may turn out be the compromise of marriage, and motherhood itself. What man will measure up to them, Flora and Amy and their dazzling alpha cohorts?

And when the time comes, how will these girls handle the necessary humbling by humdrum motherhood, as experienced by their mothers?

Now in her early sixties, Siobhan James has two sparkling thirtysomething daughters. Both are married, and both have recently had babies.

Siobhan says that she has always been close to her girls. “Close enough to reach out to each other when it was needed. They’ve never really confided in or confessed to anyone else. Except, she acknowledges, during the bad years.

From the age of 14 to 18 Julia, the elder, was a nightmare of recklessness and rebellion. Her sister Gemma was just as bad in her turn, although Siobhan suffered less because every record for impossible behaviour had already been broken. (Ah yes, I remember it well. Teenage girls can flirt with their doting fathers and use their new-found allure to get around them. Mother sees straight through this because – just for now – she does it better. She is therefore obliged to be bad cop all the way).

Then, as soon as they left home, almost magically Julia and Gemma became again the loving, reasonable, considerate creatures Siobhan thought she had lost for good.

Daughters need to scramble free of the nest and fly as soon as possible, whereas sons overcome their laziness just long enough to work out how to spend another few months eating cereal and lounging in their underpants on the parental sofa.

Just as Amy and Flora are doing now, Siobhan’s girls spent their twenties bounding up the career ladder. And then, once they had selected a mate and given birth, they stopped work. No attempt at parlaying for them.

They are both admirably certain that for now, for as long as it takes, being a mother is the best they can do. That’s how confident they are, our peerless daughters.

And how unlike their mothers, the pioneers of having it all by doing it all, who made a weary cliché out of 20 years’ ducking and diving, with one eye on the boardroom and the other on the half-sewn costume for the class play.

Another friend of mine, Claire Robinson, also has two daughters, who are now separated from their husbands. Claire was overjoyed to be present at the births of her grandchildren, and talks of how the intimate mother-daughter bond deepens with age. “I do admire them as grown women,” she says.

“They are so brave and frank. They talk to me in a way I could never have spoken to my mother. It breaks my heart to see them unhappy, but as you get older you learn that they can’t be happy all the time, however much you want it for them. You have to learn to accept as well as empathise.”

In other words, as mothers we have brought them up to be who they are, which is themselves. And potential mothers in their turn.

As relationships expert Deborah Tannen writes in You’re Wearing That?, her book about the dialogues between mothers and daughters, “One of the greatest joys of many women’s lives is the gift of grandchildren.”

Siobhan and Claire agree, but they also acknowledge that, as Professor Tannen puts it, “Their once-great influence has diminished.” It is the end, for them, of Mum Knows Best because she doesn’t, not any longer. Our daughters’ generation have all the information in the world at the click of a mouse. They know the latest on MMR, infant nutrition and speech development.

“Oh mum,” the daughters sigh. “That might have been how it was done in your day, but…”

Siobhan says that as a grandmother she feels that she has suddenly aged by more than her chronological years, although there is a parallel satisfaction that comes from being part of a continuum. The fulcrum of caring and nurturing has moved forwards by a generation. Siobhan is a professional gardener and invariably works in all weathers, but the other day she was digging in the wind and her top rode up to leave her midriff bare. Julia saw it through the kitchen window and came out to tell her to cover up her kidneys or she would catch a chill.

“Just like my granny used to say, not even my mother,” Siobhan laughs. And so the thread tugs.

My daughter, and Jane’s, are at the halfway house. Flora and Amy want to be children again, just for family Sundays. They need a mum, although that job description is constantly changing, but they also deserve privacy and the rewards of independence.

It’s not always an easy course to steer, on either side, but the reward for success is beyond price. It is being so close, “so connected, that the tie seems to go directly from your heart to hers”, Deborah Tannen writes.

The last time Flora was here for Sunday lunch she brought Laura with her – a friend since primary school. They ate everything, ravenously, and afterwards they fell asleep on the sofa, heads on each other’s shoulders, like a pair of puppies after a feed. They looked absurdly babyish and innocent. But I was also piercingly aware that it won’t be very long before Flora stops coveting my Missoni skirt, and gently reprimands me instead because I’m not wearing my sensible vest and it’s a cold day out there.

Some names have been changed. You’re Wearing That? By Deborah Tannen, is published by Random House at £9.99. To buy it at a discount, visit Saga Books

This article was created: 21 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 11 December 2006.

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