Quotations About / On: DAUGHTER

The father of a daughter 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.

Listening to learn isn't about giving advice—at least not until asked—but about trying to understand exactly what someone means, how it is that someone looks at and feels about her particular situation.... Listening to learn from a daughter in adolescence, conspiring with her thoughts and feelings, keeps a mother in touch with a daughter's growing and changing self.

A father is available to help his daughter balance both her love and her anger toward her mother, to moderate the inevitable emotional extremes in the intense mother-daughter equation. With Daddy's steadying influence daughters can learn to be comfortable with healthy anger, rather than feeling that they must be eternal good girls who must at all costs conceal it.

He says he loves my daughter:
I think so too; for never gaz'd the moon
Upon the water as he'll stand and read
As 'twere my daughter's eyes: and, to be plain,
I think there is not half a kiss to choose
Who loves another best.

The normal family triangle, then, provides the daughter with a stage upon which to rehearse her separate identity. When the parents' marriage is relatively free of conflict, the daughter can go from one parent to the other for an emotional safety valve, to let off steam. Having equal, unambivalent access to both parents—and spared their competition for her loyalty—she can then concentrate not so much on dual allegiance as on simply growing up.

Sexual activity, for women, has a history of vulnerability, in a way it simply does not have for men. The mother has to teach this hidden text to her daughter. The mother's warnings, her attempts to halt sexual development in her daughter, are not so much signs of disapproval or envy, but of fear.

Unlike the mother-son relationship, a daughter's relationship with her mother is something akin to bungee diving. She can stake her claim in the outside world in what looks like total autonomy—in some cases, even "divorce" her mother in a fiery exit from the family—but there is an invisible emotional cord that snaps her back. For always there is the memory of mother, whose judgments are so completely absorbed into the daughter's identity that she may wonder where Mom leaves off and she begins.

'Throw down the ball, ye Jew's daughter,
Throw down the ball to me!'
'Never a bit,' says the Jew's daughter,
'Till up to me come ye.'

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, a license to be different from your mother and still be loved. . . . Freedom is . . . not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

Andrews: Do you mind if I ask a question frankly? Do you love my daughter?
Peter: Any guy that'd fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined.
Andrews: Now that's an evasion.
Peter: She grabbed herself a perfect running mate. King Westley! The pill of the century. What she needs is a guy that'd take a sock at her once a day, whether it's coming to her or not.