Peg Streep

Drawn from research and the real-life experiences of adult daughters, Mean Mothers illuminates one of the last cultural taboos: what happens when a woman does not or cannot love her own daughter. Peg Streep, co-author of the highly acclaimed Girl in the Mirror, has subtitled this important, eye-opening exploration of the darker side of maternal behavior, “Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt.” There are no psychopathic child abusers in Mean Mothers. Instead, this essential volume focuses on the more subtle forms of psychological damage inflicted by mothers on their unappreciated daughters—and offers help and support to those women who were forced to suffer a parent’s cruelty and neglect.

Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

Mean Mothers

martina klix 

—Did she feel loved as a child? I never ask this question directly because it’s too difficult to admit that “No, my mother didn’t love me.”

It requires persistent courage and hard work for an unloved girl to grow up to become a loving mother

Each of us hears her mother’s voice inside her head, but those with a mean mother have a more difficult time preventing that voice from continuing to hurt them

I knew it first by the way she stiffened when I tried to sit in her lap or touch her arm and how she turned her face away when I kissed her. She wasn’t like the people who loved me—my father, my grandfather, my great-aunt, or even my teachers—whose faces softened with pleasure when I drew near.

With the birth of my brother when I was nine, I saw that my mother could love a child who wasn’t me.

But I still wanted her love as much as I wanted to be able to answer the question I couldn’t answer as a child: Why didn’t she love me?

What made my mother and me so different? Why didn’t my mother love me the way she was supposed to? Whose fault was it? Hers or mine?

I still couldn’t understand what it was about me that made me, in her eyes at least, so eminently unlovable

Unconditional love: I finally had the words for what I was missing

Mean Mothers quotes

Join the club