Our writer wonders if she should ever tell her daughter her secrets.
TW: This article discusses pregnancy loss and suicide, which may be triggering for some readers.
Sitting across from my five-year-old at the mediocre Middle Eastern restaurant we’ve made a tradition of going to whenever her dad is traveling for work—we’re regulars—I’m slowly but consistently bleeding into a bulky pad lodged between my crossed legs. The lights are questionably dim and my daughter is focused on dipping french fries into her cucumber yogurt. I take a deep breath and allow myself to succumb to the tears that have been threatening all day, knowing she won’t notice me discreetly dabbing them from the corners of my eyes with my paper napkin. I desperately want to tell her that I am having a miscarriage.
Instead, I silently sip on a glass of house red. I haven’t been to the doctor yet for confirmation, but I ordered one anyway. After four prior miscarriages, I know. And at that moment, I wanted my daughter to know, too. I wanted to tell that little blonde curly-haired girl with my eyes and her dad’s smile what was happening in my body—or maybe just what was happening in my mind. That this was it. That she wasn’t going to have a brother or sister. That I tried so hard. That I was so sorry.
But all I said was, “Use your napkin, please,” as she began to wipe her tzatziki-covered mouth with her sleeve.
These days, with all the adult phrases she is throwing around—“probably for the best,” “by the way”—sometimes it feels like I could tell her anything. But this little person doesn’t even know how to keep her face clean while she eats. I knew confiding in her would only be for my benefit. One day I will tell her my story (it’s her story, too), but not there in that dark restaurant, beautiful Syrian music filling the air.
I am grateful to have a daughter. A girl who loves to slip her small feet into my green satin heels and wobble past the mirror in my room; a girl who is fascinated by the way I dab blush on my cheeks and swipe my lashes with mascara; a girl who looks at me like I could be her future. I see myself in her, and I see all the things that will make her so much better than me; the things I hope she never goes through; the things I know she inevitably will.
I’m often overwhelmed with a palpable sense of knowing that I will be there for her; a tether to stability, warmth, and comfort, I hope, as she navigates her way from girlhood into womanhood. We will be close in a way that my mom and I never were while I was growing up. I had barely gotten my period when my parents divorced and my mother moved out; absent for anxiety-inducing conversations about sex, head-nodding talks about the struggles of being a teenage girl, and the door-slamming fights that undoubtedly come with it all.
I envision our life unfolding as a mother/daughter duo—especially now that she will be my only child—one of those units that I had witnessed from afar. I see her crawling into bed with me after her first taste of heartbreak, wanting to be held like she does now; me absorbing her pain yet savoring every minute of her body so close to mine. I picture us out to dinner, the server joking that we must be sisters, her rolling her eyes and me trying to hide a smile. Our own Gilmore Girls situation.
Of course, I didn’t get pregnant with my daughter when I was 16 like Lorelei Gilmore. I was 36 (if it had been the former, secondary infertility certainly would have not been an issue), and her father is my partner. But despite my age and marital status, in many ways it will be just us—us girls. She will have no siblings to confide in, and I will have no other children to take my attention away.
While this almost feels like fulfilling some sort of I’m-not-my-mother prophecy, living out what I never had, I worry about this type of relationship, too. Beyond the anguish of not being able to give my daughter a sibling when my own siblings, three brothers, have meant so much to me (and the spiral I go down when I start to think, she will also never be an aunt, her kids may never have cousins…), I worry that our sole mother-daughter status may damage her.
Many teens were envious watching the Gilmore Girls “best friends first and mother and daughter second” relationship. But looking at it from an adult lens, this type of dynamic can be quite problematic. Last year, psychologist Dr. Nicole LaPera tweeted, “Lorelai and Rory are the classic codependent mother and daughter. Rory is parentified by her emotionally immature parent. Lorelai uses her as her sole confidant (BFF), and there are no boundaries…”
For some reason I’m not burdened by the “mom guilt” so many working mothers I know feel, but I worry about becoming the burden. What happens if I blur the lines? If one day I’m sitting across from my daughter in a dark restaurant and I let her really see me—my miscarriages, my closest brother’s suicide—will I “parentify” her and make her feel like I’m the one who needs to be taken care of? Or worse, will she, in turn, not know how to take care of herself or maintain her own healthy boundaries?
“Children should never be burdened by the struggles of their parents,” Jillian Amodio, a licensed therapist and founder of Moms for Mental Health in Annapolis, Maryland, told me. “Sharing life experiences is fine with boundaries, but oversharing can create anxiety, fear, guilt, worry, and a sense of responsibility that is not appropriate for a child to feel for their parent or caregiver.”
My daughter, of course, knows that my brother, her uncle, died when she was almost four. When the sadness that now lives inside me begins to show in my eyes or the corners of my mouth, often when I’m putting her to bed, she’ll sometimes say, “Are you thinking about Michael?” Always. But she doesn’t know the details of his passing, and I’m scared of the day I will have to tell her.
“Having awareness and knowledge of a parent’s struggles is different than being burdened or enmeshed in them,” Amodia explains. “Another common [parenting] pitfall can be ‘trauma dumping.’ This might seem like a way to relate or have a child understand where the parent is coming from, but trauma dumping is different than offering a story about a life experience.”
She advises assessing your motivation for telling your child about your struggles. “Are you looking for validation? Sympathy? Or to connect or relate?” she asks. “A child is not your therapist, and a child is not your friend.”
Looking back at that moment with my daughter in the restaurant, I could have answered “yes” to any of these questions. With my husband across the world in a time zone where everyone was deep asleep, I wanted someone to talk to. I also wanted my daughter to know, or perhaps more accurately, to tell myself out loud, that her being an only child wasn’t my choice. That it wasn’t my fault.
I held myself back then, but what about when she is 15 instead of five? As she starts to navigate her own personal life beyond playdates and ballet class, is that when I should start letting her in on my own? And if I don’t, how close can we be?
Being children of Baby Boomers, the generation with the highest divorce rate, many of my friends were raised by single parents. While I lived with my dad from the age of 13, my closest friends were having their own Gilmore Girls scenarios with their mothers. There was a closeness that made me jealous; there were boyfriends that took their mom’s attention away; there was teenage angst mixed with grown-up responsibilities.
I asked one of them, Bryn, whose two older siblings were almost in college when her parents split, what it was like to have a mother who confided in her—though she assured me that the intricacies of her parents’ relationship were not revealed to her until later in life.
“Ever since I was a young teenager, my mom’s been very open and honest with me,” she told me. “Throughout middle and high school she dated a man who put her through a lot of emotional strife, and at times she was very visibly upset. So she would tell me what’s wrong, and be honest about it, and I would comfort her. According to her, I was ‘wise beyond my years’ when it came to advice. I remember liking that, knowing that I was helping her in some way.”
Another friend, Melissa, 48, whose daughters are now in college, began confiding more in them after she separated from her husband when they were 5 and 9. She admits she probably told them too much. “I didn’t have an adult partner around to talk to, so I talked to the girls,” she says. “As a single mom, it’s hard to hide how you’re feeling. When I was giddy about a new relationship, or crushed beneath heartbreak, they knew.” Though when I asked if she ever turned to them for advice like Bryn’s mom, she laughs, “Only about fashion.”
“When mothers treat their daughters like friends, sharing personal or dating life details, it can have a complex impact on teenage girls,” says Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a NYC neuropsychologist and the director of Comprehend the Mind. “Such openness fosters a deeper bond and connection between them, creating a supportive space where girls feel comfortable seeking advice and sharing their own experiences.”
However, this approach can also have negative consequences. “Blurring the boundaries between parent and friend roles may confuse teenage girls about appropriate levels of disclosure and hinder their ability to establish healthy boundaries in relationships,” says Dr. Hafeez. “Moreover, prematurely exposing them to adult topics can overwhelm and burden them emotionally, potentially causing anxiety or insecurities.”
When I asked Bryn how she thinks her relationship with her mother has affected her own relationships, she said it’s been positive “for the most part,” but that she can sometimes expect too much from others. “I’ve wanted—and still want—people to be honest with me from the jump, and most people aren’t. Perhaps my expectations are too high, but as I get older, I see these as good qualities: honesty, accountability, self-awareness.”
Now in her 40s, Bryn says if she had her own children, she would take a similar, albeit a bit “softened,” parenting approach.
Another friend, Kara, a 44-year-old single mom with a 16-year-old daughter, has gone in the opposite direction of her own mother. “My mother is, and was, very emotionally withholding and has never exhibited any sort of maternal inclination towards me, so I have made a conscious effort with my daughter to always be open with and available to her,” she told me. “We have a very tight bond, and I feel incredibly lucky for that.”
Like Melissa, Kara has also felt that she has overshared at times. “There are certainly things that I have shared with her in moments of stress or anger or sadness that I look back on and think, Eek, that was not a mom-of-the-year moment by any stretch, that was TMI,” she says. “Because we are so close, it’s easy to sometimes forget that she is not only my child, but she is a kid too, and my problems and issues look very, very different from her problems.”
On the flip side, Kara thinks her parenting approach has opened up a great dialogue between her and her daughter, without going too far. “I have been able to have very frank talks with her about her dating life,” she says. “She has very strong boundaries in her interpersonal relationships… My own mother has zero boundaries, which has fostered a pretty adversarial relationship between us over the years. So I want my daughter to always exercise her boundaries—I think it only makes our relationship and bond that much stronger.”
Melissa says her parenting style has affected each of her daughters differently. “One of them, I think it brought us closer. We’re pretty tight. The other, not so much,” she says. “It’s been rough on her when I’ve shared hopes and dreams that didn’t pan out,” Melissa says, explaining that this came to light during a family therapy session. “It was a hard thing for me to hear, but a good thing. I didn’t realize how much faith she had in me, and how hard the disappointment hit her when my plans for us went sideways.” Since then, she has tried to be more conscientious about what she says to both of her daughters.
Kara has learned that it is best to take her time and think about how she should respond in certain situations. “It’s super hard sometimes to temper an emotional reaction, and I don’t always hit it just right, but I am proud of the parenting moments I’ve had with her where I’ve been able to model an appropriate response or level of communication.”
Last summer, I found myself in an unintentional phase of reading memoirs by women whose mothers had no such restraint. Books about narcissistic moms with no boundaries, and the sometimes joy, but mostly havoc, they wreaked on their daughter’s lives.
In the first, Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game, a mom tells her 14-year-old daughter about her affair with her husband’s best friend, and she becomes her accomplice (and confidante) in keeping the secret that would tear her family apart—with, as one could imagine, disastrous effects on her mental health.
The second, Don’t Call Me Home, is about author Alex Auder’s childhood growing up at the Chelsea Hotel, adoring and abhorring—and often parenting—her own mother, Andy Warhol muse Viva. She witnessed more drama before the age of 18 than many of us will see in our lifetimes, thanks to her mother’s erratic behavior, lack of boundaries, and of course, the infamous location.
Both these books were gifts, so I wasn’t seeking this subject matter out, but sometimes the world feeds you what is already on your mind. The mother-daughter relationship is also quite a popular topic. Would Rory Gilmore have written one of these memoirs?
Of course, these two books are extreme examples, and nothing like my childhood, but they still felt a little too close to home and ultimately made me swear off reading books about toxic mother-daughter relationships for the foreseeable future. They also made me think about how I will foster the closeness I crave with my daughter without inspiring her to write a memoir about my parenting.
Amodia says it is important to be open, honest, and transparent with our children, though my instincts were correct when I refrained from telling my five-year-old about my miscarriage that night. “Children are perceptive. They can tell when something is wrong or ‘off.’ Keeping a child in the dark or pretending everything is perfect when it’s not can breed anger, anxiety, resentment, and fear,” she says. “It is also beneficial for kids to recognize that parents are humans, too. We don’t have everything figured out, and life is not always perfect. However, it is equally as important to keep things age-appropriate.”
When my daughter gets older, Dr. Hafeez says maintaining a close relationship with her while preserving clear parent-child boundaries will be a delicate balance of nurturing connection and establishing appropriate roles. “Leading by example is crucial; demonstrate healthy behaviors, boundaries, and self-respect in your own actions,” she advises. “Encourage your daughter’s independence and autonomy, allowing her to make decisions and solve problems while providing guidance when needed … Provide emotional support without relying on her for your own emotional needs.”
The other night in our kitchen, my daughter told me that all the kids in her kindergarten class have siblings, and that she knows all their names. I listened as she listed them off and relayed whether they were younger or older than her classmates; each name—Leo, Willa, Hank—like a small brick being laid upon my hollow chest. When she finished, I took a deep breath and kneeled down to her level.
I looked into her bright-blue eyes and said, “I really, really wanted for you to have a brother or sister. I tried so hard, but my body just couldn’t do it.”
“I know, Mommy,” she said as she wrapped her arms around me. “I am just happy I have you.”
**Some of the names in this story were changed for anonymity.
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Megan Cahn started her editorial career at Sassy’s less irreverent younger cousin, CosmoGIRL. She went on to work in the women’s lifestyle space at publications such as ELLE, Refinery29, Cup of Jo, and Best Life. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, cat, and five-year-old daughter, who has adopted her childhood Cabbage Patch Kids collection.
