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Why I envy my daughter by Anouchka Grose

Dot, my daughter, was the first baby I had ever really met properly and I wasn't quite sure how to hold her. I'd have to look in the mirror at the hospital to see whether we looked plausible as a pair. As I stared at the two of us together, rearranging her to make her look as much like a generic baby as possible, I'd start to notice how amazingly perfect she was. She looked as if she had been airbrushed. She had no open pores, laughter lines or blackheads and her eyeballs were a flawless bluish white.

My daughter's was totally unblemished. I don't think I envied her then. But now that she is nine and already looks extremely elegant in skinny jeans, crisp white blouses and my hats and silk scarves, I begin to see what Snow White's stepmother was on about. And I like to imagine that if I try to deal with it now, I won't have to ditch her in a forest when she becomes 14.

Of course, in fairytales the evil ones tend to be the stepmothers. It would be unbearable to think that Hansel and Gretel's biological mother could be such a bitch. And, clearly, Snow White and Cinderella's real mothers were lovely. If their mothers hadn't died, the girls would have been treated like dolls dressed up, cherished and paraded around proudly. Their real mothers would obviously have done what proper parents are supposed to do, i.e. relinquish large chunks of their own narcissism and put it all into their offspring. If the mums got a bit fat and went a bit grey themselves, so what? They had beautiful daughters to carry on where they left off. Naturally, mothers are like that. Or are they?

Psychoanalysts have tended to represent mothers in radically different ways presumably because they all had quite different experiences themselves. Sigmund Freud acknowledges that mothers and daughters can become rivals, especially when the daughter hits puberty. But for Jacques Lacan, mothers invade their infants' minds and bodies, and basically let it be known that they hold the power of life and death over them. Then Donald Winnicott takes up this idea of good/evil mothers in his address to step-parents, saying that we need the wicked stepmothers we read about in fairytales because they can soak up all the badness contained in the real mother, allowing her to appear entirely good. We wouldn't need to do this if it wasn't so disturbing to think that mothers can be anything but loving and generous. It's acknowledged in the world, albeit at one remove, that mothers can be awful.

When I was my daughter's age, I would lie on my mother's bed and watch her in front of the mirror, dressing up to go out.. I just remember being fascinated by her makeup and jewelry box and her shoulder-padded, sparkly dresses. In her party clothes, she seemed like a magical being one who specialized at vanishing. All I wanted was a ra-ra skirt, but there seemed to be no legal way of getting one. Eventually my mum very kindly offered to help me make one out of the old living-room curtains.. And once I'd got the hang of the sewing machine that was it. I was weirdly dressed, but not badly, and no one would have known that it was all made out of old bed sheets. I have no idea what was going on with my mother at the time. Perhaps she was stressed at work. Or maybe she was teaching us to be resourceful. But in my mind the imaginary poisoning had become a tendency not to encourage me to look nice. So I went for the classic teenage solution look a bit strange. Then you can dress up, but not in a way that will overtly compete with your mum. However, I had mostly got over it by the time I got to secondary school.

The problem now is that early tendencies die hard, and if you find tricks that work it can be difficult to stop leaning on them. I can still sometimes be a bit of a funny dresser. My daughter is mortified by half my wardrobe. I'm not deluded enough to even try to compete. But with the bits that are still left, the worry is that I risk repeating the trick I used with my mum if you can't beat them, pretend you are running in a different race.

I hate the idea that I could envy my daughter her youth and beauty, but then again perhaps it would be strange not to or at least not to admit that youth and beauty have a high cultural value and, by conventional standards, she's going up while I'm going down. The problem doesn't seem to be the presence of envy per se it's more the question of what you do about it. Do I force her to dress in rags? (I think she'd still look good.) Talk to her about it? Pretend it's not happening? Or might it be possible just to enjoy the things that are good about being older less anxiety, more interesting relationships and hope that one day she has the privilege of a daughter of her own to envy?