“I only want what is best for you.” This is a phrase often said by mothers to their children. But in the real world, parents do make mistakes and sometime emotionally hurt their children. The film “Mothers and Daughters” peels back the many layers of hurt and love that emerge in relationships between generations of women.
“Mothers and Daughters” has a cast of characters whose lives are interwoven. One character is a photographer with a successful career who becomes pregnant and must decide if she is going to parent the baby. Another character discovers that the person she thought of as her mother growing up is actually her grandmother. And then there is a mother who is contacted by her biological daughter, whom she placed for adoption as an infant.
They find out they have a lot more in common than they realize. Her biological daughter wants to meet her but can she go through with the meeting?
Questions that were asked throughout the movie are resolved in Mother’s Day celebrations. The film ends with a showing of photographs of the different mother figures and family situations that were revealed in the movie.
Two quotes from the movie that stood out to me are: “Everyone wants to know where they come from,” and “Some people have one mother and some people have more than one.” Both are very true statements that some people outside of the adoption community do not understand. One reason we have an open adoption with our daughter’s birth parents because I do not want her to wonder about her background.
There are a few wording choices I would have changed in the movie, including replacing “gave up for adoption” with “placed for adoption.” But, it is a poignant movie full of emotion. It deals with many aspects of life: illness/death, aging parents, guilt, finances, forgiveness, “being enough,” and love.
