Mothering mothers: an exploration of the perceptions of adult children of divorce.

Hughes, Kate

Introduction

It is only within the very recent past that the children of the divorce boom of the 1970s in Australia have grown to adulthood and are in a position to reflect on the impact of their family's breakdown on their lives. The outcomes for these children using various measures of physical, psychological, emotional and financial wellbeing have been widely explored in the divorce and clinical literature (see Amato, 2000; King, 2002; Neale, 2001; Smart, and Neale, 2001; Wallerstein, 2000; Wallerstein and Kelly, 1980; Wallerstein and Blakesless, 1990; Wells and Johnston, 2001).

Little is known about the ways in which parental separation (1) continues to shape the relationships between adult children and their parents, although it is clear that the degree of ambivalence towards parents correlates with conflict and poor parental relations in early life (Willson, Shuey & Elder, 2003; Hallie, 2007) whether the parents are separated or not. As parents age and their support needs grow, the quality of their relationships with their children become crucial (Bianchi, 2006; Willson, Shuey & Elder, 2006). Levels of contact, and levels of intimacy appear to be key determinants to adult children's willingness to offer care to their aging parents--where contact levels have been low (commonly with fathers) support levels are low and concomitantly, where intimacy levels are high (more commonly with mothers) it has been assumed that ongoing support will be more forthcoming (Wells and Johnson, 2001; Bianchi, 2006).

Intimacy (2) and distance are two themes central to the literature relating to post-separation relationships. There appears to be a general consensus that children and custodial mothers forge a close bond in the immediate post separation period and this commonly persists into adulthood (see Aquilino, 1994; Kruk, 1994; Arditti 1999). But there is no consensus about the efficacy of this bond. Structural family theorists, for example, type such a bond as an example of 'role reversal' which transgresses the role boundaries which generate healthy family dynamics, especially for children:

 ... when the parental alliance breaks down and the emotional
 boundaries are blurred, the children may be induced to assume
 spousal/parental functions. They may take on the role of confident,
 peer or mentor to a distressed parent, as well as 'parent' to their
 siblings (Johnston, 1990: 406).

In other words, children are commonly 'promoted' after separation (Arditti, 1999a: 116) in a way which interferes with, and ultimately destroys, the 'executive leadership' (Johnston, 1990: 405) of the parents. As the data from this project show, this can also lead to adult children giving their parents a performance appraisal. Workplace terminology aside, it is argued by Guttman and Rosenberg (2003) that this inversion blurs the family's boundaries which define both the relationships between individual family members and the relationships between members and the larger family structure per se. Quite what the long-term effects of this are is unclear. Wallerstein's (2000) twenty five year longitudinal study of separated families suggests that it may generate early maturation, and more generally contribute to the plethora of difficulties experienced by the adult children of divorce which the Wallerstein study recounts. Similarly, Amato and Keith (1991) in a meta-analysis of the literature to that date argue that the key three explanations for the relative lack of achievement of the children of divorce are as follows; a decline in their living standards, a depletion of their family structure and the stress associated with the changes which divorce engenders. More recently, there has been considerable attention paid in to the ways in which these results can be ameliorated through the use of mediation during the separation process (see Emery et al, 2001), an outcome which informed the recent changes to the Family Law Act in Australia (Australian Parliament House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs, 2003; Australian Parliament House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, 2005).

Others argue that the increased intimacy between mothers and children which commonly follows separation, whilst being transgressive of patriarchal family roles and structures, nevertheless offers an enrichment of the relationship (Arditti, 1999a, 1999b, Ardini and Madden-Derdich, 1997; Paterson, 2001). Specifically:

 ... the decomposition of the authority structure and group size
 increases communication and disclosure. Indeed there is some
 evidence that single mother parent-child relationships are
 characterised by greater equality, more frequent interaction, more
 discussion, and greater intimacy and companionship--especially with
 older children who are more in touch with a parent's emotional
 state (Arditti, 1999a: 116)

The long-term effects of this are incontrovertible in the literature--separated custodial mothers have closer relationships, into adulthood, with their children than fathers do (Amato, 2000; Aquilino, 1994, Emery, 1999; Kruk, 1994, Wallerstein, 1980, 1990, 2000) and the data from this study support this contention.

It is important to note that it is a common pattern in discussions of post-separation life to use relatively blunt instruments where the characteristics of adult children with separated parents are ranged against those from intact families, where single mothers' relationships with their children are ranged against their married counterparts, and so on. Inherent in such a matrix is a strong sense of deficit where single mothers are consistently 'normed' against others and found wanting (Arditti, 1999a: 118). Paterson (2001) takes this further by suggesting that explorations of the success of single parenting challenge the ideology of the nuclear family itself and are consequently both truncated and undermined (p. 19).

Whilst both of these positions concur with the understanding that single mothers have closer relationships with their children than other family formations, and that these bonds are initiated in the six to twelve months after separation (Kruk, 1994) there is disagreement about whether or not this is advantageous. It is not the intention here to contribute to that debate, but rather to explore the perceptions of this by the adult children of separated parents. In doing so, it is imperative to note that the data presented are memories and that this generates two methodological considerations.

Firstly, as Rice points out:

 The orthodox way to pursue knowledge is, of course, to look for
 explanatory, measurable phenomena and a legal divorce provides a
 convenient marker event for a linear analysis. A different analysis
 would proceed from a social production model. Such a
 conceptualisation invites, creates and shapes new life narrative
 paradigms for women, men and their children and families that are
 multiple and non-linear (p. 579).

This approach requires new non-linear ways of thinking about time, about consequences, about determination and perhaps most importantly, the agency of individuals.

Secondly, when exploring memories of the past it is necessary to acknowledge that history is inevitably reinvented, or at the very least reworked, by the individual in order to add perspicacity to their contemporary perceptions. As Arditti (1999b) argues, the 'children's later description may not reflect the way it was experienced then, but how it feels to them in the present' (p. 117). This caveat does not detract from an individual's account of what happened in the past and how they felt about it, but, conversely, can assist in the enrichment of the exploration of an adult child of separation's perceptions of the links between the present and the past. Such an exploration, which deals with the relationship between separated mothers and their children, from the point of view of the adult children is rare in the literature (see Wallerstein, 2000), largely because it is only recently that the children from the divorces of the 1970s have been in a position to look back on them as adults.

The participants in the study under consideration below differ from those in other studies in their perceptions of their relationships with their mothers. Although they may be intimate with their mothers, far from having experiences of closeness, of support and availability and feeling that their mothers were their 'best friends' (Arditti, 1999a), they described them as angry, bitter, depressed and, more generally, as 'having issues'.

The Generation X Project

This project examined the impact of living in a post divorce society on those raised in the post Family Law Act (1975) era who were themselves raised by separated parents. The aim of the study, conducted in 2003, was to explore the ways in which maturing during that time, and growing up in more than one family, has had an impact on the ways in which these individuals understand themselves (see Hughes, 2005). Now aged between thirty and forty-six, Generation X was the first cohort to have witnessed substantial numbers of divorces amongst their parents' generation and been raised in non-conventional families in large numbers (3). The target sample for participants were members of 'Generation X' (4), whose parents separated before they were twenty.

Thirty participants were selected: fifteen men and fifteen women who lived in suburban Melbourne. Chain-referral was used for recruitment because the cohort of interest was deemed 'hard to reach' by conventional sampling methods (Penrod et al., 2003).The initial participant was recruited via an acquaintance of the research assistant. Sample screening was conducted over the phone and by email when interested participants contacted the author or the Research Assistant. Following the interview with each included participant, as is standard in snowball sampling, they were in turn asked to recommend another (Adriaans, 1992; Biernacki and Walkdorf, 1981). This method generated an ethnically and sexually diverse sample in which each interviewee knew only one other. They had all experienced single parent, step, or blended families. Most had occupations which were either professional or associate professional (5). All were interviewed for between one and two hours, in their workplace or their home.

In-depth, semi-structured, interviews were used in the project with open-ended questions designed to enable the participant to direct the focus of the interview as much as possible such as 'Can you tell me a little about the families you were brought up in?', 'What was it like when your parents separated?', 'Do you think the choices you have made about your relationships have been influenced by your parents' experiences?'. The interviews, conducted by a research assistant, were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded. The data was analysed using Strauss and Corbin's (1998) open coding where 'concepts are identified and their properties and dimensions are discovered in data' (p. 101). This method yielded nine initial codes (consistent thematic clusters): economic and financial issues, general social issues, relationships with parents, the separation, wider family relationships, transition to adulthood, emotional and mental health issues, perspectives on relationships in general and having children. These were then broken down into forty eight sub-codes (Bogdan and Biklen, 1992; Minichiello et al, 1995).

Data about relationships with mothers was not prompted during the interviews but during content analysis, it emerged as a key theme as participant after participant, (particularly females) returned to the way they made sense of their mothers from the point of family breakdown onwards. One of the interesting findings from the Generation X project was the participants' ambivalent feelings towards their mothers. It became clear that as the impact of separation was unpacked, there was a sense that their mothers were damaged by the separation, and that this damage was long-term and, in turn, damaging.

The findings are consecutively ordered starting from the period immediately post-separation, followed by their sense of their mothers a few years

after the family breakdown and the section concludes with the participants' perceptions of their mothers today. This method is used in order to give a sense of the evolution of the participants' perceptions of their mothers as they move from child to adult. A discussion of these findings follows.

'It was awful for her, absolutely awful ...'

The participants first volunteered information about their mothers in the section of the interview which dealt with their feelings about their parents' separation at the time it happened. With the exception of one (Lola) they had all lived with their mothers.

For the most part, and perhaps unsurprisingly given their living arrangements, they saw their mothers--unlike their fathers--as being quite distressed by the end of their relationship. Words such as 'hurt', 'bitter', 'angry', 'scarred', 'humiliated' (and their synonyms) are used in almost all the interviews, and this is even more the case when the separation was initiated by the father. Fifteen of the thirty participants (four men and eleven women) spoke in some detail about their mothers' post-separation emotions and it is these accounts which are discussed here.

Ben's (6) fatherleft his mother after thirty years, having remained together 'for the sake of the children'. At the time of the interview Ben was forty one, and a Journalist:

 My mother was incredibly bitter and angry and hurt and diminished
 by the whole thing, feeling that she'd been made a laughing stock.

Similarly, Jackie's parents remained in a marriage which she, in hindsight, sees as having run out of steam. Like Ben, Jackie's parents finally separated when the children had left home.

Today Jackie is thirty six and is a Social Worker:

 ... it [emotion] was just absent, it was reflective of their
 marriage. Mum was deeply hurt.

Lola's parents parted when she was two and her younger brother was eight months old and still being breastfed. Her father won custody of the two children. Currently, Lola is thirty and the owner of a small business:

 Yeah, it was awful for her, absolutely awful and it's scarred her
 and it effects how she has relationships with everyone

Kelly prefaces her comments about her mother with 'I think Mum and I have a personality clash, a major personality clash'. She was ten when her parents separated, at her mother's instigation. Kelly felt very damaged by her parents' split and its aftermath. She is forty, and a High School teacher:

 I think I do blame her more, though if I think about it rationally
 I know my Dad is at least as much to blame. Certainly, logically, I
 look back on the time and I think she did everything she could to
 provide for us. Like she never told us Dad didn't pay maintenance
 until much later, although she did tell us. But I mean still, at
 least she kept the promise at the time.

When the interview took place, Zenzi was thirty one and working as a Research Officer for a trade union. Like Kelly, she was in the middle of her childhood when her parents separated--she was eight. Her father remained active in Zenzi's life (unlike most of the other fathers who became increasingly distant) which led to bifurcated allegiances as she tried to cope with her mother's depression (see Buchanan, Maccoby and Dornbusch, 1991):

 Our house became just like a place of grieving, you had to be
 really careful of things, not to step ... it was like treading on
 egg shells a bit, to doing a lot to make life as easy as it could
 be for Mum, to being fairly quiet and fairly helpful as I could be
 ... On the one hand I'm still a lot closer to my Dad, but I was so
 shocked by what he had done to my Mum, to watch someone go through
 so much pain and you know what the cause of that pain is, so there
 would be funny sense of split allegiances

'Look, get over it'.

Memories of the months following the separation appear to be less vivid than those of the subsequent years. For the most part, the interviewees remark upon both the length of time of the aftermath of the separation, and the intensity of the associated pain for some mothers. This is consistent with other studies which report that custodial mothers, in particular, tend towards solipsism and depression (Hetherington, 1991). For some, the anger has only marginally subsided today--many years later--and can still erupt under certain circumstances. Roughly half of the mothers remained single.

Here Ben gives an example of the timeline for his mother's feelings, and of their re-emergence. Ben both dislikes it and understands it:

 So I would say the real bitterness in Mum lasted at least ten years
 and then about ten years ago, she met her current partner who is a
 woman and since then, the bitterness has eased. But at the time of
 my father's funeral it all came out again. She behaved quite
 atrociously, really, during my father's funeral and it was because
 it raised for her all sorts of issues about abandonment and things
 like that and the hurt that she felt then and why she had been made
 to feel second best or discarded and all those things that she
 genuinely felt.

In a similar vein, Senna reports on both the longevity and intensity of her mother's feelings which persist today. Senna was seven when her parents separated and she rarely saw her father afterwards. Today she is thirty one and works as a Program Manager for an international development agency:

 I really hate it, but my mother in my experience is not emotionally
 intelligent, she's not able to reconcile or she's not able to
 resolve or let go of things emotionally for her. It's been the same
 for twenty five years. I haven't seen any level of forgiveness or
 resolution in twenty five years. She's not just an angry woman
 constantly, she has her moments, she's quite a sweet woman, quite
 softly spoken and quite gentle. But at times I see her in rampages
 and rages and it's the same level of anger and hate for my father
 and a need for some sort of compensation from him. And I think she
 desperately wanted to go back to Japan and take him to Japan
 because I guess, what she claims is in Japan, if you divorce, the
 financial and social implications for people particularly for
 fathers who leave families, is huge. And she would really like to
 see him suffer all those kinds of things.

Like Senna, Susan's mother has retained a high level of anger. This may have been augmented by the fact that both women were migrants--Susan's parents came from the Philippines--and the separation caused much more social isolation than for those born in Australia. In Susan's case, this has led to a softening of her mother's resentment as she ages and becomes more reliant on Susan, Susan's brother and her grandchildren. Susan is thirty five and a tutor at a university:

 Because it was so difficult for her and she's such a difficult
 person to talk to and to deal with perhaps that's why she's made my
 brother's life and my life difficult because she had no other focus
 because we were both living away from home. I just saw her as quite
 angry, very angry and I think Jim my brother and I got to the stage
 where we were telling her 'Look, get over it'. I don't think she's
 as angry but I think she realizes that perhaps I'm the only thing
 she has now and her grandchildren so she has mellowed and she's
 compromised with me on a few things.

Finally, Zenzi points to the relative impact the separation had on her mother and father. Her father remarried, like all but two of the fathers. Implicit in Zenzi's account, like the others whose mothers remained single and fathers did not, she believes that it was her mother who was the more damaged:

 Apart from grieving very heavily for a long time, I mean I think
 the circumstances in which my Dad left were awful because there was
 a pretty significant betrayal there by two people extremely close
 to her, one being my Dad and the other person being her closest
 friend. Mum had loved my Dad so much so basically there was just a
 broken heart there for a really long time and my sister and I
 speculate even today, because even though she's moved on and she's
 done other things, the impact of that upon her life I think has
 been a lot greater than for my Dad.

'She's challenging'

This section deals with the ways in which the participants discuss their mothers as they are today, but more particularly, they look at their mothers' personalties and offer relatively similar typologies of their mothers as 'having issues' and being inarticulate about emotions. There is an interesting shift from child to adult in these accounts where they discuss their parent from a mature perspective and simultaneously show understanding for them.

Bert, a forty year old Social Worker, was fourteen when his parents separated. Throughout his interview he comments on his mother's psychological health--both at the time of separation and later--arguing that she was unwell:

 I don't know, Mum's had her own issues and to this day it effects
 everything.

Similarly, Kelly, Cibylle and Susan here make statements about their perceptions of their mothers' emotional wellbeing:

Kelly: I hate to say it but she's a bit mad and that's a subjective thing to say but many people agree with me. I also feel bad about it now that she is a bit crazy. She always was a bit crazy. Eccentric maybe is a nicer way of saying it.

Cibylle: She's emotionally closed and doesn't deal with anything on an emotional level whatsoever and I don't necessarily think she's that exciting on a conversational level.

Susan: She's just a very difficult person. She's challenging. I think everything that has happened in her life. Words that come to mind is she can be aggressive, dogmatic, generally difficult, but I think she's starting to mellow.

Tim, whose parents separated when he was seven and is now a thirty one year old Remedial Masseur, has no contact with his mother at all. He felt she abandoned him and his brothers after the separation by living with men they didn't like. He asks 'How can a mother choose someone else over her own kids?' But, as becomes clear, he introduces the notion of having an adult understanding of his mother:

 She's a very selfish woman. I mean the reason my parents split up
 was because she had an affair and then took my father for
 everything he had ... So I won't have contact with her again unless
 she rings and apologises. I can't see her doing that. So to me, I
 have accepted that and that really doesn't bother me to be honest
 ... I don't think she's right herself. She's got her own issues
 which she obviously hasn't dealt with.

The issue of 'issues' appears again in Xena's interview. Here she looks further into the past than the separation for insight into her mother's character. Xena is an Office Co-ordinator, and thirty six:

 She's got issues. She had a traumatic relationship with her mother.
 Her mother was very emotional and used emotional blackmail a lot
 and there were issues there and I think when her mother died, she
 hadn't resolved them, still hasn't to this day and doesn't have a
 chance to now. I think she didn't have a happy childhood ... I
 wouldn't say she's a very happy person generally.

Louise's father left when she was ten and she rarely saw him after that. Now she is forty one and a Radio Dispatcher for emergency services. Having suffered severe depression for most of her adult life, she uses this experience as a lens through which to see her mother's behaviour when she was a child:

 She had her set of opinions and her version always won. But I can
 see in hindsight that was because she was stressed, she was a
 single mother with four kids under the age of ten and she didn't
 necessarily have time to listen to us and she suffered from
 depression herself. So I'm much more forgiving of her now.

Like Louise, Lola looks to her mother's post-separation experiences for insight into their relationship. But Lola is also interested in her mother's role as a grandmother and believes that it is predicated on the loss of her own children:

 She's emotionally distant. She's much better with the twins now as
 they're a bit older, but when they were younger, she was very stand
 offish and you can see there's still an element of keeping her
 distance I suppose, but the pain of having your children taken
 away, especially when one of them is breastfeeding, leaves such a
 mark on you that you really wouldn't want to get attached.

Finally, Zenzi positions herself as a mature, sexually experienced woman and empathises strongly with her mother's pain when she lost her husband to her close friend. Like Lola, above, these women's own experiences as mothers and partners have led them to an understanding of their mothers in a way which eludes others:

 I think having had relationships I see it differently, in that I
 feel a lot, lot more for my mother you know, and I think that's
 because you just put yourself in someone's else position and try to
 imagine what that would have been like and I think it would have
 been horrible. Because I think, also from that generation, that
 there was just that real sense of humiliation.

'I've had to mother her'.

In this final section, the project's data dealing with role reversal and role diffusion are dealt with. An exploration of the links between this and the participants' accounts of their changing relationships with their mothers appears in the discussion.

Briefly, role reversal is defined here as the undertaking of a role, or task, which is normally undertaken by another family member. In particular, it refers to the situation where a child (of whatever age) undertakes an executive function, involving tasks which parents are conventionally expected to undertake, and the parent, in turn, adopts a more passive position in the relationship. It is, indeed, a reversal of roles. The participants in this study widely report such a reversal occurring.

In this first example, Bert is discussing the factors which led to his leaving school in Year Ten--an event he now feels some bitterness about. Foremost amongst these factors was his father's absence which led to a dissolution of a structural framework which would have kept him at school (see Amato, 1991; Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Hines, 1997; King, 2002; Seltzer, 1991; Wallerstein, 2000), and a concomitant responsibility to maintain the running of the household:

 But Dad wasn't around ... there's that discipline, to make sure
 that I got to school and I think that was the biggest thing and
 also the fact there was so much to do in the home that it'd give me
 a good excuse not to go to school.

Bert was fourteen when the separation came and Helen was twelve--arguably ages at which adult responsibilities can be undertaken by children. Like Bert, Helen also feels she underachieved at school, chiefly because her domestic responsibilities were large. Helen (41) has five brothers and sisters:

 I was running the house and I was the first one to get a license so
 it was Dad and me who would run the kids to school, I would pick up
 the hay for the animals and have to hang around until my sister
 finished TAFE, all this sort of stuff.

Louise and Zenzi argue that at the point of separation their responsibilities grew immediately, that they were 'too serious' (in Louise's words). Interestingly, both then describe the period of their twenties as a time when they recouped their lost freedom:

Zenzi: I think just in terms of a childhood, my childhood just ended, just BANG and I had to take a role, I had to assume a lot more responsibility and that has effects. Like I think into my twenties, that meant that when I left home--and I left pretty young--this was my life now, my time. And I think this led to an incredible hedonistic period which maybe I'm only just exiting. I was sort of out of it (7).

Louise: I probably took on a lot more responsibility. I mean in hindsight I became too serious at too early an age and didn't run riot in my teen years as I probably should have. I probably did that later in my 20s.

Eleven when her parents parted, Alix spent her adolescence in a blended family with eight children--two siblings, four step-siblings and one half sibling. Currently employed as administrative worker whilst undertaking a law degree, she is thirty one. Here her comments reflect the the feelings of many of the participants:

 We weren't the parents and it wasn't our job ... we don't feel we
 were very effectively parented at all, by any parents, at any time.
 We feel it now--we were often the grown ups.

The sense of effectively being the grown ups is also a central issue for role diffusion. Here, roles are blurred rather than simply reversed and it relates particularly to emotional issues where a child (again, of what ever age) offers the parent emotional support. Arditti (1999a) argues that such support is not necessarily unreciprocated nor is it necessarily inappropriate or disadvantageous for the child. In this study, reciprocity is not discussed by the participants.

Here Ben, for example, is discussing his mother in the context of the immediate post-separation period. Without knowing this, one might guess it was a father speaking of his daughter:

 She was so angry and hurt and vulnerable and unbearable. She took a
 lot of work for a long time. She needed a lot of confirmation and
 attention. She was fragile.

Susan similarly, articulates role diffusion in terms of her playing mother to her mother:

 It was probably a little bit more difficult with my mother but I
 guess it's because of what's been going on in her life. I've had to
 mother her.

At twenty, Gail was one of the eldest when her parents finally separated after a long and troubled relationship. She is thirty six and is employed as an Office Administrator. Here she positions herself as her mother's 'counsellor':

 But I remember very clearly, and my sister will talk about it
 until the cows come home, about me being my Mum's counsellor.
 Mum would talk to me often about her dissatisfaction, unhappiness
 and that sort of thing.

Similarly, Mark's mother sought the friendship of her son, and explicitly attempted to reject having a role as his mother. But Mark, in turn, would not let her. He is thirty eight now, works as a nurse and is studying law part-time:

 As a late teenager and in my early twenties, I put it to her that
 she didn't have the option [not to have a mother/son relationship]
 ... but she would say 'I don't look upon you as a son, I look on
 you as a friend'. And I said 'I'm not satisfied with that because
 I'm not your friend, I'm your son!' ... Later on, when I was in my
 late twenties, I went to her with my list of questions and said
 'This is what I want to know about, what happened when I was a
 kid? 'Why did you do this and what was your motivation?' And
 ultimately I was satisfied with her account and found it from
 the goodness in my heart, the capacity to forgive her. Because
 I really believe that she did things that she had to be forgiven
 for--or alternatively not be forgiven for.

Discussion

At first glance, the data from the Generation X project appears surprising for two main reasons.

Firstly, unlike other studies (undertaken with older children rather than adult children) (see Aquilino, 1994; Arditti, 1999a; Paterson, 2001; King, 2002) the participants do not report strong feelings of warmth towards their mothers. On the contrary, they almost unanimously, and spontaneously, expressed a number of negative feelings. In some cases, this was tempered by a sense of understanding and empathy for what their mothers had endured.

Secondly, the majority of interviewees approached the issue of their mothers almost as if they were therapists and their mothers were their clients. In this dyad there is a sense of division and analysis as they discussed the experiences which came to shape their mothers' characters.

There are three points to be made about this. The first is observational and the others are explanatory.

Firstly, the levels of intimacy expressed by the participants in relation to their mothers is consistent with other studies (see Arditti, 1999a, 1999b, Arditti and Madden-Derdich, 1997; Paterson, 2001). This level of intimacy can be 'determined by the level of commitment and positive affective, cognitive, and physical closeness' (Moss and Schwebel, 1993: 33) and for the most part it is the case that the data in this study show a commitment between mother and child (with the exception of Tim), a positive affective and cognitive closeness (in other words the mother and child know and feel a great deal about one another) and are physically close (this is more difficult to ascertain given that the data covers the period from childhood to adulthood but, in the main, such closeness is evident). Yet the difference in this study is not the strength or depth of the feelings but that they are so critical of their mothers--particularly of their mothers' anger and the longevity of their hostile feelings about the separation: they should have 'moved on' (8).

Secondly, how might these intense, sometimes negative feelings for their mothers be accounted for? One possibility lies in two linked issues touched upon earlier: role reversal and role diffusion. Johnston (1990) argues that reversal occurs when a child effectively replaces the absent partner in terms of decision making processes and performing tasks more normally undertaken by a parent. Role diffusion involves a similar dynamic of usurpation but involves a situation where 'parents and children act unilaterally in terms of their own needs' (Johnston, 1990: 411). In such a context, the children are often used to meet the parents' emotional needs which include such things as psychological support, offering comfort if the parent is upset, listening to the parent discuss their ex-partner and relieving loneliness. It is not my intention to offer a precise delineation of these two dynamics in the context of this project, but to suggest that the participants argued that they did, indeed, undertake adult tasks and offer emotional support to their mothers.

Given this, it is possible to argue that the power relationships between mother and child are, at the very least, altered. The child feels able to offer an analysis of their mother's personality and behaviour--with varying degrees of warmth and empathy. It may also be the case that there is some degree of resentment that the roles of mother and child have been compromised. This resentment issues from both the truncation of childhood, and the support they felt obliged to deliver to their parents.

Thirdly, it seems to me that the participants' feelings towards their mothers can also be accounted for by exploring the emotional culture of their generation in the same way that they themselves account for their parents feelings and behaviour in terms of their generation. Generation X matured in a culture where marriages were easily ended for the first time in history, divorce was relatively common and there was little stigma attached to both. As a corollary, they are sceptical about the possibility of staying with a partner, and cynical about the value of the family per se (see Hughes, 2005). In contast, the expectations of their parents' generation were that marriages simply continued unless a spouse deserted, committed adultery or was cruel. As is clear from the data, the participants argue that the longevity of their mothers' feelings of loss, humiliation and disappointment can be explained by their expectations that marriages would, simply, last.

There is little doubt that all familial relationships underwent a fundamental change in the last half of the twentieth century (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Beck-Gernsheim, 2001) with a partial dissolution of the old community and family concerns, and duty and obligations between individuals. These have been replaced by notions of individualism (characterised by the drive for self-improvement and an overwhelming self-absorption), self-actualisation, contingency and of individuals as conscious agents of change of themselves and of their relationships with others (Hughes, 2005). Whilst it is not surprising that such dynamics have become integral to sexual relationships, it is interesting that they appear to shape biological relationships also.

The focus of the project under consideration here is Generation X (rather than their parents) and the data drawn from the project is uncontrovertible: the participants have a strong belief that their relationships with their mothers (like all other relationships) are malleable, are about growth and, ultimately, about self-actualisation. A key concern in this context is the balance between this impulse, and the sense of filial duty which previously shaped the behaviour of adult children and their aging parents. As Wells and Johnson (2001) point out, separated fathers are the least likely to receive care from their children as they age--a result of their lack of contact with their children. But as the traditional sense of duty on the part of adult children wanes, replaced by a sense of frustration, separated mothers may well become vulnerable too.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that we are approaching an era in which generational expectations will become a vexed issue. This is partly due to the large numbers of the 'baby boomer' generation who are drawing near to retirement and old age. This was the generation who led the divorce revolution in the 1970s and raised their children in multifarious homes. In doing so, they reshaped the familial roles which had dominated their own parents' lives in the post-war era.

Their children are currently in the process of negotiating their own relationships with their parents--a process which appears to be marked less by roles. Given that they have grown up in an era where relationships are negotiable (and almost certainly temporary) it is perhaps inevitable that they should approach their parents with the sense of contingency expressed by the participants in this study. The desire for personal autonomy and the dependence of parents on their children (which is founded on an older model of obligations) generates a set of conflicting impulses. For the adult children of separation, these contradictions are heightened because they feel their growth towards autonomy has been truncated by family demands, and by their mothers' dependence on them. This dependence was forged by a traditional sense of entitlement which contemporary adult children feel less bound to than previous generations may have been. It is these frictions that generate the participants' perceptions of their mothers as needy, vulnerable and demanding.

Although the study is small and does not claim to be representative, the participants have pointed to a shift in the ways parents and adult children regard one another--a context where biological relationships become open to negotiation in new ways. In the case of the many thousands of separated parents who may soon rely on the assistance of their children (regardless of the quality of their relationship) as they age, their disparate expectations of care giving may be problematic. Where there is an enlivened public debate, and some considerable anxiety, about the wellbeing of older Australians, some further exploration of these dynamics seems opportune.

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(1) I am using the term separation to denote the end of a relationship. It thus incorporates both legal and defacto marriages, and points to the reconfiguration of a set of family relationships rather than the legal termination of a marriage.

(2) I have adapted Moss and Schwebel's (1993) definition of intimacy in order to apply it to the parent/ child relationship and see it as 'determined by the level of commitment and positive affective, cognitive, and physical closeness' (p.33).

(3) At the time of their parents' divorce, there was very little support available for parents or their children in terms of mediation or counselling which may well account for the heightened levels of emotion still apparent in the participants in this study.

(4) Born between 1961 (the year the contraceptive pill came on the market in Australia), and 1976 (the year the Family Law Act was enacted)

(5) I have used the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations (ABS, 1996) to categorise their occupations in this way.

(6) Pseudonyms are used throughout to protect the participants' identity

(7) Another unexpected theme in the data was the problematic use of drugs and alcohol by the participants.

(8) The Jordan Report (1996) which explored the responses of men to their divorce over time suggests that men were equally as disturbed and that their feelings of anger with their ex-partner tended to rise rather than decrease over a ten year span.