March, 2026
By Kayla Randel, 12th Grade
Editor’s note: This article was chosen by the editorial staff as the 3rd-place opinion piece for The Cardinal Post’s First Annual Op-Ed Contest.
“Don’t worry when I fight with you, worry when I stop because it means there’s nothing left for us to fight for.”
This is the mindset that many daughters acquire after reaching complete numbness from their mothers. Mother daughter relationships are complex and typically filled with a lot of heartbreak and bad communication. Hi my name is Kayla Randel, I am 18 years old and me and my mother Indeed don’t get along very well. From what I can remember me and my mother used to be close and got along great but things became more rocky when I hit early middle school. We went from being together all the time and hardly arguing to now rarely getting along and arguing every time we are together. This is my version and outlook of the reality of mother daughter relationships.
Starting in middle school
After 18 years of life I realize I am not the only girl out there who struggles with finding and maintaining a healthy and stable relationship with my mother. I began to truly notice this in my 7th and 8th grade years of middle school, me and her would argue non stop and every time we finished i felt terrible and misunderstood, ignored, invalidated, etc. This was the beginning of me shutting down and blocking out all feelings. Many daughters are told that their mothers are a reflection of them just older, but I don’t entirely believe this.
In Teri Cole’s article “7 mother types and emotional impact” she displays seven different types of mother daughter relationships, which all highlight different scenarios with different mothering types and the relationships they have with their daughters. The article highlights the Hot and Cold relationships which is a demonstration of one versus the other rather than the two versus the common issues. This is an example of me and my mothers relationship, we are in constant battle with each other and neither is willing to back down, we both just want to feel heard but often my mother believes since she’s the adult she right and im wrong causing me to feel unheard and most of the time feeling unwanted and less than, which is how I arrived where I am now; Completely numb and no willingness to fix things. The complexity of this relationships is shown through the fact that of course y’all love each other but aren’t good at expressing it and allowing it to evolve into minimal/ no contact or even complete numbness. The feeling of constantly being invalided leads typically to you never feeling enough for yourself either making it hard to find a pursue self love and the funny thing is while your fighting this silent battle most of the time we fail to realize this is our first time getting out hearts broken and its by the person we love most.
Additionally, as mentioned previously the communication aspect of the relationships leads to more pain and is one of the most detrimental aspects of why we give up and stop feeling. Mothers and daughters both so badly want to be heard that we forget to hear each other and a lot of the time we are feeling similar things but just really don’t care about what the other party is saying or feeling. Speaking from experience when I look back at our arguments I realize that she felt the same way but by then it’s too late to fix things leading bit by bit to the loss of the relationship. On the KARMO show there is an episode where a mother and daughter are speaking about how they feel towards each other and the daughter expresses the mother is constantly antagonizing and disrespecting her which led to her completely disassociating with her mother and forcing her to feel the biggest hurt of her life which was losing her mother although her mother is still alive, The mother stated she feels her daughter doesn’t respect her which causes her to act and react the way she does. Clearly they both feel the same way but the communication and delivery of their words are putting them against each other rather than the problem against them as a team. COMMUNICATION really is the key factor in creating and stabilizing
healthy relationships and many mother daughter duos similar to mine lack the skill of effective communication that makes each party feel heard rather than invalidated and forcing them to build a wall that should never be between a mother and daughter.
Although there are many mother daughter relationships that are healthy and feel super natural this sadly isn’t the case for all of them out there. For example there are mothers and daughters who feel as though they are best friends rather than parent and child but this can lead to a power indifference causing boundaries to be difficult to be implemented. In a movie called “ Precious” she is a teen girl who loves her mom but her mom continues to reject her and instead forces her to take care of all her younger sibling which caused precious to obtain attachment and insecurity issues leading to her pregnancy and her mother cussing her out on the stairs for being “fast” at a young age but she hadn’t known any better, a guy gave her validation and she took it in search for validation from her mother. Her mother wasn’t her to make the same mistake of having a kid young and not getting to reach full potential but she didn’t know how to love her correctly either. They were so alike yet so different causing both of their hearts to be broken and so multiple miscommunication incidents to occur instead of just being there for each other.
In conclusion I wrote this essay to spread awareness of the reality behind a great deal of mother daughter relationships. To allow yourself to feel heard and seen and have someone who is going through what you may be as well. Not all mother relationships are but they are the ones that are, they take a toll. The relationship can be complex, overwhelming and heartbreaking but these experiments are what shape daughters and force them to break cycles before passing them down to their own kids.
The Cardinal Post 