Motherhood Quote by Nancy Friday

Blaming your mother can look like rebellion, but Nancy Friday skewers it as a kind of emotional dependency in disguise. The line is sharp because it flips a familiar story: the angry adult who insists they are finally independent may still be organized around the mother, just with resentment as the glue. Friday’s point isn’t to exonerate harmful parenting; it’s to expose how grievance can become a relationship substitute, a way to keep a powerful figure psychologically present long after you’ve left the house.

The intent is clinical and a little unsparing. “Clinging” is the key verb: it reframes blame not as moral clarity but as attachment behavior. Negative attachment still meets the same need as positive attachment - attention, meaning, a stable villain to explain your life. The subtext is almost transactional: as long as mother remains the central cause, the self remains partially relieved of agency. Blame offers coherence. It also delays grief: accepting your mother as limited, human, and finished-as-an-authority is harder than keeping her omnipotent and at fault.

Context matters: Friday wrote in the wake of second-wave feminism and the therapy boom, when mother-blaming had become a cultural reflex in psychoanalytic and pop-psych circles. Her work often challenged the tidy morality of those scripts, especially around women’s anger and desire. This line reads like a corrective to a decade of easy diagnoses: if you want freedom, you may have to give up the story that keeps her alive in your head.