Mothers And Daughters

Getting to know each other is not something that many mothers and preteen daughters spend time doing.But clinical psychologist Lynda Madison learned that many really would like to do just that."

Mother's Day poetry readingComplex relationships between mothers and daughters will be explored by Maryland poets during a Mother's Day poetry reading at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Bibelot bookstore in Timonium Crossing, 2080 York Road. Seventeen poets, many of whom appear in the newly published anthology of poems "Thy Mother's Glass: Poems for Mothers and Daughters," will participate in the second annual event. Among them are Ann Christie, Rosemary Klein (pictured), Natasha Saje and Tillie Friedenberg.

A Southeast Baltimore girl named Tiffany, 10, got dressed up in a pink and red sweater and took a long trip to see her mother yesterday. Together, they put on bonnets, gloves and aprons while they dipped Easter eggs and talked.But it wasn't a regular pre-Easter get-together. It was a visit behind bars. Tiffany was one of 21 Girl Scouts who came in a red van yesterday morning to the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup, where their mothers were let out of their 5-foot-by-10-foot cells to try and cram days, weeks and months of mothering into three hours.

THE "I HAVEN'T Quite Finished It Yet" Book Club has been meeting for most of the 11 years of my daughter's life. Every month or so, my friends and I get together to discuss a book that one or two of us has found the time to read.After a lively literary exchange that lasts about 20 minutes, we have another glass of wine and talk about everything but books. Our book club is more to us than a book club, I think.Generally, it is the husband's job to disappear with the kids on book club night, but before a meeting scheduled for my house, my daughter and her friend Sarah asked if they could stay and "serve."

"Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters," by Erica Jong. HarperCollins. 312 pages. $24.95The title of Erica Jong's new novel might seem to be an oxymoron. But I believe that good fiction remembers, and memory benefits, from the spice of imagination. This blend is demonstrated with brio, in Jong's first novel, "Fear of Flying," which recounts the adventures of its heroine, a type of late 20th centuryAmerican-Jewish Moll Flanders."Inventing Memory," however, denies its title by being pure contrivance.

Mother-bashing. It is one of the most popular pastimes of the '90s.It goes from the Oprah show (as in "My mother stole my husband" or "My mother made me clean my plate and that's why I weigh 400 pounds") to magazine articles about famous people who had overbearing mothers (February's Ladies' Home Journal cover story in which Jodie Foster talks about her lost childhood and her changing relationship with her mom). Who cares?And then some medical bulletins give fuel to the flame: "You can be allergic to your mother . . ."

Idelisse Malave was helping her 7-year-old daughter pull on a pair of blue jeans in a store dressing room when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. "Oh, God," Ms. Malave said. "How ugly I look."It's something women say to themselves all the time, and Ms. Malave was feeling hassled and harried and imperfect that day.Her daughter, Esti, stared at her. Ms. Malave will never forget it. "You're not ugly, Mommy," she said. "You look like me.""At that moment I went cold inside," says Ms. Malave, a 46-year-old New York lawyer.

Denim gets better and softer with time. So does the fabric of the relationships between mothers and daughters in the times spent sharing games and secrets. Denim, the fabric of America's carefree hours, wears comfortably across the years and generations.

MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS.Elena Bonner.Knopf.349 pages. $23.Although Elena Bonner gained fame as the wife -- now the widow -- of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, she already had lived an interesting life in interesting times before they met.Add to this a most remarkable memory, and a gift for writing, and one could expect a fascinating memoir. Unfortunately, "Mothers and Daughters" is merely good.One problem is that remarkable memory. "Mothers and Daughters" runs to more than 300 pages but deals almost entirely with her life only up to age 14. It begins when she is still in a high chair, age 2 or 3.Not only does she remember broad details of incidents, but she remembers small details, too: where they lived.

When I opened my eyes, she was there. I saw her beautiful face bent over her needlepoint, engrossed, a faint smile on her lips, her blond hair picking up the morning rays through the dusty hospital window. It was a few years back when I had just had a serious back operation.No, it wasn't my mother beside me, it was my oldest daughter, and I was coming out of anesthesia. It was around the spring of the year. So I have been thinking about her, about how our roles became gradually reversed. She, the caretaker now, caring for me.She said, "I'm here, Mom," just as I had reassured her of my presence back when she was 7 and had just had her tonsils out: "I'm here, darling."

They say that the work of a parent is never done. It just changes. It is a truism that carries a lot of baggage for those of us who came of age in the era of professional motherhood, when their report card might as well have been our report card. When we were only as happy as our most unhappy child. Now those children are young adults, and those hyper-involved chickens have come home to roost, especially in the always-fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. In a new book, "Too Close for Comfort?"

Moms, it's your weekend. And if you're the kind who wants to spend it having fun with the family - instead of holed up solo with a glass of wine and a good book - there are plenty of kid-friendly activities to choose from around town. You can explore the outdoor beauty at Ladew Topiary Gardens in Monkton and take a free tour of art depicting the roles of women at the Walters. Help your kids make your Mother's Day gift (hey, at least that way you're sure to get one) at a local library. Take in a concert that explores the relationships between mothers and daughters.

You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation Deborah Tannen Random House / 248 pages / $24.95 In her book You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen taught us that men and women do not speak the same language. When we talk, our words fly past each other, wide of their target. But when mothers and daughters talk, those words become arrows, each with the power to pierce the heart of the other. In You're Wearing That?, her latest book on the complexities of human conversation, Tannen asserts that the relationship between a mother and a daughter is the most passionate of a woman's life and the source of her deepest love and deepest anger - literally, the mother of all relationships.

It was a dark and stormy night in April -- but the traffic-stopping rain didn't prevent the moms and teen-age daughters of the Mount View Mother Daughter Book Club from sloshing into the Glenwood library for their monthly discussion. The evening's selection: The Amazon Papers by Beverly Keller. And the teens were pretty tough critics. "How many teens do you know use words like `obfuscate'?" asked Kim Sides, 15, who was there with her mother, Therese Sides. Even though this book wouldn't go down on the list as a favorite, their time together wasn't a total washout.

An interview with Lisa Bankman, co-founder with her daughter, Judy Bankman, of the Book Buddies Book Club. Is this a mother-daughter book club? Yes, the mothers are always invited, but they're not required to come. How did you start? My daughter and I had talked about it since she was in the sixth grade and by the time she was in eighth grade, we sent out invitations to a group of close friends and to the moms. We had our first meeting and took off from there. That was in the beginning of 2001.

TYSONS CORNER, Va. -- A festive din fills Neiman Marcus, where designer Kate Spade has come to promote her new line of beauty products and fragrance. A 90-minute queue of chattering Spade acolytes, all female, winds through the cosmetics department. They sip lemonade from pastel glasses and nibble cookies that look like miniature Kate Spade handbags. Sales associates, dressed in circle skirts and wearing pert little ponytails, a la Audrey Hepburn (a Spade inspiration), are deployed through the store to draw a crowd.

DECEMBER IS a busy time of year, and many of us find ourselves cramming countless holiday chores into a few harried weekends. But last Saturday, Girl Scout Troop 1345 offered an antidote to the holiday frenzies - a relaxing, civilized mother-daughter tea. "Around the holidays, we get hustled and bustled," said troop leader Sue Marino. "I thought it would be nice for mothers and daughters to relax together." Eighty people gathered at historic Carroll Baldwin Hall in Savage for two hours of sipping, sampling and socializing.

Posing for the cameras is nothing new to celebrities, but truly candid shots at home are rare. In a new book, Hollywood insider and amateur photographer Joyce Ostin captures famous mothers and daughters in unguarded moments of affection. There's Madonna getting a hug from her dark-haired daughter, Lourdes; Jennifer Lopez being sweetly pecked on the cheek by mom Guadelupe. And Olivia Newton-John hamming it up with her daughter, Chloe Lattanzi. "Hollywood Moms" (Harry N. Abrams, $29.95)

"The Bonesetter's Daughter," by Amy Tan. G.P. Putnam's Sons. 353 pages. $25.95. Ingest enough of Amy Tan's stories and even a reader from the American heartland might feel Chinese. Because once you wander past the very Asian ghosts, superstitions, salutations and English-as-a-second-language locutions, the universal appeal of Tan's audience-pleasing novels -- the recurrent "Chinese" theme that rings true in English and in translation into Danish, Czech, or Tagalog -- is that adult children (especially daughters)

A MEMORABLE PLACE Mothers and daughters Gail Parker SPECIAL TO THE SUN It's 4 p.m. on the beach, the golden hour. This is my second day in Ocean City, and already the waves have lulled me into that hypnotic state that says ahhh. I'm flanked on either side by two friends from Baltimore, and scattered around us on colorful towels are our daughters, eight in all. Our husbands are home in Baltimore enjoying the quiet that comes only when all their women vacate the premises. They don't care for the beach.