ABSTRACT
We have suggested, without yet offering substantive evidence, that the quality of the caring and previous mother /daughter relationship is a crucial determinant of the way in which the carer approaches, responds to, and experiences the task of caring. In the case of daughters caring for their mothers, this relationship is likely, as Helen Evers (1985) has observed, to be ‘fraught with ambivalence’. It is difficult to assess the quality of these relationships. A recent small-scale qualitative study (Marsden and Abrams 1987) set out to investigate whether informal mother/ daughter caring arrangements were in fact characterized by warm loving relationships, and the extent to which caring imposed emotional costs. However, in the case of mothers and daughters it is doubtful whether a focus on affection or even closeness necessarily tells us much about the quality of the relationship. As we have seen, the majority of our respondents expressed some degree of affection for their mothers, in three cases despite poor early relationships, and in sixteen cases despite consistently problematic relationships during the period of caring. In many cases the mother’s deterioration exerted some strain on the relationship and daughters coped with this in a variety of ways, the most common being some form of distancing. To this extent relationships became less close as a result of caring, but it is not clear that this was viewed by daughters as an ‘emotional cost’. For the most part they regarded it as sad, but inevitable.
