Sorrel had recently revealed to her mother that she was a lesbian and Fay had been more than supportive of her. On the other hand, there was the strong relationship Pipher found between Sorrel and Fay.
This created too much distance between the two of them, causing Whitney to feel that she could not come to her mother with problems she felt most girls should be able to speak with their mothers about. However, nothing Whitney did was held to Evelyn’s standards of how she grew up so nothing was good enough for her, and Evelyn could not understand that her daughter is growing up in a completely different world than she did. While Whitney and her father had a very strong relationship, when it came to Evelyn, Pipher states, “If there was any affection for her daughter, I could not find it.” Whitney was a responsible young girl, including putting herself on birth control pills when she became sexually active with her long term boyfriend. Conversely, there was Whitney and Evelyn, who went in to see Pipher because the Whitney’s father was complaining about the constant fighting between the mother and daughter. Due to this, Jessica tried to rebel but Brenda was too understanding and Jessica’s plan kept failing each time she tried to create distance. When Pipher first meets with Jessica and Brenda, it becomes very apparent that Brenda was focusing too much on Jessica and creating too much closeness between the two of them. Pipher tells the stories of three mother and daughter relations: Jessica and Brenda, who have too close of a relationship, Whitney and Evelyn, who have an extremely distant relationship, and Sorrel and Fay, who have a perfect balance of distance and closeness. This creates an attempt to step into adulthood and “to be an individual different from and not dependent on her mother.” While the girls are going through a difficult time with this transition, so are the mothers they find it hard to decide whether to be distant with their stubborn teenage girls or to try and get closer to them. Even though this being one of the times in which girls need a motherly figure the most, mothers are not accustomed to the new culture their daughters are growing up in since it is so different from the world they grew up in Pipher even states, “Daughters are just as confused as mothers by our culture’s expectations.” Adolescence causes girls to try and reject the person they have been so close to for so long. While most girls have very strong relationships during their younger years and during adulthood, during adolescence, the relationship usually takes a turn for the worse. In the fifth chapter of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, author Mary Pipher focuses on the relationships between mother and daughter and how those relationships can change through the years of adolescence.
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