What Taylor and Andrea can teach us about the mother-daughter bond and why it matters

Who does a billionaire-pop star send in to negotiate the most important deal of her life? Her mum.

Taylor Swift, superstar-billionaire, mother (as her fans call her), Easter egg enthusiast, and BOSS.

That’s a light description really, about a woman who has won four Grammy Awards, 40 American Music Awards, 49 Billboard Music Awards, and 30 MTV Video Music Awards, and has just wrapped up the most epic global tour of all time. Isn’t there a new album too?

But as she revealed on boyfriend and Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights, Taylor’s greatest achievement is gaining ownership of her original story. Her music. Her diary. Her memories.

And she has her mum (and brother) to thank.

"I'm in the business of human emotion, so I would so much rather lead heart-first in something like this," she explains, “because to me this isn't something like, 'I want to own this asset because of its return.' I want it because these are my handwritten diary entries from my whole life."

Who else could know her so well? Who else could be trusted with the world’s most successful pop-star’s music library?

Taylor and Andrea’s relationship has been reported both as an exemplar and as toxic.

So, what influence do our relationships with our mothers have on us?

Lots, according to Freud and his classical psychoanalytical theory feminine Oedipus complex (Fischer, 1957) – and it’s not positive.

According to Freud, we have our mothers to blame for all our lacking in comparison to our brothers and we despise Her for all Her shortcomings as well. How could She let us down like that…

Yuck.

We’ve come a long way since Freud theorised daughters held their mothers with distain because of both their…. lacking. IYKYK.

While the mother-daughter relationship can be complex. It’s also a cherished one. Ask any 35-year-old woman, pop star or not, who she calls in her moment of need? Many, not all, but many will simply say ‘mum’.

Whether it’s boys, friends, babies, husbands/wives, education, travel, or work. It’s mum who has the answer. She knows us so well. Our faults, our fears, irrational and otherwise, our secrets, and our hopes and dreams. It’s our mothers who carry it all with them from the moment they see the double line on the stick to their very last breath.

No wonder Taylor called her mum.

You may be a woman who has been “best friends” with your mum since you can remember, or a woman who “was awful to my mum” during the teenage years, or even indifferent towards Her. Oftentimes as adults we find our way back to our mothers. Even when we’re in our sixties and they are well into their aged years. Our mothers are the most significant people in our lives and are “the figure from whom we build our image of self as a feminine being” (Miller, 1973, p. 392).

How beautiful, complex, perfect and imperfect they are. It’s an impossible pedestal to be held on.

It’s a relationship held up as the highest honour and most important job a woman can have in our patriarchal (and suffocating) society.

We value the role of mother so much the role extends to other people’s children – supporting schools in canteens and classrooms, ballet recitals, and from the sidelines of the footy field.

It’s a respected job so long as mothers don’t ask for support (emotional or financial), flexibility, or appreciation for the emotionally laborious, often career-killing, complex work of raising the next generation of (hopefully) decent human beings.

What an insurmountable amount of pressure to perform under. But somehow through all of it, they manage.

Motherhood is becoming ever more complex with career, care, and school commitments all weighing down. There’s also parenting style, are you doing it right? Are you passing on generational trauma? Have you shown up enough?

Let’s not even start on the state of global politics and the environment.

It all gets a bit much. Sometimes we do just need mum.

Princess Diana apparently once said, “A mother's arms are more comforting than anyone else's”.

I’d call mum, too.