Ophelia’s Mom: Women Speak Out About Loving and Letting Go of Their Adolescent Daughters

Ophelia’s Mom Speaks — At Last

“Why do I hurt so much when she pulls away?” “What did I do wrong?” “Are we ever going to be friends again?” “Why is she friends with that sleaze and dating that fungus?” “I know I’m supposed to let her go, but I don’t know how and I’m terrified.” From the mother of the author of the
bestselling Ophelia Speaks, this is the first book in which mothers of adolescent girls speak out about how the changes in their daughters’ lives are prompting cataclysms in their own.

Reviving Ophelia and Ophelia Speaks explored the painful challenges faced by teen girls. But where’s the support for the mothers of those teen girls? In Ophelia’s Mom , Nina Shandler, Ed.D., gives the mothers the chance to speak out about feelings and uncertainties too often considered taboo.

Culled from written submissions and interviews with hundreds of women from all walks of life and from every part of the country, the concerns voiced in these pages reflect the universal experience of mothers facing one set of life changes while their daughters are facing another. With humor, pathos, insight, rage, sadness, joy, and ultimately, optimism, these mothers talk candidly about rejection and separation, feminism versus Girl Power, love and sex, friends, school, drugs and alcohol, divorce, menstruation and menopause, the mother-daughter bond, and much more.

As these mothers reveal how this life passage has reshaped them as well as their children, you’ll realize that you’re not crazy, and you’re certainly not alone in your frustration, confusion, and exhilaration over raising an adolescent daughter.