Pyari beti.

I was holding my daughter. She was a baby. And those words came out of my mouth, in my voice, to my child.

My mum’s words. I hadn’t heard them in over twenty years.

It took me by surprise.

Dear daughter. Beloved daughter. She said it to me for years, and I couldn’t hear it over everything else.

I also felt a tinge of hope. Curiosity led me to understand my relationship with my mum on a much deeper level.

Because if pyari beti got in without me noticing, what else did?

The parent who never left

Too often, adult daughters confidently, some even defiantly, believe they are curating their lives independent of their parents’ influence. Until she notices herself mimicking a pattern, a trait, a turn of phrase that matches her parent. It can stop her in her tracks.

There are obscure ways our parent lives rent-free in our mind and our life. Conditioned reactions built from decades of watching and interacting. Patterns we absorb, like osmosis. Some are adorable. Some are admirable. Others risk causing upset to yourself and the people around you.

Of course, every child is conditioned by their parent. The conditioning becomes an issue when their opinions, values or beliefs oppose our own. When their influence shapes how we see ourselves. When we struggle to trust our own ability. That’s when it starts to cost us energy, and change the way we move through the world.

Eckhart Tolle puts it plainly. Our thinking, he writes, is conditioned by the past: our upbringing, culture, family background.

Which means the voice in your head assessing whether you’ve made the right call isn’t neutral. It isn’t wisdom.

It’s a recording, made a long time ago, still playing.

The second-guessing started long before you

Our parents’ predisposition for risk or danger shapes how they react when we get it wrong. Sometimes they’re calm and balanced, and the reaction barely registers. Sometimes they under-react, because they don’t see the importance, and that can be brilliant or confusing. And sometimes they react disproportionately, with big emotions and loud voices. That over or under reaction implants a bias in us, and it takes on a life of its own. Childhood, teens and early adulthood become the arenas where that bias gets confirmed at every turn.

One of the most common ways I see it show up in adult daughters is second-guessing.

The second-guessing spins from a long-ago reaction. It’s an embodied response to your parent’s response. Every time a decision arises, you worry whether you’re making the right move. You question whether you’ve thought it all the way through. And because you can never truly be sure, it builds more self-doubt.

John Bowlby had a name for this. He called it an internal working model, the template we build in childhood for what to expect from the people who matter, and from ourselves. Where a parent is unpredictable, he wrote, the child is left uncertain whether her parents will be available or responsive or helpful when called upon.

That uncertainty doesn’t expire at eighteen. It becomes the hesitation before you send the email.

Most adult daughters are intuitive enough to realise how the second-guessing was imprinted. Sometimes it’s obvious. Other times it’s only when a friend mentions a trait they’ve noticed in you. She’s usually aware of the pattern on some level, but stumped by how to intercept it.

So the parent lives rent-free, long after childhood.

I went looking for the recording

I was shaped by my mum, as we all are, and it got me wondering where she ends and where I begin. The unknowing was frightening once I became a mum myself. I couldn’t bear the thought of handing the same wounds or patterns to my children.

I was clearing out my old bedroom at my parents’ house. I never finished the clearing.

I found the journals in there. I’d written them sporadically, badly, in a child’s handwriting. And I sat down on the floor of that room and read them, and hours went. I was captivated. Not by what happened, but by what I used to say. The way I made sense of things. How hard I was working, at nine and eleven and fifteen, to explain the world to myself.

It was like being reunited with a dear old friend.

It was notable that most days, I’d had a run-in with my mum.

During early childhood we argued about me wanting to play outside with my brothers. From the age of ten, I wasn’t allowed. Why? I was a girl, and she cared about what people would say. It’s a South Asian thing. It felt cruel, curtailing my joy and my outlet.

If my brothers and I fought, she’d pick a side, and it was rarely mine. She had her favourites, and it sparked rivalry between us. If my brothers broke something playing footie indoors, we were all told off, and I was told off again for not clearing away the mess. My job. Because I was the girl.

In adolescence, the criticism turned to how people in our community would perceive me. I was a mouthy tomboy who wanted to be free to play, explore, be with my friends. Well, I wasn’t allowed. The absolute last thing I found fun was staying home, dressing up dolls and playing happy families. Dolls freaked me out.

As a teen, the focus turned to womanhood and becoming marriage material. Looking beautiful and polished. It was the 1990s, not the 1950s. Ladette culture was brewing and I looked on with envy. Being a wife meant learning to cook, clean and be polite. A total waste of time, given I didn’t even want to get married. It wasn’t my pipe dream. I was often told off for over-speaking when guests visited. I was an ambitious rebel. I wanted more for myself and I wasn’t afraid to say so.

The friction was relentless. I felt reduced to a project, in need of moulding, editing and refining, so that one day someone would accept me as their wife.

I believed being a girl was the worst thing that had happened to me.

Those daily arguments became my reality. That I wasn’t good enough to be loved as I am. Not physically, not emotionally, not in any way. That I had to earn love by changing fundamental parts of myself.

I don’t believe it was her intention. But I reached inferior conclusions about myself, and I kept them.

The part that’s hard to say

When I saw her lose it with me, banging on about the same issues, I quietly lost respect for her.

This one’s hard to say, still today. I felt ashamed of her. Of her role, as a mum, as a wife, as a woman. I felt she had no original thoughts or beliefs of her own. She was a puppet to the patriarchy. Can you hear my teenage rebellion there?

Shame had wrapped its tentacles all around me. I was ashamed of myself, ashamed of my mum, and ashamed that I was ashamed of my own mum.

What kind of daughter was I?

The day I passed my driving test

I was eighteen. I passed my driving test on the first attempt. Two minors. The examiner told me I was a safe and confident driver.

I was delighted.

I went straight to the phone box, put in two ten pences, and dialled home. My brother answered. I told him I’d passed and asked him not to say a word until I got there.

I got home. I told my mum. She was in a strop.

“No, you didn’t. You’re lying.”

Then: I’ll believe it when I see your certificate.

The joke being, she couldn’t read a word of English. So just how?

When the news eventually reached my dad, only then did she accept that I had indeed passed.

I was the only girl in the family. I passed before my brothers, first time. And she couldn’t give me the credit, or recognise the moment for what it meant to me.

That riled up a level of anger that sat in my bones for over a decade.

I used that anger. To finish my degree, the first graduate in my family. To progress in my career. To meet my husband. To move away. To travel. To buy my first home, my first family car, and to go to the places that lit me up.

It wasn’t a rageful anger. It was resentment, and betrayal, and above all it was grief.

Grief masquerading as a driven, ambitious woman collecting firsts.

The recording, and what to do with it

Here’s what those journals gave me.

Not a diagnosis. Not a villain. Just evidence. And a girl I was glad to meet again.

Evidence that a ten-year-old who wasn’t allowed outside, and a teenager being edited into someone’s future wife, and an eighteen-year-old standing in a phone box with two ten pences, all made the same meaning: I am not enough as I am.

That meaning was reasonable. It was the only conclusion available to me at the time, with the information I had.

It just wasn’t true.

This is what I call Recognising the Parent Wound, and it’s the first thing we do together in Liberated Daughter. Not to relitigate the past. To read it accurately. Because you cannot rewrite a story you’ve never actually looked at.

And once you’ve read it, you can start to change what it means. That’s the Reclaim Ritual. The slow, deliberate work of noticing the recording, naming it when it plays, and choosing a different response while it plays.

Becoming a liberated daughter is a decision

It’s a vote for the woman you choose to be. Your childhood was eighteen, maybe twenty-one years. Creating joy and peace in the decades after it is your responsibility, and nobody else’s. It takes commitment. But it is a wonderful thing, to become empowered, self-compassionate, and no longer paying rent on a wound.

Your parent may never change. Your life can still change.

I made that decision sitting on the floor of my old bedroom, in my parents’ house, surrounded by journals I’d gone in there to throw away.

If you’re reading this and recognising the recording but you can’t quite name your version of it, that’s what the quiz is for. It takes a couple of minutes, and it will tell you which pattern you’ve been running, and where it started.

Because here’s what nobody told me, and what I’ll write about next.

I could name the recording. I could trace every line of it back to the room it was made in. I understood it completely.

And my body still played it, every single time she rang.

Sources

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Penguin, 2005), p. 59.
John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (Routledge, 1988), p. 140.