Whether you have a great mother-daughter relationship or a mother-daughter relationship that can be improved, you probably know that mother-daughter bonding can start at an early age.

When you're five, she's a goddess. You smear your face with her lipstick and model her earrings and high heels, wanting to be just like mommy. That's the way it is until you're about thirteen, when she suddenly becomes the most ignorant, benighted, out-of-touch creature on the planet, and you can't get far enough away from her. Your primary form of interaction for the next five years or so will be a single word, "Mooooooooooooommmmmmm!" And then, somewhere between your twenties and your thirties, if you're lucky, she becomes your best friend again.

No relationship is quite as primal as the one between a mother and her daughter. "It's the original relationship, and it's also a relationship that has been sentimentalized but not honored," says Lee Sharkey, Ph.D., who directs the Women's Studies program at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches a popular course in mother-daughter relationships. "Women grow up and our energy is largely turned toward men, but the original love relationship is with a mother. If we as daughters don't acknowledge that, we're closing ourselves off from a great source of power and fulfillment and understanding of ourselves."

How Mother-Daughter Bonds Develop
Rose Marie Fries, age 75, raised four daughters and one son, but says she's close to her daughters "in a way I don't think you can be with a son. With the girls I have four best friends that I can talk to about all the emotional things that women consider important that men don't like to talk about." Fries' daughters, now in their thirties and forties, concur. In fact, says 36-year-old Laura, a television critic for Variety, she and her mother built their bond during a time when most young women are rebelling.

In Laura's senior year in high school, her father died, leaving her mother and her in the house alone. "That year probably cemented our relationship more than anything else, just the two of us in this horribly depressing situation. We helped each other through what was a terrible year," Laura recalls. "My sisters, I think, are always shocked because I will ask mom just about anything. I remember when I was a teenager I asked her if she was a virgin when she got married. And she answered, 'Oh my heavens yes, but she didn't seem phased or bothered by the question. My sisters couldn't believe it. 'You asked her that!?'"

It took longer for Dallas native Martha Frase-Blunt to find a similar closeness with her mother, Ann Frase. Now an independent businesswoman in northern Virginia and the mother of two young daughters herself, Martha remembers herself as a rebel — a description her mother does not disagree with.

Ann Frase laughs in recognition. "In high school, when she would come downstairs to breakfast before school, I'd just look at her and say 'No, you're not wearing that. Change your clothes.' We argued and we went through a lot of stress, but she and I are very much alike, I realize now."

Both women believe that Martha's decision to attend her mother's alma mater, Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, started a process of evolving closeness that continues to this day. "She went to my college — her choice, not my choice. That thrilled me to death but I wasn't about to tell her that! I didn't want to turn her off," says Ann. "I got kind of a subliminal feeling that maybe she had some respect for me and maybe she wanted to be a little more like me, and that's a big compliment for a mom."

You Just Don't Understand Me!
But mothers and daughters aren't always best friends. Storm clouds in the adult mother-daughter relationship most often arise over one very basic question, says Laura Tracy, Ph.D., a family therapist who specializes in counseling mother-daughter pairs and has written books on the relationships between women. "Will the mother accept the daughter as an adult? That means, when she's visiting you, does she let you run your house? Does she trust you to be independent on small issues as well as large — who are you with, what's your sexuality, where do you work, how do you spend your money? Letting the daughter be her own woman is a universal issue," she explains.