Nancy Reagan and Patti Davis
During the Reagan years, I was in high school and college. I remember hearing about the Patti-Nancy estrangement and frankly, thought it was useless drama. I just wished they would both grow up and move on!
I am definitely blessed in the Mom department. While my Mom is not perfect, she is without question the kindest person I have ever known. It has never occured to me to even be anything other than mildly annoyed at my mother so I guess I just did not relate.
But, just as I was really getting into the whole mother-daughter column for Delamina, Patti Davis launched her latest book - The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us: Prominent Women Discuss the Complex, Humorous, and Ultimately Loving Relationships They Have with Their Mothers. I realized that this column series would not be complete without the wisdom of the power of forgiveness and that Patti and Nancy had an important place in that chapter.
As part of the book publicity, Patti Davis gave two interviews that I thought were noteworthy. One with Tavis Smiley of PBS and one with Lesley Stahl for Sunday Morning. There were a few boulders of wisdom that just screamed for inclusion.
When Lesley Stahl asked Davis how she felt about letting go of the feud with her mother, she said, “It’s made me more relaxed. It’s made me more confident that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing on this earth, because I think an estrangement from a parent, particularly as a woman from your mother, leaves you sort of unmoored, you know? You’re adrift and you know it intuitively, but you have such good reasons to not go back there.”
She added, “When you asked me in our interview, ‘Did we get it wrong about our mothers?’ — I’ve thought about that question since then. And the truth for most of us is no, we didn’t get it wrong about our mothers. The majority of our mothers didn’t always do the best job as mothers. Some women’s mothers got it right from the beginning, but for most of us — no, we didn’t get it wrong. It’s just that, like Candice said, ‘The things that they got wrong we held on to for so long.’ I mean, we gave their sins and their shortcomings the half-life of plutonium. So it was up to us to let that go. And once you let it go, you are really letting go of something toxic that has lived inside of you.
When asked by Tavis Smiley about the specifc nature of her forgiveness and a woman’s wisdom over 40, Patti said, “I can only speak for myself. I know there were just serious personality differences, and I think also in my case my parents’ relationship was so close and so exclusionary that there were elements of I want more of Daddy’s attention, but Mommy has all of Daddy’s attention, and all that kind of stuff. So I think there are different circumstances in everybody’s life, but to some degree I think it’s a rite of passage that we as daughters have to grow up, and again, the 40 thing I think played into that.”
Generally speaking on the relationship of mothers and daughters, Patti made a beautiful and universal statement about acceptance to Lesley Stahl: “Well, there are a few things and one is something that we all know intellectually, but I think it’s an important thing to be reminded of: We are all much more similar than we are different. As women we all have this well of experiences with our mothers and it remains fresh forever. So in that way we are all very, very similar as women. I also really learned — again I knew it, but it’s important to be reminded — the immeasurable value of acceptance. Whatever your path was with your mother, whatever your journey was with her, you have to accept it. And then I also gained a lot of reverence for the fact that there’s even a step beyond acceptance, and that is to honor and respect what you have gone through as the vehicle to where you are now.”
This quote from page two of Davis’s book is an astounding summary of the mother daughter relationship, “Our mothers stand behind us at the mirror, trail our footsteps, tap on our shoulders. If you burrow under the surface of any woman you will find what her mother thought about her.”
Tags: boulders of wisdom, column for Delamina, Lesley Stahl, Nancy Reagan, Patti Davis, power of forgiveness, rite of passage, Tavis Smiley of PBS, The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us, the Reagan years, woman's wisdom