It took a move to Greece with my 85-year-old mother for us to finally make peace

What is it about mothers and daughters? It’s not that relationships between mothers and sons can’t be complicated and tricky – monstrous or idealised mothers rear up in the heads and work of writers and artists including Patrick White, Hemingway, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol – but there’s something specific about the relationship between a daughter and her mother.

Both have female bodies, and I can’t tell you how many women friends have told me how hard it was to learn that their body and their mother’s body were two bodies, and not one.

My own much-loved mother, Barbara, with whom I had a complicated and tricky relationship, never really understood that my body wasn’t an extension of hers. She poked me in the stomach to point out my belly fat, or told me I was much too old to wear a bikini. She clearly felt an ownership over my body that she did not feel over my brothers’ bodies.

It wasn’t that Mum was being mean to me, it was that she thought my body belonged to her, even if she would never have said this in those exact words. It was instinctual, reaching out to poke me, or patting me on the back and telling me to stand up straight; a deeply unconscious act. She was like a mother cat obliged to lick her kittens.

And I found it hard not to think of my body as a kind of doppelgänger of hers, too. She told me that when she gave birth to me in Brisbane at 22, she missed her mother in Sydney so much that her “milk dried up” by the time I was three months old. When my first son was three months, my breast milk began to dry up too, as if my body was under instructions or an enchantment.

She poked me in the stomach to point out my belly fat, or told me I was much too old to wear a bikini.

I was always too fat, or too thin, for my mother. I was looking “porky”, or growing skinny, and she said everyone knew that skinny women look older than nicely rounded ones as they age. “Do yourself a favour and cut your hair,” she might say to me. Or “You’re not going out wearing that are you?” My best friend, Emma, had a very difficult mother, who once said to her when she was 16: “You’re pretty. But not as pretty as I was when I was your age.”

It’s not always competition or envy or thwarted ambitions in a mother’s complicated relationship with a daughter. It’s much deeper than that, a sort of over-identification with a new female birthed by your own female body.

I remember walking with my parents when I was about 11, and Mum saying proudly to Dad, “Susie’s eggs are coming down soon. Look at her! I always wanted a daughter more beautiful than me.” I didn’t know if I was a chicken or a specimen, but I was certainly something demonstrable to my mother, some evidence made visible. She was my template, my guardian, my guide to being a woman. I thought she knew everything.