Every girl should have a mother, I think, not the sort of predatory monster sketched out and whined about in pop-psych books designed to cop a chunk of the bestseller trade, but an ordinary mother like mine, flawed but serviceable, who will hang your kindergarten plaque in her kitchen and teach you to sew an invisible hem in your skirts and stay up watching a late movie with you both because she likes you and because she likes the movie. She may, like mine, take some of her responsibilities too seriously, especially in matters (not entirely unrelated) of politeness and sex, and in this way cause you a good bit of unnecessary teeth gnashing and sleeplessness. But unless, unlike mine, she’s some kind of nut, you’ll learn to interpret the clamp of emotional hands on your spirit as one of love’s shape-shifting signs and to pry her fingers free without breaking them or the heart they clutch.

At the same time, every girl should have a not-mother, a woman who has, in every sense, no stake in you. If you’re a bad child, no one will blame her. And she has a much narrower interpretation of badness than your mother, anyway. Almost nothing you do seems to strike her as bad. A lot more of what you do strikes her as funny. Like when you build a “cat house,” you solemnly tell her, for sleek, striped Minnie. Or when you lather yourself lavishly with the expensive soap from S.S. Pierce shaped exactly like a lemon, with a lemon’s maddening pungency. She’s under no obligation to warn you that certain words “aren’t nice” or to exhort you to thrift. She’s under no obligation at all. That’s what a girl needs: a woman who’s free to love her without fretting whether she’s going to grow up to be all right.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place