It Never Ends

It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters explores the complex challenges and unexpected rewards of aging mothers in their relationships with their midlife daughters. Based on interviews with women between 65 and 85, it illuminates issues of closeness, distance, longing, and need that arise. Mothers speak openly about the ongoing effects of the past on the present, the cultural, familial, and interpersonal conflicts that remain, and the varied and often invisible ways they continue mothering. As mothers enter the last decades of their lives, their roles with their daughters often shift and change in complicated ways. Now that they are no longer central in caring for them as they once were, many experience a recalibrating of authority, autonomy, and independence. Their courage is apparent as they reflect on the mistakes they’ve made, acknowledge their regrets, and search to come to terms with their relationships as they now are.

Nan Fink Gefen is the author of Stranger in the Midst: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, Discovering Jewish Meditation, and Clear Lake: A Novel, winner of the IndieFab Gold Award for general fiction. After fifteen years in practice as a psychotherapist, she became the cofounding publisher in 1986 of Tikkun magazine, a journal of politics, culture, and society. In 2007 she founded Persimmon Tree: An Online Magazine of the Arts by Women Over Sixty, where she remains as publisher. Nan lives with her husband in Berkeley CA. Their blended family includes seven children and ten grandchildren.

Sandra Butler is the author of Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest. Her second book, Cancer in Two Voices, coauthored with Barbara Rosenblum, was the winner of the 1991 Lambda Literary Award. She is also the co-producer of the award-winning documentaries Cancer in Two Voices and Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House. She has two middle-aged daughters and a rich community of women friends.