Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell Laughing in the Face of Motherhood.

This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today we're talking to Dr. Alison Alford. She is a communication scholar,

researcher, and author of the new book, Good Daughtering, the work you've always done, the credit

you've never gotten, and how to finally

feel like enough. Through more than a decade of research, Dr. Alford has become the leading

expert on the unspoken role of the adult daughter, the invisible emotional glue of families,

and the toll that being good takes on women's sense of identity and worth. I cannot wait for

this one. Welcome, Allison. Thank you. Glad to be here. We've been doing the podcast for 10 years now,

and I would have said, I'm done having the, how did I never think of this, this way moment, because we've talked about so many things.

But this book gave me that moment in terms of, oh, this is a whole other thing that is

affecting my life in ways that I had not particularly quantified. So let's talk about defining the

term daughtering. Yeah, you're not alone in

having that reaction to this idea of thinking of daughtering as something important and active.

So when I think of daughtering, I think of the way that adult daughters function in a family to try to keep everybody together,

hold everything together. It's not only active, but it's often invisible. It's the emotional,

logistical, and mental work. And many times women are completely burnt out by it without even

recognizing they're doing it. Yeah,

invisible not just to other people, but almost to myself. Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things

when I did the research and I spoke to women and I asked them about doing daughtering, they would

start by saying something like, well, I don't do all that stuff, thinking that it was some really super special daughter does these, you know, things were super close. Does the most, right? The most. They would say, well, I don't do all those things. And then we start going through, well, what do you do? And how do you show up in the relationship and oh that thing you just mentioned who does that oh

that's me and by the end of our interview they were like oh my gosh I'm actually doing a lot it just

wasn't things that I was clocking it wasn't things I was counting so if I wasn't counting it for sure

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