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Perhaps inciting even more outrage in feminist communities this election cycle than the sexist cable news coverage of Hillary Clinton were the so-called intergenerational feminist wars: the alleged electoral disagreements between older feminists and younger feminists. Nowhere does intergenerational feminism become more painful and more complex than in its most literal and personal setting—when feminism intersects a mother- daughter relationship.

­­Growing up, I’d never heard my mother identify as a feminist, and her social and political beliefs had been different than my own in many ways. Usually I would try to bridge this gap by forcing my mother to read endless amounts of feminist literature, with the hope that she’d better understand my positions, and maybe, begin to share them. Luckily my mother, God love her, has actually met almost all of my literary demands thus far. But some mother-daughter feminist problems haven’t been simple enough to resolve with a visit to the library, mostly because sometimes being a child to someone conflicts with being a feminist supporter.

One week before I was set to commence my final semester of college, my mother pulled me aside one evening to tell me she and my father, her husband of 24 years, were separating. Even as an adult (my therapist would say, particularly, as an adult) the news was crushing and the anger I felt toward my parents was immense.

But something about the unique kind of anger I felt toward my mother did not sit well with me, even as I couldn’t help but feel it. I found myself being harder on her than I was on my dad. I was angry with her for not having done more to keep their marriage healthy, for failing to keep my life consistent and cheery.

­­To this point, I had had no trouble filling the role of the modern American child. What it means to be a child in this culture is usually the right to some degree of selfishness, demanding unconditional attention, affection and compliance from our parent. It’s what we’re entitled to—the narrative goes—and we shouldn’t be ashamed of holding our mothers to these impossible standards. Of course, as feminists, at least when it comes to women who aren’t our mothers, we recognize that these standards are not only impossible, but unjust.

Years long unhappiness cannot be forced upon mothers for the benefit of their children. As a feminist, this was clear to me. But as a daughter, extending the right to the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment to my own mother is a struggle, even as I recognize it must be done. At times in a mother-daughter relationship, there come points when we must sacrifice traditional offspring behavior in order to live up to the standards we set for ourselves as feminists.

If Virginia Woolf was right that we, as women, “think back through our mothers,” then being a feminist daughter is as much about supporting a piece of your self as it is about supporting another woman. Our mothers’ lives are the lenses through which we can view our roots, our struggles, and measure our progress and success. While being a feminist daughter doesn’t mean rejecting the nurturance and support parents are able to offer us, it does mean rethinking what it means to be a child and recognizing the humanity, not just of women we’ll never meet, but of the women we know best.

 Haley is a recent graduate of Vanderbilt University, where she studied English and Women’s and Gender Studies. She now attempts to justify hours of popular media consumption by writing feminist criticism for Pushback.org and her own blog, The Pop Perspective.