Mothers and Daughters

With Father's Day fast approaching I suppose I have chosen an awkward time to think about my relationship with my two daughters. The thing is they never had a relationship with their father until they were adults and it is a rocky one at best. I must also admit, if I am being honest, that my choice of a husband and their step-father for fifteen years left much to be desired. Still, I don't think any of my children were very happy when I remarried their father. He really was a virtual stranger to them, and they only knew of the bad things that had caused us to divorce in the first place.
When my oldest daughter reached her teenage years she already had a rebellious temperament and she was determined to do what she wanted, when she wanted, in spite of my best efforts to stop her. We had so many arguments. My husband at that time did not help, he only managed to make things worse. I feel that it was really my fault that my daughter was pregnant at fifteen. She was constantly looking for love and attention from all the wrong places and she loved telling me how I was never there for her when she needed me. It broke my heart a million times and more.
So I set all my hopes on my younger daughter. She was so much calmer, so much more pleasing in her attitudes. No doubt, she was very spoiled and we all went out of our way to make her smile and be happy. So when she started down the very same road her older sister had followed I just couldn't believe it. This was the child who was going to realize her every dream. How could she throw away her very promising future to have a baby at eighteen and get married to a young man that had not proven himself to be very reliable at anything except causing trouble?
It seemed to me that I had lost both of my girls. Gone were the dreams of having an ideal mother-daughter relationship where we shared little secrets and talked about everything. Their teenage years had been so full of drama and discord it was hard to believe that we could ever get past all of the hard feelings. Always feeling that everything was my own fault, that I had not been a good mother to my daughters in spite of my best efforts.
I still do not have that dream relationship with either one of my daughters, but it is slowly becoming less distant and perhaps a bit closer. I revel in my grandchildren and the joy that they bring to my life. I try to let my daughters know that in spite of it all they have a mother who loves them very much and wants only the very best for them. I wonder if I had tried too hard with my daughters, wanting only to protect them and keep them from making my mistakes all over again, and instead pushing them far from me. The only answer I have is that I do not know. I know that children, daughters, grow up and live their own lives. I know that maybe someday they will have the same perspective that I have now, knowing that mistakes were made, but only out of love and care. I know that I can still cherish those two little red-haired girls, so different, yet so much alike. I know that I will always love my daughters more than they know.