Carol Sarler: Mothers and daughters, locked in bitter battles that none can ever win

The avidly reported libel case, currently in full flow at the High Court in London, is being enjoyed with rather more than the usual frisson attached to oh-no-I-didn't versus oh-yes-you-did. The plaintiff, Mrs Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, is there to refute claims that she once behaved in a manner most brutal, as described in an autobiography by the defendant, Miss Constance Briscoe. So far, so simple. What sets it apart from the usual public spat is that the two women are mother and daughter – and, thus, the relationship that we like to hold to be perhaps more sacred than any other is being exposed to a scrutiny that suggests it might, sometimes, be anything but.

Motherhood, at the best of times, sets the standard by which women are judged above all else. Put them into the workplace, or take them out and chain them to the hot-buttered scones; call it 1908 or 2008, it makes no difference; to be deemed a "bad mother" is beyond damned. We'll jail the mother of Baby P with a relish denied to her male partner; we know that more children are killed by their mothers than by anybody else – but we warm ourselves with research that shows they are almost always severely mentally ill, so preserving our sense that normality is benign.

We are hugely sentimental about the notion of the perfect mother, emptying florists on Mothering Sunday; even in the movies, where baddy daddies are two-a-penny, they hesitate to incorporate the unfit mother – and when they do, they quiver their disapproval; think of the hammering that poor Joan Crawford took in Mommie Dearest.

We even see competitive mothering that has nothing to do with the mothers' egg-and-spoon come sports day. Huge attention, in some quarters at least, is paid to the annual Celebrity Mum of the Year award, whose winners in recent years have included Sharon Osbourne and Kerry Katona; never mind that the one raised two teenage drug addicts and the other is herself a sauce-addled, bi-polar depressive, they were measured against others and the others, the losers, were found to be wanting.

But if all motherhood is measured on a scale of competence, none of it reaches the demands and expectations of the mother and daughter "special" relationship. They are bonded by line of blood and shared gender, and carry the presumption of permanence – sons are on loan and will eventually leave for another woman; a daughter, by contrast, is for ever – we ask so very much of two women and criticise so very harshly when they appear to fall short.

Look how the spotlight has remained on the Duchess of York's relationship with her two daughters. She was roundly condemned when, shortly after the birth of Princess Beatrice, she left the girl with nannies to travel with her dashing naval husband: shameful, neglectful, how could she? Years later, on the occasion of the infamous sucking of toes, the outrage was not about infidelity but about "setting a bad example" to the girls. More recently a flippant remark concerning the pleasure of mother and daughters "going on the pull together" led to further complaints that the relationship seems to have "degenerated" into something far more like gal-friends than a "proper" mother with her daughters and, once again, how could she?

The female Yorks give every impression of getting on exceptionally well. But if the watching eyes cannot cut even them some slack, what hope or sympathy for those less blessed, who add up to hundreds of thousands of the hurt and bewildered, wondering behind their closed doors where on earth they went wrong?

Bel Mooney, the Daily Mail's agony aunt, is in no doubt about the quantity of misery attributable to this fraught relationship. "It was unexpected when I started this job, and I am actually quite shocked. I have a good relationship with both my mother and my daughter, so I find the mailbag depressing. I can put up with any number of crap male-female relationships – men and women have hurt each other for ever – but there seems to be an awful lot of incredibly unpleasant old ladies who are straightforwardly nasty and demanding of their daughters.

"I keep hearing about mothers who are always putting their daughters down, making them feel bad about themselves, including criticising the way they look" – which, oddly enough, is one of Constance Briscoe's main allegations against her mother.

Virginia Ironside, Mooney's opposite number at The Independent, sees some corrosion as "inevitable" in most mother and daughter relationships, because of the process both parties have to go through between the child's infancy and her adulthood. "The mother is all-powerful to start with; she is your survival. You fall over: Mummy, Mummy, make it better. She does. You put her on a pedestal. But she cannot live up to this for ever; you see that she has feet of clay after all; you are disappointed."

And, oh, what a hideous creature is a disappointed young woman.

Young men, by and large, take time out; they disappear into a parallel universe, their occasional returns punctuated by monosyllabic updates if the mother is especially fortunate. It is young women who gee themselves up to confrontation and, so, the battle-lines are drawn.

On the one side the mother, riddled with guilt (note to male readers: "guilt" is the name of the fluid that runs through the umbilical cord). She was home too much, she was home too little, she's too strict, too lenient, too pushy, too cloying, too distant, and discipline is all very well, but there is her legacy to consider and she doesn't want to be looked back upon as a monster, does she?

On the other side is the disappointed one, who provokes like the brat she is. Defiant in dress, cavalier in time-keeping, aggressive in negotiation – in short, the determined daughter from hell. Many years later, when she is doing the looking back that her mother feared, it is she who feels the twinges of guilt about her latterday self. Right about the time when she is about to have daughters of her own, for whom she will, as she finally recognises her mother almost certainly did before her, feel the first stirrings of unconditional love.

The misunderstood point about unconditional love is that, by definition, it need not be reciprocal. The mother is programmed to love the baby daughter; the baby daughter is programmed only to need the mother. Not the same thing at all – and even if filial love does eventually develop, it may go through ebbs and flows where it is far from apparent. So a mother, when faced with a daughter who is rather coolly reassessing her as her own adulthood looms, might well feel that her still-unconditional love is being thrown back in her face.

But what happens after that is open to more choice than is often assumed. It is not written in stone that any among us takes sufficient lasting umbrage to turn us into the querulous, angry, resentful old women of Bel Mooney's mailbag; it is open to us to accept Virginia Ironside's analysis of the cyclical nature of things, wherein the period of flagrant enmity is just a phase which, if allowed, will pass – when, as Ironside says, "You reach the point where you realise that, whatever else, your mother did her best."

Contrary to the romantically high expectations as nurtured by wider society, there is no such thing as a perfect mother, nor a perfect daughter, nor yet a perfect relationship between them. Some – most? – women eventually realise this, allowances are made and gratitude for what there is takes precedence over fury for what there is not.

Others, such as the feuding pair in the High Court, probably never will come to such terms. In their case, it is for a jury to decide whether or not Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell has just cause for grievance against her daughter. Either way, the incalculable loss is shared by both.