In the novel, Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, the protagonist Sal explains that “when my mother had been there, I was like a mirror. If she was happy. I was happy. If she was sad, I was sad.” (pg. 25) By this Sal meant that when she was with her mother she had not felt her own feelings but was just copying or reflecting her mother’s feelings. This shows that Sal’s relationship with her mother was overly close and that they did not have healthy emotional boundaries. Sal didn’t know where she stopped and her mother started. There could be negative effects of such an extremely close mother-daughter relationship. One drawback to this kind of relationship is that the daughter would not learn to identify her own feelings. This can be seen
