Dawn French adopted daughter Billie with Lenny Henry when the youngster was just 2 weeks old, unable to have children naturally.
And the actress has revealed that despite her overwhelming love for the 24-year-old, their relationship hasn't been a smooth ride.
In an interview yesterday, she explained:
"I expected that if you nurture [a child], like a tomato plant, it grows towards the light, and surely if your mum is someone who wants to have fun with you and have adventures and read with you and spend time with you, how could you ever have a war?
"But I haven’t got a kid who wants to read with me and have adventures with me, I’ve got a different kind of kid who’s a different kind of set of challenges and that’s been my lesson.
Nothing is ever what you think it’s going to be at all. If the love wasn’t there I don’t know how we’d survive all this other stuff.
Despite not living together, the twice divorced Vicar of Dibley star still lives just 12 minutes away from her daughter in Cornwall.
"We could no longer live together – there would be murder. But we have to live nearby", she added.
And regardless of the complications, the 58-year-old comedian knows their mother-daughter bond is unbreakable, concluding:
"Our relationship exists in a bizarre kind of process of peacetime, small battles, war. The peacetime is much more than the other two energies, but we have our wars.
"The love, thank God, is profound and I do thank God, because I love that kid so much that sometimes if I don’t like her or she doesn’t like me, we survive it."
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