The second arcanum speaks of a break between mother and child where that break was not inevitable: the child was given up, handed over, left uncared for — or, the other way round, a grown child struck the mother out of their life.
In the generations that follow, this reads as coldness along the maternal line. The women of the lineage grow close to their own children with difficulty, care is given by an effort of will or replaced by money; daughters repeat what they condemned in their mother. Often there is a story alongside it about how "mother did not accept" or "mother did not forgive", and it stretches across two or three generations.
The working-off runs towards the mother and the women of the lineage: to restore contact where it was cut off, to take on real care — not the festive kind, but the daily, wearying kind. And not to pass the grievance on to one's own children: the chain breaks where someone is the first to stop answering in kind.