Singer Whitney Houston has been through a lot on a personal level, including surviving a serious drug addiction and managing to successfully break free from an emotionally abusive relationship with former husband Bobby Brown. From him, she was left with a beautiful daughter, Bobbi Kristina, of whom the singer speaks in the most adoring terms in the January issue of InStyle magazine.

Some might imagine that having a teenage daughter (or any teenager around the house, for that matter) must be a living hell. However, for Whitney, things are much easier, since she was blessed with a girl whose only notable “flaw” is that she sometimes forgets to return the clothes she borrows from her mom, the singer explains. Because Kristina, or Krissy, as her mother calls her, has been right there with her when life at home was hell, she will have her (Whitney’s) undying support no matter what.

“If she’s angry, I allow her to say, ‘Damn! I’m so frustrated today!’ We have our moments when we clash, but we have a good relationship. I want her to count on me to try to understand what she’s going through. No damnation, no condemnation, nothing that’s going to make her feel like she can’t come to me,” Houston says of her relationship with her 17-year-old daughter.

The same unconditional love Krissy showed Whitney when she decided to divorce Brown and in the months to follow, when she even sat her mother down and explained to her, while trying not to upset her too much, that it was “not all right” for Brown to spit on Houston, like he did in one of their most bitter disputes. It was Krissy’s support that got Whitney through such hard times and, because of it, she plans on doing whatever she can to always be with her – which also includes not being separated from her when she goes on tour soon, in support of her “I Look to You” album.

And, come to think of it, there were moments in her life when support and unconditional love were essential to Whitney, as she also said in her Oprah interview. “He [Brown] was my drug. I didn’t do anything without him. At home, he was very much the father, he was very much the man. He was very much in control. I liked that. When he said something, I listened. I was very interested in having someone have that kind of control over me. It was refreshing. […] Something happens to a man when a woman has that much fame... I tried to play down all the time. I used to say ‘I’m Mrs. Brown, don’t call me Houston’,” Whitney was saying in the tell-all interview that Oprah Winfrey called the best of her career.