Motherless Daughters (10 page)

Mary Jo, who was eight when her mother died, knew her mother was gravely ill but received no concrete information against which to test her reality. She heard her mother screaming from pain—an image she says she has suppressed, even though she knows that the event occurred in her presence. But her family’s reticence confused her so profoundly that she kept her fear and loss to herself for nearly thirty years.

The year after her mother died, Mary Jo lost her younger brother in an accident. Her father, having suffered these two losses, as well as the death of his father the previous year, defended himself against the pain by refusing to discuss the events. “That was very difficult for me, because as a child, I sort of thought it was all my fault,” Mary Jo explains. “I believed that maybe if I’d done something differently, things would have turned out otherwise.”

Mothers leave because children are bad; parents die because their children want them to go away
—these are examples of “magical thinking,” which grows out of a child’s egocentrism and cause-and-effect belief system. Magical thinking has been observed in children as young as three, and motherless women report evidence of it throughout childhood and beyond. These daughters see a mother’s death or absence as the result of something they did—or didn’t—do. Terrified and awestruck by her own power, this daughter then feels guilt and remorse. She may structure her behavior so that she is either so bad her mother will have to come back and rescue her, or so good that no one would ever want to leave her again.

A daughter who loses a mother during late childhood may have fairly detailed memories of their time together, and she may depend on these later for clues about femininity. The mother is a
daughter’s first and most influential model for female behavior. She’s the one who gives the first lessons about relating to men, running a home or combining family and career, and being a mother. A daughter’s early identity forms in large part from the experiences she has with her mother, the behaviors she observes and the quality of their relationship.

“A five-year-old can understand about being a little girl with a mom, and on top of that comes her seven-year-old experience of it, and then on top of that is a nine-year-old layer,” explains Nan Birnbaum. “It’s not that the original identifications disappear; it’s like increments get added onto each other. What then happens is the girl’s view of her mom slowly matures, and she sees her mother in more realistic ways, with flaws. She begins to see there are things her mom isn’t able to do so well. She still values her a lot, but she just doesn’t see her as God. Along with that, the girl’s view of her own capacities is growing. She begins to realize, ‘I’m better than Mom at this,’ or ‘I’ll have to go to Dad or someone else for that.’ It gets more and more realistic.”

Losing a mother can bring this process to a premature halt, freezing a daughter’s identifications at a very specific point and time. “Without live experience, no new layers of identification are being added on,” Nan Birnbaum says. “Kids who’ve had mother loss at age eight or nine sometimes have a view of how things ought to be done, based on their earlier experience, and they see what they need to do to obtain what the mother could do in very rigid and fixed terms. They may judge themselves very harshly, be very critical of themselves, or have an overblown, idealized view of what the parent did and of what they have to do to be like Mom. That’s one of the major things loss confronts kids with—their identifications don’t have a chance to mature.”

Caroline, fifty-three, says she still thinks every day about her mother, who died when she was eleven. But the mother she imagines is the mother of her childhood, the one who cooked big breakfasts and sang to her daughters. Even though Caroline is a mother today, she says that whenever she meets a nurturing woman, she’s delighted to be cared for in these ways. When we met for our interview, she had just returned from a visit with her father and his third wife, who
is offering Caroline exactly the kind of mothering that, after forty-two years, she still craves.

When a mother dies, a daughter—no matter what her age—faces changes and upsets. The psychological defenses a child develops to cope, however, are more primitive and vulnerable than an adult’s. While an adult brings cognitive and emotional maturity to a loss situation, a child usually regresses, projects, identifies, or turns against herself to a more dramatic degree.

DISPLACEMENT.
The severe emotional pain associated with losing a mother is often too much for a child to bear alone, and bereaved children may stuff their feelings underground. They may refuse to discuss the loss, pretend it never occurred, or allow themselves to feel the pain only in diffuse and displaced ways. When Anna Freud observed abandoned children during World War II, she noticed that they frequently displaced their own feelings of distress and loneliness onto their lost mothers. “I have to telephone my
mummy, she will feel so lonely,” was a common wish among those who longed for their mothers’ return.

Other daughters allow themselves to mourn only from a distance. Hillary, thirty-two, says she didn’t cry as a six-year-old when her mother died, but five months later she came close to virtual collapse when her pet hamster died. She’d kept her core feelings about the loss of her mother buried under protective layers until an external event months later pulled them to the surface. For some daughters, this release may not occur for years.

TRANSFERENCE.
An adult who loses a spouse can manage without a close connection to another person for a period of time, but a child who loses a parent can’t exist alone emotionally without significant cost. She’d be left in what Anna Freud called the “noman’s land of affection,” isolated and withdrawn from everyone and with an impaired ability to attach to other people in the future. So instead of detaching from her lost mother, a daughter may try, quickly and directly, to transfer her feelings of dependency, her needs, and her expectations onto the nearest available adult. This may be her father, an older sibling or other close relative, a teacher, a neighbor, or a therapist. During adolescence, a boyfriend or an older female friend often serves the same purpose. Transference can be helpful when the child is too young to detach all her emotion from her caregiver, but if she doesn’t return later to pull away from the image of her mother enough to mourn the loss she will continue to search for her in the people she chooses as replacements.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.
The loss of a mother creates a significant developmental challenge for a child. She may be forced to take on responsibility for herself very quickly, causing her to advance some areas of development. At the same time, she may continue to identify with her earlier stage of maturity as a way to maintain a relationship with her mother and deny the finality of the death. The result is an adult who retains some characteristics of an earlier developmental time, one who feels as if a piece of her were still “stuck” in childhood or adolescence. To this daughter, “growing up” feels not only like a mystery but also a practical impossibility: She’s still too wedded to her childhood. “Parent loss per se doesn’t lead to an arrest in development, but it can happen if circumstances don’t support
mourning in the interim,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “All the girl’s other means and interests develop, but some immature aspects are still a part of her. It’s like the child of ten coexisting with the woman of twenty. As long as her mourning is incomplete, she feels there’s something she can’t quite recapture, and she remains in a state of yearning.”

The daughter whose development arrests in some areas may later have trouble emotionally connecting with the tasks and responsibilities normally associated with her chronological age. Without the socializing influence of her mother, she has a difficult time reaching complete intellectual or emotional maturity. Twenty-five-year-old Tricia, who was three when her mother died, says she begins every adult romance with the hope that she’s found someone who’ll hold her and care for her like a child. As her friends marry and start families of their own, she admits, “I’m just looking for someone who’ll lullaby me. It’s kind of like I’m out of sync.”

DELAYED REACTIONS.
When researchers at the Harvard Children’s Bereavement Study looked at school-age children one year after the death of a parent, they found no significant behavioral or psychological differences between these kids and those who hadn’t experienced a loss. At the two-year point, however, the parent-loss kids exhibited much more aggressive and disruptive behaviors than their non-loss peers. They were also more socially withdrawn, and suffered from lower self-esteem. Other studies have found that bereaved children don’t show symptoms of disturbance until as much as three years after a death—usually long after hospice or other family support programs, which typically work with families for a year, have exited the scene.

Adolescence, a period of intense internal chaos even without mother loss, is perhaps the only time in human development when obsessive, phobic, and paranoid behaviors are actually considered normal. In the frenzy of maturation, all the rules seem to suddenly change. Parents become oppressive and embarrassing; friends, unpredictable and competitive; the boys at school, mysterious and suddenly
worthwhile. The real changes, of course, are occurring internally, where a girl’s swiftly changing moods, emerging sexuality, and newly advanced cognitive skills blend to create a sense of disharmony unlike any she has experienced before. “It’s just a stage,” our parents say, and to some degree they’re right. Most of adolescence is about losing and regaining equilibrium, and about allowing a new, more mature identity to emerge slowly from the family’s cocoon.

At least that’s how it works according to the master plan. When a traumatic event occurs during these years, however, the whole process can get thrown off course. Any of the developmental tasks of adolescence—developing autonomy, dealing with authority figures, learning to live with ambivalence and ambiguity, developing a capacity for intimacy, solidifying a sexual identity, learning to manage emotion, developing a personal value system, and maintaining a sense of adequacy and competence—can be disrupted or halted by mother loss at this time. In addition, sleep disturbances, academic difficulties, poor concentration, withdrawn behavior, decreased appetite, depression, alcohol abuse, and delinquency are common in bereaved adolescents during the first year after a major loss. Two years after the loss these teens score higher in anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal, and perceive themselves to be less socially adept and less in control of their destinies than their non-bereaved counterparts.

As humans, we are social creatures, dependent on others for fulfillment. When we detach from one person or group, we naturally want to attach to another. During a normal adolescence, as a girl loosens her attachment to her mother she invests more energy in her peer group and possibly in a romantic partner. Although this break is significant, it’s not complete: A daughter still periodically returns to her mother in times of stress. Traveling along this two-steps-forward, one-step-back trajectory, the adolescent prepares for the passage into a stage of increased autonomy, a transition that helps her ultimately detach from her family of origin and begin a family of her own.

It’s normal for a girl to feel both positive
and
negative emotions toward her mother at this time, often within minutes of each other. Feelings of love and security connect her to a vital source of nurturing and support, while anger and resentment help her establish and maintain the distance she needs to begin to venture forth alone. These are the years when a daughter fully acknowledges that her mother is less than perfect and may even feel embarrassed or ashamed when comparing her to other women. The teenager takes an important step toward developing an independent identity when she realizes that she doesn’t want to duplicate her mother, recognizes she has the power to differentiate, and begins to do it.