Read Motherless Daughters Online
Authors: Hope Edelman
Motherless Daughters (11 page)
This separation is rarely clean or easy, and often is complicated by a mother’s behavior. Because a mother frequently perceives her daughter as an extension of herself and thus identifies with her daughter more strongly than she does with her sons, she may try to hold on as a daughter breaks away. At the same time, because she has gone through adolescence herself and understands that her daughter must achieve autonomy, she pushes her daughter toward adulthood and independence.
4
This is not a time of mutual understanding between most mothers and daughters, and the struggle typically lasts into a daughter’s late teens or early twenties. As a study of a hundred autobiographical accounts from Wellesley College students in the early 1980s revealed, more than 75 percent of the daughters at that age still had unfavorable or unflattering views of their mothers.
4
This is not a time of mutual understanding between most mothers and daughters, and the struggle typically lasts into a daughter’s late teens or early twenties. As a study of a hundred autobiographical accounts from Wellesley College students in the early 1980s revealed, more than 75 percent of the daughters at that age still had unfavorable or unflattering views of their mothers.
When a mother dies during her daughter’s adolescence, what would otherwise have been a temporary separation with the hope of later reconciliation then becomes an irrevocable physical fracture. “Wait a minute!” the daughter wants to shout. “I didn’t really mean it. Come back!”
A daughter at the peak of rebellion may be left with tremendous guilt and regret if her mother dies at this time. In her memory, their fifteen-year relationship may then deflate to the six awful arguments of the past year. When I think of the times I hurled hurtful phrases at my mother, using the word
love
like a knife—“You don’t love me!”
love
like a knife—“You don’t love me!”
“I don’t love you, I
hate
you!” and that most horrid and self-fulfilling of all, “I wish you would go away and leave me alone!”—I’m furious at the adolescent I once was. I never believed my mother died because I wished it, but for many girls a certain residue of childhood magical thinking does persist beyond childhood.
hate
you!” and that most horrid and self-fulfilling of all, “I wish you would go away and leave me alone!”—I’m furious at the adolescent I once was. I never believed my mother died because I wished it, but for many girls a certain residue of childhood magical thinking does persist beyond childhood.
“Whenever someone we’ve had an ambivalent relationship with dies, especially if we’ve just had an argument, we often feel a lot of pain and remorse for the angry thoughts we felt toward them,” explains Arlene Englander, LCSW, MBA, a psychotherapist in North Palm Beach, Florida, who specializes in bereavement and complicated grief. “When people are under stress, they tend to regress, and at those times adolescents and even adults can reactivate magical thinking at a conscious level. They then believe they were in some way responsible for the death.”
Lea, now thirty-four, remembers a conversation she had with her best friend when she was thirteen. “We were talking about issues thirteen-year-old girls thought were important,” she says. “I asked, ‘If you had to lose a parent, which one would you want to lose?’ I said my mother, because I was closer to my father, and my life would change less. A couple of months later, my mother had a stroke and died. Between the way a thirteen-year-old’s mind works, and the guilt taught in my Catholic school, it took me a long time to get over the idea that God had heard me.”
An adolescent daughter may also blame herself for not being a “good” daughter and may feel intensely sad about the lost opportunity for later redemption. Paula, twenty-seven, attributes most of the guilt she felt after her mother died when she was fifteen to wishing she’d fought with her less and comforted her more. “It just seems that if I’d known how sick she was, I wouldn’t have said all those terrible things,” she says. “Sometimes I catch myself even now, telling myself what a horrible thing I did on such and such day back then. But now I also say to myself, ‘Well, you were a teenager. You were going through all that,’ or ‘Maybe you were suffering from PMS.’ Something to make it all right. Because I don’t have the chance now at twenty-seven to sit back and laugh with a mother who’s fifty and say, ‘Oh, remember when?’
“You hope that your mother was able to see you were going through a bad period, and that it wasn’t always going to be like that,” she continues. “You hope she didn’t leave with the terrible feeling that you didn’t love her. That’s always my fear. I try to catch myself whenever I’m feeling that way and tell myself, ‘It’s okay. You did what you did at the time, and that’s it. She understood. You didn’t have more time together, but it would have worked out all right if you did.’”
Like Paula, I try to coax myself beyond self-blame, into a place where I can find comfort believing my mother once said the same things to her mother, too. And though their relationship had complications of its own, it can stand as a loose model for me of what might have been.
“It’s very important for the daughter to understand that the mother knew the antagonism was normal,” says Evelyn Bassoff. “Do you remember that scene in
Terms of Endearment
when the mother is dying and the older son is so angry and rebellious? She insists, ‘I know you love me’ in that dying scene. That’s really wonderful, that little sequence. I think it depicted a very non-narcissistic mother, a very giving and generous mother. I think when she said that to her older son in spite of his horrible behavior toward her, she gave him an incredible gift. But I think that even if there wasn’t that kind of reconciliation, even if it didn’t happen like it does in the movies, you can come to understand that yes, it was bad at the time your mother died, and you weren’t getting along, but that your mother was mature enough to know you would have mended your relationship in time. The healing thought is, ‘My mother, because she was older and wiser than I am, understood that I was going through a stage.’”
Terms of Endearment
when the mother is dying and the older son is so angry and rebellious? She insists, ‘I know you love me’ in that dying scene. That’s really wonderful, that little sequence. I think it depicted a very non-narcissistic mother, a very giving and generous mother. I think when she said that to her older son in spite of his horrible behavior toward her, she gave him an incredible gift. But I think that even if there wasn’t that kind of reconciliation, even if it didn’t happen like it does in the movies, you can come to understand that yes, it was bad at the time your mother died, and you weren’t getting along, but that your mother was mature enough to know you would have mended your relationship in time. The healing thought is, ‘My mother, because she was older and wiser than I am, understood that I was going through a stage.’”
Because maturation is such an individual process, different adolescents separate from their mothers at different ages. Some never do it at all. If a mother dies or leaves when the connection with her daughter is loving and close, the girl may find herself faced with little guilt but much pain. Her reaction to the loss may be closer to that of the dependent child suddenly set adrift without a firm connection to shore. Mariana, who at sixteen was the oldest of two daughters when her mother died of kidney failure, told me how frightened she’d been
to lose her mother because she was so timid as an adolescent. I must have given her a skeptical look—and it’s true I had trouble believing it at first; Mariana was probably the most effusive person I’d met all week—because she nodded her head vigorously to emphasize her point.
to lose her mother because she was so timid as an adolescent. I must have given her a skeptical look—and it’s true I had trouble believing it at first; Mariana was probably the most effusive person I’d met all week—because she nodded her head vigorously to emphasize her point.
I was an extremely shy person when my mother died. I really kept close to home. My family used to call me “The Hermit,” because sometimes you’d see me come out of my room, but generally not. I’d just peek out. My mother and I were very tight. She was my best friend in addition to being my mom, so not only did I lose my mother, but I also lost a close friend. She just did everything for me, so I was totally unprepared for what it meant to be without her there to protect me from everything.
I went straight to work after high school. If Mommy had lived, I probably would have gone to a college close to home, but I was too nervous to leave Daddy. He was in and out of the hospital because of diabetes and depression. I ended up working for a year, and I decided to also volunteer for my congressman. It took time away from what I could spend with my sister and the household, but I felt if I didn’t get out of the house, I’d turn into a lunatic. Working for Joe made a big difference. He was very young, only ten years older than me, and I was working with young, hip people. I had to become more outgoing to work in the political arena. It changed my personality. I stopped being so inside myself all the time.
Losing her mother propelled Mariana into an autonomy that she might not have otherwise achieved as quickly, if at all. For other daughters, particularly those who lose mothers during their most turbulent periods, some areas of personality development may get stopped short. Arrested development isn’t exclusively a childhood phenomenon. It can happen during adolescence as well, occurring when a teen feels deeply ambivalent toward her mother at the time of loss and isn’t able, for any number of reasons, to mourn adequately and separate from her. Gayle, thirty-two, who was eighteen and the youngest of eight children when her mother died, was so tightly (and
unhappily) bound to her mother when she was alive that Gayle’s separation did not occur until almost twelve years after her mother’s death.
unhappily) bound to her mother when she was alive that Gayle’s separation did not occur until almost twelve years after her mother’s death.
My relationship with my mother was so many things. She was very sick, both emotionally and physically, from before the time I was born. And I was born when she was forty, pretty late in her life. She was at times my friend, but at times very domineering. She knew exactly how I needed to live my life, and she told me. I was her last child, and she held on tight. She let my other brothers and sisters go, with a fight, when they were ready to leave, but I never broke away from her during adolescence. I would make leaps to do it, but I was really tied to her, almost as if the umbilical cord was never cut. When I think of it now, it’s almost as if we shared bodily fluids. I was of her, for her, with her, and as much as I would scream—and I did my screaming during adolescence, trying to fight her that way—when push came to shove I would always give in, because there was no way I could win against her.
These last few years have been a period of redefining my life. I’ve had to take a look at my relationship with my mother and realize I never really mourned her death. I went through a good part of my adult life having shut the door on it, thinking, “Fine. We’ll just go on and not think about this.” Now that I’m finally doing it, I feel like I’m just starting to go through adolescence today.
Because mourning often reactivates the emotions that existed at the time of loss, a daughter who returns to that juncture in her past as an adult also may find herself working through the developmental tasks she never completed during adolescence. Daughters like Gayle who feel stuck in a prior stage can finally emerge from it as adults. Likewise, daughters who were forced into adult responsibilities too soon and feel they missed out on adolescence entirely report giving themselves license to act irresponsible or carefree ten or fifteen years beyond their teens.
With mother loss magnifying the typical strains and stresses of adolescence, is it easier for children who lost their mothers earlier to
pass through these stormy years? Probably not. A 1950s study of orphaned children at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic in England revealed that children deprived of a stable mother-figure for their first five years actually have more
difficult
adolescences than children whose mothers die or leave during that time. Many of the children who’d lost their mothers before the age of five experienced a preadolescent phase that was often characterized by a frantic search for a mother-figure, possibly to form an attachment that could then be loosened.
pass through these stormy years? Probably not. A 1950s study of orphaned children at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic in England revealed that children deprived of a stable mother-figure for their first five years actually have more
difficult
adolescences than children whose mothers die or leave during that time. Many of the children who’d lost their mothers before the age of five experienced a preadolescent phase that was often characterized by a frantic search for a mother-figure, possibly to form an attachment that could then be loosened.
Lucy, the child who lost her mother as an infant and appeared in Elizabeth Fleming’s case study earlier in this chapter, plunged into a mother-daughter void when she reached adolescence. She had never accepted her stepmother as an adequate mother substitute, and knew little about her own mother. At fifteen, she experienced a depression, according to Fleming:
It was marked by feeling dejected and hopeless and being unable to wake up in the morning, losing interest in social activities, and not attending school and analytic sessions. She seemed immobilized bodily and mentally—a characteristic she had never shown before. In addition, old difficulties were exacerbated; she gained weight, experienced increased physical symptoms and, on one occasion, scratched her wrist. Consciously, Lucy linked her difficulties to her disappointment at her first boyfriend’s withdrawal. . . . Her greatest despair stemmed from not having an image of her dead mother from which she could divorce herself as a child and with whom she could choose to identify, or not identify, as an adult woman. During the following two years Lucy searched out independently enough detailed knowledge of her mother to form the coherent picture she had always lacked. Then, on her own and for the first time, she visited her mother’s grave. These achievements marked the end of her depressive symptoms.
Separating from a mother or mother-figure during adolescence, it seems, is an essential part of the process that turns a girl into a self-confident, autonomous woman.
Adolescents and Loss: Matters of AppearanceIn college, I pledged a sorority. Like most sorority houses on campus, mine had its annual traditions, and one evening during the pledges’ Hell Week, all sixty-four sisters assembled on the living room floor. We sat in a haphazard circle on the powder-blue rug as the pledge trainer explained the rules: Everyone had to tell a story that began with, “Something my mother doesn’t know . . .” One woman told about a drunken midnight roadtrip to Milwaukee; another shared a vignette about sexual advances in a neighbor’s suburban hot tub. The stories crept around the circle, punctuated with small bursts of laughter and an occasional “You didn’t!” and “No way!” And then sixty-three eager faces turned to me.
I’d been siting there quietly, examining my fingernails and considering my options—Should I go along with it? Tell the truth? Excuse myself from the room?—when the woman to my left prodded me with her elbow. “Your turn,” she said.
I looked up. “I think I’d like to pass.”
“No way!” “Come on.” “Tell us, tell us, tell us.”
“No, I mean it. I’d like to pass.”
More laughter. “Come
on
!” “What, are you trying to hide something good?” “No, no, no. Everyone has to say.”
on
!” “What, are you trying to hide something good?” “No, no, no. Everyone has to say.”
I panicked and I stammered, until words formed purely by impulse appeared. “I don’t have a mother,” I said, “but I do have a father. So I can tell you something he doesn’t know. The room fell silent, widely and uncomfortably silent, as I spit out some convoluted story about a man I’d met that winter in New Orleans. I don’t remember the details now, and I doubt I paid much attention to them then. My goal was to finish quickly and remove myself from the spotlight I’d been trying to avoid all year.
I managed to sit through a few more stories, until the pledge trainer noticed my wobbling chin and led me to her room. “I’m so sorry,” she said, feeding me Kleenex as we sat on her bed and I cried. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
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