Motherless Daughters (13 page)

For daughters of the post-World War II generations, the twenties are the period when a daughter’s experience begins to differ from her mother’s the most. A mother who married at twenty-three and gave birth to a daughter by twenty-five may watch that daughter postpone marriage and motherhood until her thirties. Today, a woman whose job opportunities were limited to teaching and sales may well have raised daughters who run companies or obtain advanced degrees. Many of us have had access to education, employment, health care (including cohabitation, birth control, and legal abortions) and marital options (including uncontested divorce) that women of previous generations could only imagine. Civil rights, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement—all have contributed to differentiating our experiences from our mothers’ and have allowed us to define our own identities by the distance between us and them.

As cultural and social beings, mothers and daughters are rarely produced by the same mold. But because of their powerful early bond and their shared femaleness, differences between the generations can make both sides uneasy. Mothers and adult daughters can be paralyzed by assumptions, unable to communicate much beyond nitpicking and complaint. A mother wants a daughter to become
what she once was—or what she never got to be—and expects her daughter to want the same. A daughter is defensive about the choices she’s made, believing that her mother can’t possibly understand them, or her.

As a daughter matures, and especially as she becomes a mother herself, her vision of her mother typically evolves. Like the child who first realizes her mother can’t solve all her problems, the young adult begins to see her mother more clearly as a multidimensional woman with human limitations, one with both strengths and weaknesses. And though the daughter retains some of her earlier desires for the perfect mother, she also becomes more willing to loosen her expectations. The mother, in turn, begins to accept her daughter as an autonomous individual, one with the ability to make and implement decisions for herself. Both sides give and take, push and pull, ideally arriving at an ideological compromise based, if not on understanding, then at least on mutual respect.

From the moment a girl first leaves her mother’s side, she is always trying to get back to the mother of her earliest memories. The attention and affection that her mother once provided become the ideal for which a daughter continues to search; departure was a necessity, but reunion is perpetually the goal. Although the mother’s place in her adult daughter’s life is hardly the site she occupied two decades before, an adult reconciliation can lead to a second bonding for a mother and daughter. After the adolescent girl completes her individuation from the family, she often comes full circle to reunite with her mother as a tentative partner in a woman-to-woman camaraderie.

The twenties are the years most women pinpoint as the time they first realized their mothers had qualities—empathy, wisdom, experience—they would value in a friend. To lose a mother at this time, just at the point when one seems to have found her again, feels like a cruel trick. Thirty-five-year-old Christine, who had a particularly tumultuous adolescence, had just begun to enjoy a close relationship with her mother when death broke their bond.

The desire to reunite with one’s mother is a developmental impulse that arises whether the mother is alive or not. A daughter who, during childhood or adolescence, lost her mother, reaches her twenties and feels ready to reconnect—but with whom? With what? In my early and midtwenties, I felt the need for a strong female figure in my life for the first time. Those years were characterized by what felt like a desperate search for someone to guide me, but the person I wanted to connect with most was missing, and my efforts to replace her always seemed to fall short. Twenty-nine-year-old Karen, who lost her mother nine years ago, expressed my sentiments exactly when she said, “It’s almost a rite of passage in a woman’s life to be able to come back to her mother and be friends, to meet on an equal ground. But when she’s not there, you can’t do that. I felt kind of like I was in limbo, waiting for something to fill that void, some way I could have that coming back. And I can’t. But it’s kind of haunting,
because the need doesn’t go away.” When a mother dies too young, something inside her daughter always feels incomplete. There’s a missing piece she continues to look for, an emptiness she keeps trying to fill.

The loss of the mother as an adult friend is what therapists call a “secondary loss,” which may not be apparent at the moment of actual separation but reveals itself to us over time. Twentysomething daughters often leap ahead to imagine the secondary losses—no one to help plan a wedding, no one to consult about child rearing, no grandmother for the kids—they envision as long-term effects of mother loss. This is a scenario ripe for idealization. The mother who bandaged an eight-year-old’s knee probably would not, if she had lived, have been able to fix an eighteen-year-old daughter’s heart-break, or stop the pain of a twenty-six-year-old daughter’s labor, yet at such moments that is the mother we long for, the only one we can remember, and the one we desperately want.

Would my mother, who quit her job in 1964 at the age of twenty-five to raise me, have given me the advice I sought in 1988 to solve a problem at the corporate level? Would she, a virgin at her wedding, have been a supportive listener when I had a pregnancy scare at eighteen? Or would she have been horrified by my standards of sexual morality, which seem to differ so dramatically from hers? When I try to piece together a more mature version of the mother I knew, the one who taught me to use tampons and spoke freely of her own methods of birth control, I come up with a question mark every time. My mother, as a woman in her sixties, is mostly a mystery to me. In my mind, she’s an eternal forty-two, and as her daughter, I never get past seventeen.

There’s a sad beauty to this, that my mother will remain forever young. I’ll never have to watch her grow old or have to worry about her care during old age. But this also means I will pass my mother and grow beyond her very soon. Back in my twenties, I’d already felt this starting to begin. Although we came of age in different eras, my adolescence and hers were fundamentally the same: we loved our parents but disagreed with them, took final exams in public high schools, went off to college, and fell in love. But she married at twenty-one, and the choices I made then—to support myself, to go
on for a graduate degree, and to delay marriage and motherhood until my thirties—are the ones that firmly separated my adult experience from hers.

Well, this is nothing unusual: Most of my friends whose mothers are still alive can say exactly the same thing. Daughters frequently surpass their mothers. That’s just fact. But many of my achievements have been tinged with bittersweet, because they are things my mother once hoped to accomplish but never got the time to do. I’ve visited a dozen foreign countries. I went to my brother’s wedding. I saw the first day of a new century. In two more years, I’ll turn forty-three.

I’ve been consistently surprised by the number of women who have contacted me over the years to be interviewed about mother loss, even though they had been in their thirties, forties, or beyond when their mothers died. Because I was so much younger when I lost my mother, I naively assumed a woman past the age of twenty-five or thirty would accept the death of a mother in her sixties or seventies as part of the natural course of events. She wouldn’t feel as if something vital had been ripped from her prematurely.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I remember an afternoon not long after I’d moved to New York to write the first edition of this book. I was shopping for a couch in a furniture store on Broadway, and as the final purchase was being rung up, the saleswoman, Sonia, and I began to talk. One conversation led to another, and then I was telling her about my work. When I explained I was writing about young women who had lost their mothers, she pushed aside the paperwork and grasped my arm above the elbow. Blinking back tears, she asked, “Do you want to interview me? My mother died just a few years ago. I wasn’t a child—I’m forty-two now. But let me tell you, it isn’t easy at any age.” And one of my friends in her mid-forties is now shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles and Phoenix every other week to help her ailing mother, who is in the midst of chemotherapy, get her final affairs in order. Her experience is just as frightening and heartwrenching as any young woman’s I’ve ever seen. Even harder, in some ways, because not only must this
friend come to terms with full knowledge of her mother’s illness and its likely outcome, but the tremendous amount of caretaking responsibility she’s taken on as an only child greatly complicates the emotional and practical tasks she has to juggle back in Los Angeles as a grieving daughter, a mother, and a wife.

Elizabeth Nager and Brian DeVries, two researchers at San Francisco State University studying the relatively new phenomenon of online memorials created by adult daughters for their deceased mothers, acknowledge that the death of a parent during one’s middle age is a common and expected event. Between the ages of forty and sixty, more than 50 percent of American women will experience the death of one or both parents. Still, Nager and De Vries say, mother loss during adulthood “represents myriad emotions and psychological experiences. A parent’s death represents the loss of the history and memories that shaped and remain part of that relationship. A parent’s death signals a different sense of time and self as the buffer between life and death dissipates. The death severs, or forever alters, the attachment bond that was established in childhood.”

Middle-aged daughters continue to miss and long for their mothers long after a loss, even when the death was expected and accepted. Several studies on adults who have recently lost mothers reveal that:

Women who were younger—closer to forty rather than sixty—had a harder time accepting the loss, as did those who’d had positive mother-daughter relationships. Daughters who were still very emotionally dependent on their mothers also had difficulty adjusting. I have also met numerous women at seminars and lectures who devoted years of their lives to caring for ill mothers, sometimes to the exclusion of marrying or having children of their own. To these daughters, the eventual death of the mother requires a reorganization not just of daily living habits and responsibilities, but also a relinquishing of one’s identity as caregiver.

The tensions an older adult daughter experiences when her mother dies are no less or no more important that those of theyoung adult, but they are different. Because an adult daughter is likely to occupy more roles—lover, wife, mother, grandmother, co-worker—her relationship with her mother is usually less central to her identity and also less central to her mental health. Yet her mother may occupy more roles in
her
life, too: maternal grandmother to her children, mother-in-law to her husband, and adult confidante. These are also valid losses in a daughter’s life, and ones that must be grieved.

Research from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women reminds us that because of men’s shorter life expectancy, the relationship a daughter has with her mother is likely to be one of the longest-lasting relationships of her life. When this is cut short, the death is perplexing and profound, no matter what the daughter’s age. She is still her mother’s child, and the loss leaves her feeling abandoned, angry, and sad.