Motherless Daughters (16 page)

A mother’s ability to cope with these physical changes gives her daughter clear messages about illness, stress, femininity, and body image. A mother who adjusts well to losing her hair, for example, passes along the message that appearance doesn’t define a woman, but a mother who falls into a depression and refuses to leave the house transmits messages of shame. Twenty-five-year-old Ronnie, who was sixteen when her mother died after four years of chemotherapy, says, “I always looked up to my mother’s vanity. I grew up playing with her makeup and wanting to look as good as she did. But when she got to the point in her treatment where she was, to her, ghastly, she’d look in the mirror and say, ‘It’s horrible. I can’t even look at myself. Don’t you hate me?’ She wouldn’t let her friends come over and visit because she didn’t want them to see her less than perfect.” Ronnie, who describes herself as “the kind of woman who brings makeup on a camping trip,” admits that on days when she feels ugly and depressed, she, too, isolates herself at home.

The daughter who absorbs her mother’s anxiety about physical transformation may, after the loss, become determined to win the war against body image that her mother lost. In seeking to gain the control over her body that her mother never had, she sets rigid standards of physical perfectionism for herself. Every hair must be in place, every calorie counted. To slip, she believes, means to move one
step closer to death. Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are extreme examples of this need for control, but many women describe other physical preoccupations they rely on as crude barometers of their health. I know that I still wear my hair long because I remember the horror of seeing my mother crying in the bathroom the day her hair began to fall out in clumps. It’s not rational, I know—drugs, not cancer, made her lose her hair—but at some level I’m convinced that the more hair I have, the farther I am from death.

Andrea Campbell, Ph.D., a therapist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who frequently counsels motherless daughters, was ten when her mother died of breast cancer. She says weight became her source of security. “My mother was heavy and always concerned about her weight,” she explains. “When she was dying, she was only about ninety pounds. So when I lose weight, I get terrified I’m going to die. For eight years, I carried at least an extra ten pounds on me. Until then, I’d lose some and then gain it right back. I know I was trying to make myself feel safe.”

A daughter’s individual identity depends on her ability to adopt some of her mother’s characteristics and reject others, a process that’s complicated when the most recent and striking memories she has of her mother are of a woman who was seriously ill. “The daughter doesn’t want to be like the mother, because that means these awful things are going to happen to her,” Naomi Lowinsky explains. “She’s going to be in a terrible state, she’s going to lose her hair. The memories of the mother are not of somebody she’d ever want to be like.”

To separate her body from her mother’s—and therefore ensure her own survival—a daughter’s impulse is to create emotional distance between herself and her mother. Yet to attempt such a complete rejection also cuts a daughter off from the Well Mother, the one who was once young, healthy, and unencumbered by hospitals, drugs, and worry, and a woman the daughter might want to be like. “Most of the women I see, whether their mothers are alive or not, are working with their internal relationship with their mother and their capacity to mother themselves,” Dr. Lowinsky says. “The woman who lost her mother at an early age may not have access to that, because all she sees is her sick mother. Part of her work is then to bring the image of the well mother back to life, so she can have an alive relationship
to apply to her own capacity to mother herself.” To do this, a daughter has to focus on the days preceding her mother’s illness. Looking at photographs of mothers taken when they were healthy and learning the stories of their lives helps us see them as they were before we were born, and in our earliest years together.

A small but notable group of motherless daughters grew up in families where mothers were living with chronic, degenerative illnesses such as multiple sclerosis or early-onset Alzheimer’s, or were kept alive in hospital settings or nursing homes for extended periods. Under such circumstances, the mothers were unable to function in the maternal role, and the daughters struggled with losses that felt ill-defined. The mother was alive, yet incapacitated; she was still considered a member of the family, yet she was unable to be involved in a meaningful way. When a mother’s condition was brought on or accelerated by childbirth, a daughter often carried guilt for her perceived role in her mother’s decline.

Fifty-one-year-old Josephine was raised by her grandmother and her father after her mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, became physically unable to care for her. She was twenty when her mother died, but she considers herself motherless from a much earlier age.

Mothers who are institutionalized or kept alive in a permanent vegetative state for extended periods exist, to a daughter, in a noman’s-land between life and death, neither a functional mother nor a lost one. When death does come, its course and timing are usually unpredictable. As one daughter, whose mother was in a long-term, stroke-induced coma for much of her adolescence, recalls, “Even though we knew she was going to die eventually, when it happened it was still a terrible, rude shock. I thought I was prepared, but when it happened I fell apart. That’s when I realized I’d been hanging onto the hope, however slim, that as long as she was alive she might somehow get better.”

Death always feels sudden, even when it’s anticipated, Phyllis Silverman says. “But when a parent simply ‘drops dead’ the assault on a family cannot be overestimated,” she emphasizes. Heart attacks, aneurysms, accidents, suicide, homicide, complications during pregnancy and childbirth, acts of terrorism, natural disasters, war, and other forms of sudden death
⁵
throw a family into an immediate and unexpected crisis. To survive such a loss is truly a test of the human spirit. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live,” wrote Mark Twain, who lost his favorite daughter, Susy, in 1896. Life changes with the news of a moment, too quickly for anyone to adjust with grace or ease.

The immediate shock, disbelief, and disorganization that follow the sudden death of a loved one often force mourning into a holding pattern until family members can process the circumstances surrounding the loss. When a daughter’s assumptions about the world as
a safe, nurturing place are shattered in an instant, she has to restructure her beliefs and rebuild some of her faith before she can devote much energy to accepting her mother’s absence. We mourn only when we feel stable and secure enough to relinquish some control—not when we’re anticipating another blow from behind.

Donna, twenty-six, remembers the seventy-mile-an-hour car ride she made through San Francisco to reach the hospital after she heard her mother had committed suicide. “I ran into the emergency room,” she recalls. “I was running on adrenaline. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t speak beyond saying, ‘I’m Donna Barry. Where’s my father? ’ The nurse walked me back into the room, and I saw my mother lying there with the tube in her mouth and the tape on her face. My dad was sitting next to her, holding her hand and crying. I turned around and started punching the nurse. I was a basket case. Reality had not hit, and it didn’t hit until months afterward. I knew my mother was gone, but there was still this idea that maybe she’d come back. I kept having dreams that I’d see her again. People kept saying, ‘How
are
you?’ after she died. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ and they’d say, ‘Donna, you have to.’”

To outsiders, Donna’s initial coping behaviors may have resembled denial, but as Therese Rando explains, this immediate response to sudden death is more a sense of disbelief. “When somebody dies suddenly, you don’t have time to gradually shift your expectations, to tell yourself, ‘Well, next Christmas she’s not going to be here,’ or ‘She won’t be here when I walk down the aisle,’” she says. “Instead, everything is gone all at once, and you cannot bend your mind around the idea that fast. There’s been such an assault on the way you’ve conceptualized your world, which includes that person. And especially with your mother. Your mother is your
mother.
How can she not be here?”

Sudden deaths, more than any other form of loss, teach children that relationships are impermanent and liable to end at any time, an awareness that can dramatically shape their emerging personalities. Carla, forty-four, says she delayed marriage and childbirth until her forties because she spent her twenties and thirties afraid to form lasting attachments. The deep rejection and abandonment she felt at the age of twelve when her mother committed suicide, and again three
years later when her father did the same, made her terrified of losing another loved one without warning. “Since my parents’ deaths, I’ve lived a life in which I always felt calamity might be lurking around every corner, and that some terrible loss might come at any moment for which there is no preparation and no defense,” she explains. Today, Carla is a successful professional, a wife, and the mother of two. But her childhood experiences made it hard for her as an adult to understand that others intend to stay.

Losing a parent to suicide is one of the most difficult types of death a child can experience. It’s sudden and usually unexpected, it often involves violence, and even daughters who understand the part mental illness and depression often play still experience suicide as a clearcut and real rejection. “To a child, parental suicide is a ‘fuck you,’” Andrea Campbell explains. “It’s an ‘I can’t live for you. I can’t stay alive for you. You may hurt, but I hurt more.’”

A mother’s suicide leaves a daughter to contend with a complex array of emotions, including heightened anger, guilt, and shame; lowered self-esteem; shattered self-worth; feelings of inadequacy, deficiency, and failure; fear of intimacy; and an eroded capacity to trust that this type of rejection won’t happen again. Therapists have observed that among young children, poor school performance and eating and sleeping disorders are typical symptoms, whereas older children are more likely to act out with drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, social withdrawal, or aggression. Child survivors also may exhibit posttraumatic behaviors such as distortions of memory when asked to recall the death; the belief they will die young; a collapse of earlier developmental skills; and a tendency to repeat the trauma through dreams, nightmares, and play. And all this takes place in a cultural milieu that typically projects shame and guilt onto the family members left behind, no matter how young.

“After I figured out that my mother had killed herself, whenever I heard the word
suicide,
I felt embarrassed,” remembers twenty-year-old Jennifer, who was four when her mother died. “I don’t even think I knew exactly what the word meant, but anytime anyone mentioned it, I could just feel my face get warm from my collar up. I was always afraid somebody was going to turn around and say, ‘You! You’re the one whose mom killed herself!’”

When the psychologists Albert Cain and Irene Fast, two early researchers of parent suicides, studied forty-five children between the ages of four and fourteen who were being treated for psychological disturbances after having lost parents to suicide, they found that guilt was a predominant response and that questions such as “Why couldn’t I save her?” and “Did I cause her despair?” were common. They also discovered that few surviving parents had discussed the suicide with their children, and some overtly refused to talk about it. In one-fourth of Cain and Fast’s case studies the child had witnessed some aspect of the suicide yet was told that the parent had died some other way—an additional reason why parental suicide often destroys a child’s basic sense of trust.

Cain and Fast also found that child survivors occasionally, in adolescence or adulthood, identified with the parent to such an extent that they repeated the mother or father’s suicidal act. In some instances the parallels were striking, such as the eighteen-year-old girl who drowned herself alone at night at the same beach and in almost the same way as her mother had drowned herself many years before. Jennifer solemnly reports that in her family, which never openly discussed her mother’s death, that she and an older sister attempted suicide in their teens. When she was feeling depressed and isolated as a college freshman, Jennifer explains, suicide seemed a simple solution to her pain.

Other daughters develop isolated symptoms that relate to a mother’s suicide in some way. Margie, twenty-five, describes the chaotic scene that took place when she, as a seven-year-old, awoke in the middle of the night to her grandmother’s screams and learned that her mother’s body had just been found in the garage. “A main thing I remember from the rest of my childhood is this rigid fear at night, just lying in bed stiff and terrified out of my wits,” she recalls. “I think the fear came at night because I was so obviously alone then, and also because my mother died at night. I’ve been an insomniac for most of my life, which I’ve just recently connected with that.”