Motherless Daughters (19 page)

By then he was finishing graduate school, I was ready to leave Tennessee, and we were planning a move to California, where he had already accepted a job. On the surface, our future together looked as limitless as the tableau the West once was. But underneath, there had been problems all along. The first one was my mother, whose absence I was trying my best to ignore. And the second was his mother, whose presence was harder to overlook. I was of the “wrong” ethnicity, not from a “good” family, and breaking up their tight-knit group: These were the complaints. She was vocal in her disapproval, I was terrified by her rejection, and my meek attempts to improve the situation were inhibited by my conviction that one mother had left me and another wanted me to disappear. By the time we began to reach a small sort of truce, her son and I had been arguing about it for too long. I’d felt abandoned and wanted him to take a stronger stand; he felt pressured and kept insisting there was nothing he could do. Around and around we went, until the only exit I could see was mine. One month before our
move to California, I placed the diamond ring on his coffee table and walked out the front door.

Death, I knew how to manage. Separation, I could not bear. So I turned the end of the engagement into a mini-death. I refused to answer his letters. I got involved with someone else. I packed everything he’d given me, including the teddy bear and all the photos of us together, into a box I pushed to the back of a basement shelf. I’m not proud of how I handled this, but it was the only way I could think of to cope. I knew how to end relationships, not how to fix them. When an unmourned death is your paradigm for loss, later separations have an evil way of echoing back to that earlier one.

This time, though, the pain refused to stay underground. As the initial shock of separation slowly wore off, I began to grieve with a ferocity that, quite literally, one night brought me to my knees. It didn’t matter that I was the one who’d walked away; I still felt an overpowering sense of loss. Five months later, I was still mourning with an intensity that even a four-year relationship didn’t seem to warrant, and I realized that my feelings had to be coming from a place deeper, much deeper, than a space once occupied by a man I loved.

Eva, forty-five, nods her head vigorously when I share this story with her. She was eight when her mother died, and her experience with later separation closely parallels my own. “My husband left two and a half years ago, and the divorce was final a year after that,” she says. “At the time, I couldn’t understand why I was so inordinately taken by it. I’ve seen a lot of people go through divorces, and most of them didn’t suffer as I think I did. I really suffered. At first, I thought, ‘Well, maybe I feel things more intensely than other people,’ which may in part be true. But that experience made it clear to me that a lot of my suffering wasn’t about my husband. It was about my mother. So I’m trying to understand more about that first loss, and what it’s done to me.”

For thirty-seven-year-old Yvonne, however, loss has become progressively easier. She says her divorce three years ago and her teenage son’s decision to live with his father provoked minimal emotional pain compared with what she, as a twelve-year-old, felt when her mother died. “I view separation and loss as inevitable,” she says. “I’m ready for it. I never want to be lulled into thinking that something
can’t change at any moment. I know this sounds cruel, but I believe I come by it honestly. I have loving relationships with many people. If anything, I want to make sure that I’m remembered when I die.”

Why do some women who’ve experienced early loss adjust easily to later separations, whether in the personal or professional world, while others live in perpetual fear of abandonment? Nobody knows for sure. Most therapists agree that a child’s specific experience with an early, major loss shapes her emerging personality, which then determines how she views and handles later separations. Exactly how her personality is affected—if at all—depends on the factors below.

We’re all born with different temperaments, and some children appear to possess a natural resilience that protects them from long-term distress. “There is a certain hardiness of personality that allows some people to do better than others,” Therese Rando says. “That doesn’t mean these people are unmoved by death, but when they are moved by it, they’re going to deal with it in a way that’s better than someone who had a weaker personality to begin with.” Other children seem to have an innate, deep sensitivity to loss that leaves them nearly crippled by it every time. The psychologist and author Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., calls these people “sensitives.” In her audiotape, “Warming the Stone Child: Myths and Stories About Abandonment and the Unmothered Child,” she explains, “It is true hell for a sensitive to be unmothered and abandoned, because they’re the people who, if you just scratch them, bleed. They’re the people who are like the skinless man. They walk around with exposed nerves.” No matter how well supported these daughters are as mourners, they’re constitutionally incapable of bouncing back quickly from loss.

The British psychiatrist John Bowlby believed a child’s earliest pattern of attachment determines her resilience or vulnerability to later
stressful life events. Although he studied children only until the age of six, his hypothesis suggests that the kind of bond a girl forms with her mother predicts how well she’d cope with losing her. A young daughter with an anxious attachment, such as one who panics each time her mother leaves her sight, may lack the emotional skills to accept the loss of her mother or a later attachment figure without intense protest and distress. Paradoxically, kids who securely attach to a primary caregiver may be the ones most able to let later relationships come and go.

A daughter who perceives herself as capable and takes responsibility for herself after a mother’s death often gains a level of mastery over her environment. When she believes she has acted, rather than reacted, to the loss, she can develop a certain self-esteem and self-confidence that helps to insulate her against later stresses. She knows she can rely on her own resources.

The daughter who perceives herself as helpless and powerless against adversity, however, is more likely to grow up fearing future loss. These are often individuals who have what psychologists call an “external locus of control,” the belief that things happen
to
them, rather than as the result of their own efforts. Instead of trusting her own ability to cope, this daughter lives with an ongoing fear that another major loss will occur and that she will collapse.

Forty-three-year-old Mary Jo, for example, who was eight when she lost her mother and nine when her younger brother died, was raised as an observant Catholic and concluded that God must be punishing her for bad behavior. Believing she was powerless against divine will, as a child she lay in bed and practiced lying in her coffin, convinced she would be the next family member to die. She was also terrified of losing her father, and as an adult, she extended her fear to include losing her husband, her job, and her home. “I’ve always had a sense of alarm, worrying who or what I’m going to lose next,” she explains. A divorce in her twenties left Mary Jo even more convinced that she lacked power over her life.

A motherless daughter who has the personal maturity and the environmental support to express her feelings, attach meaning to the loss, and form other secure attachments is most likely to accommodate the death of her mother and approach future separations without excessive trauma or pain. But a daughter who was prohibited from feeling angry or sad, who became bogged down in denial or guilt, or who grew up with a further threat of abandonment may never mourn that first loss. Erna Furman, who studied parent loss with a group of Cleveland child analysts in the 1960s and 1970s, found that when childhood mourning is incomplete—as it often is—the death of another loved one in adulthood frequently reactivates elements of the early loss, including the same coping mechanisms the child relied on then. As a psychologist I know explains it, “The stone drops straight to the bottom of the well.” The problem, as many women discover, is that what helped a child through a loss at twelve doesn’t necessarily work for a woman of thirty-five.

When a subsequent loss sends a mourner spiraling back to her mother’s death, it encourages her to continue working on grieving the initial loss. Experiencing subsequent losses, then, may be an important part of a daughter’s long-term mourning task.

This is true when a later loss cycles back to an earlier one, but that sequence isn’t inevitable. Later loss reactivates early loss selectively, depending on who dies or leaves the second time, the cause of that loss, the timing in a daughter’s life, and the proximity in time to another major loss. Eva, for example, lost her father twenty-five years after her mother died. The circumstances of this second death were sufficiently different for her, as an adult, to perceive it as an isolated event and keep it separate from her mother’s. But when her husband, on whom she’d depended for most of her emotional needs, walked out eight years later, the abandonment and despair she felt were so similar to her experience after her mother’s death that this loss was the one that sent her back to do the mourning she hadn’t done as a young child.

This is all complicated even further when the death or departure of a mother isn’t the first major loss of a daughter’s life. The death of
a father or a sibling, a parental divorce, family dysfunction, or a traumatic move may have already occurred before a mother dies. Six percent of the 154 motherless women surveyed for this book lost their fathers first, and 13 percent said their biological parents separated or divorced before their mothers died. For these women, a mother’s death often re-triggered elements of an even earlier loss, and reactivated coping mechanisms developed and relied on at that time.

As unusual as it may sound, family dysfunction such as alcoholism or abuse may help daughters cope with the loss of a mother, at least in the short term. “Loss isn’t a new event for these kids,” Therese Rando explains. “They’ve had practice feeling helpless and dealing with it. But I’d much rather be a daughter who’s had what I call ‘too good a childhood,’ without any loss, because over time that person will be able to cope better.” The child with a troubled past who learned to “numb out” at an early age may depend on this skill to get through the initial shock after a mother dies or leaves, but she probably lacks the solid foundation she’ll need to handle the changes that follow and the subsequent losses she’ll inevitably face.

Not long after my first daughter was born, I was sitting in a Mommy & Me group and listening to other exhausted new mothers share the stressors that now filled their days. One mother couldn’t get her newborn to nap for stretches of more than forty-five minutes at a time; another was concerned that the minerals in her bottled water were disturbing her son through her breast milk. The woman next to me expressed the irritation she felt when her mother-in-law criticized her daughter’s use of a pacifier.

Surrounded by such tame concerns of new motherhood, I was reluctant to share my own new fears. I could just imagine the way heads would turn and eyebrows would arch if I were to say, “Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve been afraid that I’m going to die and leave her motherless, or that she’s going to get sick with an untreatable disease, spend weeks in the hospital ICU, die in my arms, and leave me and my husband incapable of living without her.”

I knew that I was projecting an innocuous new-mother moment into a full-blown annihilation scene, but it didn’t seem all that far-fetched to me. Early loss has a way of making adults turn even the most mundane, everyday events into a catastrophe. Children never miss dinner because they forgot to check the time; they’ve been kidnapped by ex-cons. The headache is never a migraine; it’s a brain tumor, and you’ve waited too long. There’s no such thing as turbulence; the plane is going down. It’s part of what Maxine Harris, Ph.D., calls the “terrifying insecurity” that marks life after the full-scale disaster of an early death occurs. “For these individuals, the world seems changeable and unpredictable, and they fear that even that which seems most secure could be taken away on a moment’s notice,” she writes.

As thirty-two year old Jess, who was thirteen when her mother died, admits, “I insist that my husband call if he’s going to be home later than expected. If he doesn’t, I panic. I don’t fear that he’s out having an affair. I’m convinced he’s dead on a highway somewhere.”

Someone we love has left us before. Who’s to say it can’t happen again?

These visions of gloom usually have little to do with reality. Instead, they’re outgrowths of a woman’s perceived vulnerability, which is linked to her expectation for future loss rather than to incomplete grief in her past. People don’t usually think of themselves as vulnerable to threatening events unless they’ve experienced a loss or disaster—such as the early death of a parent—in the past. When a daughter loses a mother, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. The result? A sense of inner fragility and overriding vulnerability. She discovers she’s not immune to unfortunate events, and the fear of subsequent, similar losses may become a defining characteristic of her personality. “I know my mother’s death led to this huge cynicism I have,” says twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her mother committed suicide. “I often feel like, well, why wouldn’t my boyfriend get hit by a bus? It’s not
that
strange. What’s going to prevent it from happening? What tremendous luck is going to prevent all the people I love from dying?”

Anyone who’s experienced a traumatic loss will react more dramatically to the risk of future loss, perceived or actual, says Tamar Granot. “Often, adults do not understand why a child may exhibit such intense anxiety when faced with seemingly simple situations,” she writes. “The child’s overreacting has to do with the traumatic memories that immediately surface whenever he gets close to a situation that contains elements of a potential loss and separation. For children who have already experienced a traumatic loss, even the beginning of a situation that involves a risk of loss will stir up the deepest fears and anxieties.” And this isn’t a state that evaporates after childhood: We often retain these characteristics well into our adult years. Says Carla, forty-four, who lost both parents by the age of fifteen, “When we go off in the car, I often think, ‘What if a car comes careening across the median and one of my sons is killed?’ I know other mothers think of that, but I think it occurs perhaps more often to me. And yet I recognize it for what it is and I tell myself, ‘Okay. You’ve thought the thought. Now put it aside. You have the beautiful gifts of your sons and a life that is full and for the moment very satisfying.’ I don’t think people would refer to me as a gloomy person, but there is a sense in which I’m racking in, I don’t know, in a kind of darkness. It’s a curious way to live.”