Motherless Daughters (21 page)

As Margie’s example illustrates, a woman need not lose both parents to death to identify with the orphan archetype. Many unmothered
women who still have one or both parents nevertheless describe themselves as spiritual or emotional orphans. “Functionally orphaned” is a term they understand well. Their mothers, though physically present, may have offered them little emotional support; their fathers, though still alive, may have played minimal roles in their lives. As children, their most crucial emotional needs were never met.

As early orphans search for a reason why such tragedy would befall them, they reach for religion, metaphysics, rationalizations, even platitudes—anything that will help them believe the cosmos is not so random that disaster can strike anyone at any moment, and that they are not doomed or marked in any dark way. A girl uses whatever cognitive and emotional resources are available to her at her time of loss, and in adolescence and then adulthood she continually reworks the images, seeking renewed comfort at each developmental stage.

Darlene, who lost her father and then her mother to separate accidents by the age of ten, says her search for meaning has continued well into her adult life:

Loss is a part of life as involuntary as a heartbeat, as inevitable as nightfall. This is even more poignantly true for women, whose gendered experiences are so closely linked to natural separation and loss. In her essay “The Normal Losses of Being Female,” Lila J. Kalinich
explains that although a man experiences potential and real losses throughout his life, a woman encounters a significant loss about once every decade: the first individuation from the mother during her toddler years; the end of childhood when menstruation begins; the second individuation during adolescence; the loss of virginity during adolescence or young adulthood; the possible loss of her original surname when she marries; the sacrifice of certain elements of motherhood or career if she decides against combining both; her children’s departure from home; the loss of her childbearing capacity at the onset of menopause; and, because women are likely to outlive their husbands, the possibility of widowhood. Biologically and socially, women are surrounded by loss. Within this larger landscape, the loss of a mother is an inevitable, though tragic, female experience.

Eva, Mary Jo, and Margie, as adults, each found a compassionate counselor to help them mourn their mothers’ deaths. Other women interviewed for this book mentioned strong religious beliefs, dependable lovers and spouses, and close friendships as supports that have helped them cope with subsequent separation and loss and approach it with less trepidation.

“After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote. He understood how influential that first loss can be. It continues to sit on our shoulders, guiding our response to future separations, until we can put it to rest. When you lose a parent early, you develop an increased sensitivity to later loss. The challenge isn’t to bury that early experience, but to understand it, to accept it, and to keep it from interfering with your ability to enjoy and fully experience the rest of your life.

Sophie stared at the pans lying upside down on the counter. “Doesn’t it seem kind of pathetic—just us?”

“What do you mean?” said Caitlin. “We’re a family.”

“Yah, but it doesn’t feel like we’re all here.”

“We’re not,” Chicky said.

“Joanie Nathan said the first year needs to go by before you get used to it,” Caitlin said.

“We have a month, then,” Chicky said. It had been eleven months since the accident.

“I’m not expecting to
get
used to it,” said Delilah with disgust.

“Well, it feels like more than just Mum,” Sophie said.

Everyone nodded. It wasn’t just one thing; a thousand things were missing. The house was filled with missing things, despite the Christmas decorations being up. . . The girls put the decorations where they always got put—the creche on the Chinese table in the hall, the laurel looping down the banister, the wooden fruit poked into wreaths. They taped Christmas cards to the stair railing the way Mum had and lit the pine candle. Nothing was the same.

 

—Susan Minot,
Monkeys

MY FATHER WAS NEVER much of a talker. Even when my mother was alive he preferred to stay at home listening to the radio and working crossword puzzles while she went out at night. She scheduled the social events, organized the dinner parties, made all the new friends. After she died, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he spoke even less. Over the years, his occasional phone calls consisted mainly of questions about the weather and the performance of my car. Later, he’d ask about my daughters. He wanted to hear only the good news. If I mentioned my mother or said I was having a hard day, silence was typically his response. If I brought up his drinking or his weight, I’d hear a quick goodbye and a click. Maybe he’d call back in a few days or weeks. Long portions of my adult life were spent wondering which one of us would break down first and pick up the phone.

The easy explanation for my pervasive fear of abandonment is that my mother died when I was seventeen, but that’s never been a reason that’s made much sense to me. Although it taught me a quick lesson about the impermanence of relationships, I know, and have always known, that my mother did not want to leave. But my father, well, that was a different story. The threat of his departure, which was both symbolic and real, began with the moments in my childhood when he stormed out of the house after an argument and reached a terrifying peak one evening when I was a sophomore in college and my sister called me, crying, pleading with me to do something, because my father, momentarily overcome by the demands of single fatherhood, was packing his bags to leave.

In the end he didn’t go anywhere that night, but my siblings and I quickly learned how to tiptoe through the minefield in this new landscape we all shared, careful not to tread too hard on any topic that might make our father explode. A friend of mine who at age eight lost her mother describes this kind of tentative choreography as a dance between the threat of rejection and a denial of the self. To confront any painful issue with her father, especially concerning her mother, meant risking that he, too, would leave her, but to pretend such topics did not exist was the most blatant denial of her reality. Because the children in my family were too young—and too afraid—to risk total abandonment, we chose silence. The times our father did show emotion and let us see his pain, we deliberately forced him back into the safety of suppression. When he broke into jagged tears at my brother’s bar mitzvah, I elbowed him hard and hissed at him to stop. To me, his crying signified the first stage of what I was afraid would lead to complete collapse, undermining the only security I had left. While my father never gave me a safe place to air my feelings, neither did I, until much later, give him the chance to express his.

My father died at the age of seventy-four. His children and grandchildren were around him at the end, but he didn’t have a partner or even any close friends. He never remarried. As far as I know, he never even dated. He lived alone in a small, tidy apartment with dozens of photos of his children and grandchildren clustered on the walls. Twenty-four years after my mother’s death the mention of her name still brought him to tears. Until the very end of his life, he refused to talk about her final days or the role he’d played in them. And so, as fate would have it, he had to live them instead. Her primary cause of death was liver failure, and liver cancer was what finally did him in. The last seventy-two hours of his life, as his liver shut down, mirrored the last three days of hers with eerie precision. If I hadn’t believed in karma before that experience, I surely would have started believing in it then.

Bereavement experts talk about the importance of maintaining a relationship with the deceased, and about how the inner dialogue continues long after a loved one has gone. When I reach for my father now, I find only silence, but it’s neither uncomfortable nor unfamiliar.
Long pauses and audible ellipses always demarcated our conversations when he was alive. I try to speak to him sometimes, silently; but, even now, I don’t know what to say. For the last twenty years of his life, we rarely managed to communicate at a level more significant than the meteorological report. And it makes me wonder: Did we ever communicate any other way?

 

I have to go backwards, to look at where it all began.

I know little about my father’s life before I was born, only disconnected snapshots meted out from time to time. He grew up, with both parents and his older brother, in New York City during the Depression. His grandparents ran a corner newsstand. On Saturday afternoons, he saw double features for a quarter and bought three candy bars for a dime.

The stories he told of his childhood were brief and intermittent, deliberate parables linked to lessons he meant for me to learn. When I asked for a raise in my allowance, he told me how once he had asked his mother for a nickel to buy an ice cream cone and she couldn’t come up with enough change. When the school system wanted me to bypass kindergarten and go straight into the first grade, he insisted that I stay back with the children my age. He’d skipped two grades in elementary school, he said, and was miserable as a result, always too young to make real friends.

I can tell you a great deal about my mother’s family, about her grandparents’ immigration from Russia and Poland, and about her eight aunts and uncles, her two younger sisters, and her parents, all of whom I knew. But my father’s family was always a mystery to me. It’s small—only his brother and his brother’s children survive. And he’s always kept his past firmly locked away. In the cufflink box on his dresser I once found a picture of his father, a small black-and-white mug shot of a dark, serious man who looked remarkably like him. I used to stand on tiptoe and sneak looks at it during the day, trying to figure out where my father had come from and what he might become. My mother once told me that my paternal grandfather, who died just after my parents met, had a heart attack at fifty-two. “That’s why I’m always nagging your father to stop drinking and smoking, and to keep his weight down,” she explained. When I
mentioned this to my father a few years ago, he looked genuinely puzzled. “But my father died of cancer when he was fifty-seven,” he told me, and he didn’t say much more.

When the author Victoria Secunda says, “Mothers represent the day, fathers the night—and the weekend, the holiday, the special dinner out,” she succinctly describes the family I knew for my first seventeen years. My mother was the continuous presence in my life. My father was the parent who waxed and waned, leaving for work each morning before I woke and returning in time for dinner and prime-time TV. The quick and the physical—that was my father’s domain. He taught me to throw a softball and mow the lawn. He corrected my math and chemistry equations. He showed me how to pitch a tent. He was the disciplinarian of my childhood, the distant yet larger-than-life figure who set the house rules. He handed out allowances and he reprimanded us. When we traveled as a family, he always drove the car.

My mother was the parent who woke me each morning, made sure I drank a full glass of orange juice with breakfast, and always called, “Have a nice day!” as I bolted for the bus. She was there when I came home. She chose my clothing, accompanied my grade-school classes on field trips, and read me stories before I went to bed. My mother taught me how to play the piano, cook a three-course meal, and knit a simple scarf. The lessons that required patience and repetition came under her tutelage, and as a result, it was in her company that I spent most of my time.

The morning my mother died, my father assembled his three children around the kitchen table at dawn. He looked at us and blinked quizzically, as if to ask, “Have we met?” and I understood fully for the first time that I had only one parent left, and that he was one I barely knew and didn’t particularly like. So much prose has been devoted to the Good Mother/Bad Mother complex, but far less to the corresponding split in our fathers. “One man, two fathers. Daddy and the Other Father,” is how Letty Cottin Pogrebin describes her father in the memoir
Deborah, Golda, and Me.
When memory fails, the old home movies from the sixties show me that I had a daddy who carried me on his shoulders and let me blow out the candles on his birthday cake. This daddy is the man who, during
the first years after his wife died, tried to compensate as best he could. He rearranged his work schedule to be home by 5:00 p.m. He gave us money to buy our own clothes. One day he came home with a microwave and taught himself how to cook. I used to set the table and watch him as he prepared the meals, a big man in a chef’s apron thumbing through his new cookbooks as his Scotch and soda sweated droplets on the counter by his side. In the warmer months he barbecued, and two nights a week we ordered in.

I loved him for these efforts, only vaguely understanding how difficult his transition from husband and part-time father to full-time single parent must have been. I remember how his face pinched up the first time we took a car trip after my mother died, when nobody wanted to sit in the passenger seat. But most of the time, all I could see was the Other Father. I’d been my mother’s protector, the one who always defended her when they argued, and our afternoons of bedroom “girl talk” had given me information about their marriage that no sixteen-year-old daughter should have to know. I’ve heard that when a mother shares with her daughter bitter feelings toward her husband, the mother keeps that daughter allied with and bound to her even after she dies, and prevents the daughter from forming her own relationship with her father. I know some of my anger toward my father developed this way. And I know some more of it came from knowing he had withheld information from my mother about the severity of her illness, denying her the opportunity to turn to the religion she believed in so deeply, or to fashion any sort of goodbye. And beyond all that, I was angry with him for being just a father. When my mother transformed into a saint after her death, I turned my father into the ultimate sinner. As hard as he tried, nothing he did could possibly please me. His most grievous fault was that he wasn’t her.