Motherless Daughters (22 page)

I always knew that my father fiercely loved his children. He showed this love as best he could: with his brief telephone calls; with the ten-dollar bills he stuffed in my pocket each time I walked out his door; with the Priority Mail packages that arrived, like clockwork, the day before someone’s birthday, with a preprinted card inside signed “Love, Grandpa” or “Love, Dad.” My adult friends and boyfriends who met him in his later years knew him only as a gentle,
quiet, sober, lonely man. Yet I once knew him to be hard drinking and emotionally unpredictable, a man who behaved so much like a child that his children felt as if they needed to parent him. It was one thing to accept the good/bad duality in my mother, the parent who was dead. It was much harder to reconcile feelings of love and resentment toward the one who was still alive.

 

I used to think the distance between my father and me was peculiar, even shameful in some way, but when I asked ninety-three other motherless women to describe their current relationships with their fathers, I discovered that I was by no means unique. Only 13 percent of these women described their father-daughter relationship as “excellent.” Thirty-one percent said it was “poor,” and the remainder categorized it somewhere in between. Some of these daughters had once been close to their fathers, only to lose the connection after their mothers died. Others said the relationship soured when a stepmother entered the family. And still others said their father-daughter bonds had never been strong, although they hadn’t really noticed that when their mothers were still alive.

Whatever the circumstances, these figures are disheartening at best, and troubling at worst. A good deal of research in the past ten years has focused on the importance of the surviving parent to a bereaved child’s long-term adaptation, and in every study conducted the verdict has been clear: A good relationship between a bereaved child and her surviving parent helps buffer the ill effects of the loss. A strained relationship, or one characterized by neglect or abuse, puts the child at risk for numerous long-term adverse effects, including depression, high blood pressure, diminished feelings of self-worth, and vulnerability to stress.

Researchers once looked for a direct cause-and-effect relationship between early parent loss and depression. Now, it’s widely believed that the surviving parent provides a crucial intermediary link. Depression is much more likely to surface among bereaved children who receive little or no emotional care from a surviving parent than among those who receive compassionate, reliable care from that parent after the loss. “Without a doubt, the most important external influence on the emotional state of the child and on
how he copes with his loss is the parent or adult who raises him,” Tamar Granot says.

The work of Phyllis Silverman and William Worden has provided us with far more knowledge about motherless children raised in father-headed households than we had only a decade ago. When they compared a group of children who’d lost a mother to a group who’d lost a father, they found that the motherless kids were more likely to experience changes in daily living routines, and less likely to have their emotional needs met. They were also quicker to get a step-parent and more likely to be living with a depressed parent—which in turn increased their own chances of becoming depressed.

In 2002, approximately 840,000 American girls under the age of eighteen were living with their single fathers.
⁶
Of all children raised in single-parent homes, these girls may have the most personal difficulties, especially during the teen years. The Harvard Children’s Bereavement Study revealed that adolescent motherless girls being raised by their fathers were more likely to act out or engage in delinquent behavior than girls who’d lost their fathers. “A lot of times they were the oldest child in the family and were given responsibility for childcare and meals,” William Worden explains. “That was part of the resentment. And the dads would often bring a new honey into the house, and that was part of it, too. There wasn’t one particular reason. But the significant acting out on the part of teen girls who lost mothers was way, way beyond that of teen girls whose dads had died.”

According to Richard A. Warshak, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and an expert on father custody, girls raised by fathers show lower self-esteem and higher anxiety than father-raised boys and mother-raised children of either sex. This is partly because of a father’s doubts and insecurities about raising daughters, he says, and partly because of a girl’s anxiety about becoming a stand-in spouse.

“When a father has to raise a child of the opposite sex, it’s complicated,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “He’s in part influenced by his own identifications with his parents. A dad’s identifications with his own mother help him understand his daughter, and his memories of how his father treated his mother and sisters, if he had any, are embedded in his ideas of how to treat women. If a man feels relatively comfortable with the aspects of his mother he felt in tune with and shared, then he has something to draw from. But if he had an uncomfortable relationship with his mother, he doesn’t necessarily have a firm bedrock for relating to his daughter.”

When a mother dies or leaves the home, fathers and daughters find themselves in an unexpected and awkward position. They are strangers and intimates, allies and foes. Explains thirty-two-year-old Maureen, who was nineteen and the youngest of three children when her mother died, “My relationship with my father was nonexistent when my mother was alive. She’d really alienated me from him. I had to totally start from scratch with him. When he started dating six weeks after the funeral, there was so much tension in the house. I had a lot of anger toward him I just didn’t know how to cope with. My stepmother has been instrumental in getting my father and me to talk as adults, and my own maturity has allowed me to patch some things up. We’re getting better at relating to each other today.”

Many motherless daughters trace their current struggles—particularly in intimate relationships—not just back to the loss of their mothers but also to their relationships with their fathers. Twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her divorced mother committed suicide, went to live with her father and stepmother, neither of whom helped her mourn as a child or feel emotionally secure.

In a 1993 University of Detroit-Mercy study of eighty-three adults who lost parents between the ages of three and sixteen, the psychologist Bette D. Glickfield found that the subjects who remembered their surviving parents as warm and nonrejecting were most likely to believe that they could depend on others as adults. “Being able to talk freely with the surviving parent about the circumstances surrounding the death, to express sorrow to the surviving parent about the death, or to ask questions about the deceased parent, as well as having a parent who encourages independence and trust in others, predicts one’s ability to feel emotionally supported,” she says. The idea is that daughters who feel secure after a mother’s death are able to go on to form secure attachments with others.

Twenty-six-year-old Holly doubts that she’d avoid adult romance the way she does if she trusted that she could depend on others. For her, such trust was shattered when her father abruptly withdrew from her soon after her mother died. Holly says she never felt emotionally attached to her father when she was a child, and after her mother died when she was sixteen, she did not expect their relationship to improve dramatically. But she also did not expect her father to move in with a girlfriend six months later and leave her in the care of an elderly great-aunt until she left for college the following year. Feeling angry and abandoned, Holly swore she’d never make the mistake of depending on anyone else again:

A father is a daughter’s first heterosexual interest, and her relationship with him becomes the most influential blueprint for her later attachments to men. Throughout a daughter’s childhood and adolescence, she picks up clues from her father about how to relate to males. Though it may sound implausible at first, given what we know about same-sex role modeling, some of a girl’s
feminine
identifications come from having a father who exhibits the traditionally
masculine
traits of instrumentalism and assertion. Fathers also tend to reinforce sex-typed behavior in their daughters, subtly urging them to conform to behaviors and play that emphasize caretaking and cooperation. But when a mother dies or leaves, a father’s traditionally masculine behaviors can’t meet all of a daughter’s needs. His ability—or inability—to take on the expressive parenting role is suddenly magnified, and his strengths and weaknesses in this area become more apparent and more important than they were when his wife was present.

On top of this, another layer—the father’s ability to cope with mourning—is added to the post-loss father-daughter relationship. “Even today, fathers still tend to be people who will not talk at length or reveal their feelings to their children, and in some cases do not want their children to reveal their feelings to others,” says Russell Hurd, Ph.D., an assistant professor of educational psychology at Kent State University in Canton, Ohio. And we must not forget that surviving parents are themselves trying to cope with a devastating loss. Husbands don’t expect to outlive their wives, and they’re
often emotionally and practically unprepared for the demands of daily family life. Right when children are the most needy, widowed fathers, understandably, have the least to give.

Interviews with more than ninety motherless women revealed four common coping strategies that fathers adopt after the loss of a spouse. These categories are not mutually exclusive; a father may show evidence of more than one response, or switch from one to another over time. Like the mourning process in general, a father’s adjustment to single-parenthood is fluid and evolutionary, and a daughter has different needs at different ages. A good indicator of where the father-daughter relationship will ultimately end up is the point at which it began. Still, a mother’s absence can change the way a father relates to his daughter during the interim. The events of those months or years are the ones that can deeply affect a daughter’s feelings of security and self-worth, and her ability to form satisfying relationships as an adult.

Tricia, twenty-five, has just started grieving for the mother who died when she was three. Until recently, she wasn’t aware that she could. Her father hadn’t mourned, and neither had her four older brothers and sisters, as far as she could see.

After Tricia’s mother died, her father’s response was a quick, three-part sequence of silence, avoidance, and remarriage. He encouraged the family to continue on as if the death had never occurred, as if the empty place at the dinner table had been there all along. I call this “the Bonanza syndrome,” in honor of Ben Cartwright (played by Lorne Greene), the family patriarch of the television series
Bonanza,
who fathered three sons from three different wives, all of whom died young—one in childbirth, one at the hands of Indians, and one in a fall from a horse—none of whom were spoken of in any meaningful way. One notable exception takes place in the episode where the middle son, Hoss, falls in love with a dying woman. Ben takes him aside
and solemnly shares with him, “Son, I’ve buried three wives, and my advice to you is that you’ve gotta take it like a man.”

Growing up surrounded by such silence, Tricia passed through childhood and adolescence disassociated from her loss, yet she was still deeply traumatized by it.

“Up until the last couple of years, I never thought of my mother’s death as something that really happened to me,” she says. “In my head, I would think, ‘What a terrible thing to have happened to a three-year-old girl—to a child out there, but not to me.’ I couldn’t relate to it at all. But what an awful thing, for someone else. At the same time, I couldn’t even talk about my mother until I was nine or ten, because I’d get so choked up with emotion. I think that confusion came from never having permission to deal with any of my feelings.”

As Tricia learned at an early age, the “I’m okay, you’re okay father” uses a relentless forward motion as a defense against his own emotional pain and a means of avoiding his children’s grief. He rarely speaks about his deceased wife out of a reluctance that may stem from his commitment to be the protector of his family, a job he believes involves shielding his children from emotional pain. He often remarries quickly, immersing himself in a new relationship. (Fifty-two percent of all widowers remarry in the first eighteen months after a wife dies, although it’s estimated that more than half of these quick marriages end in separation or divorce.)