Motherless Daughters (23 page)

Tricia’s father remarried within two years after her mother’s death, presenting his new wife as a replacement—rather than as a substitute—for a mother all five children remembered and still missed. “When he married Marian, it was like, ‘Here’s your new mom,’” Tricia recalls. “It was very confusing to me, growing up and having to call my stepmother ‘Mom,’ because I knew I’d had a different mom, whom no one would talk about. It was like everybody was role playing; everybody was not dealing. I ended up really resenting my stepmother. I picked her because she was the mother figure, the person I wanted most that I didn’t have, and I blamed her for everything that went wrong in the family afterward.”

Because children often mimic the loss response of the family’s most significant surviving member, children of this kind of father often try to convince themselves that their grief should be as minimal
as their father’s appears to be. The siblings in Tricia’s family ranged in age from three to sixteen when their mother died, and this coping strategy began to backfire visibly as they acted out their confusion and grief. The oldest daughter became pregnant and gave birth to a child at sixteen; the oldest son, who’d been particularly close to his mother, entered a period of intense rebellion and virtually disappeared from the home. The family evolved into a loose group of isolated individuals that reunited for a strained and awkward Christmas at the family home each year.

Without a firm sense of family support, and unable to communicate on any meaningful level with either her father or stepmother throughout her childhood and adolescence, Tricia became a global nomad, living in England, China, and Japan before finally settling back in the United States. “I’ve always felt defensive, just like nobody’s there, nobody’s supporting me at all,” she explains. “And I often feel that I’m more needy than the average person. Just recently, I’ve realized why. I
am
needy. And it doesn’t make for very good relationships right now, especially with the men I date, because I’m looking for a strong parent. I always wind up feeling resentful when I don’t find one.”

For more than twenty years, Tricia modeled her father’s coping approach, trying to push her loss firmly into the past and denying that it had long-lasting effects. But when her boyfriend died in a car accident two years ago, she found she couldn’t keep the grief for her mother contained any longer. Part of mourning her mother’s death now, she says, has involved calling her stepmother ‘Marian’ instead of ‘Mom,’ and confronting her father with her feelings. “When I was grieving my boyfriend’s death, I went back to my father’s house. I took him outside one night and said, ‘I’m here, and the reason I’m here is because I’m grieving, and I’m going to sit here and do it until I’m done,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘You know, a lot of it really comes from my mom’s death. It’s had a major impact on me, and regardless of what anyone else in this family does, I’m very upset about it.’” The moment was a turning point in her relationship with her father. “It’s ironic, because now I’m the only child who ever sees his tears,” she says. “I’m the only one he feels safe enough to cry with.” She and her father, she says, are now tentatively trying to make up for their years of silence.

When Oedipus discovered that he’d killed his father and married his mother, he stabbed himself in the eyes and set off on a self-imposed exile. As the two of them wandered, hungry and barefoot, through the Theban countryside, his daughter, Antigone, became his sight and his guide. Devoted, compliant, and motherless—her mother, Jocasta, had killed herself when she had learned her husband was really her son—Antigone was the quintessential daughter of a “helpless father.” Had she lived to adulthood, she no doubt would have felt the effects of such single-minded subservience.

Tragedy takes on slightly less epic proportions today. Prolonged grief, addiction, and an inability to manage without a woman’s care are the typical reasons for a father’s helpless state after the death of his wife. Holding a job, raising children alone, and maintaining a home can overwhelm these fathers to the point of paralysis. “I’m working with a man right now whose wife just died in a car accident,” says Therese Rando. “This woman had done what a lot of women do: She paid all the bills, made all the decisions. This man knew nothing about the grocery shopping, nothing about where the IRS forms were. He was really very dependent upon her. In many cases, if the man dies, the woman still knows enough about operating the home because she’s had more experience in those roles. Even though a father’s death may mean a loss of income, it’s easier for kids to adapt if the surviving parent is the one most familiar with the ongoing daily routine. And many times, that’s the mother.”

When chronic bereavement causes a father’s helpless state, when his grieving seems to have no limits, he often succumbs to a mixture of intense despair, apathy, and depression. He may lose interest in his appearance and let his home deteriorate, and his children may suffer emotional or physical neglect. Only one parent has died in this family, but a daughter feels that both have disappeared. “This can be mitigated somewhat by a grandmother, an aunt, or siblings,” Russell Hurd says. “But to these children, it’s like a double blow. It’s really the loss of two parents—the death of one and the emotional withdrawal of the other.”

Who, then, steps in to keep the family together and run the house? Usually a daughter. This was the family situation for Denise and Jane, who met for the first time last year, during an informal focus group for this book. Over wine and cheese in my living room, they discovered that both of their fathers had had great difficulty adjusting to the loss and had expected their daughters to become the family caretakers.

Denise, now thirty-five, describes her father as a “tender, lovable, boyish, but highly avoidant man” who suffered a virtual emotional collapse after her mother’s death. Although she was just twelve at the time, Denise quickly realized that she was the only family member who could run the house and care for her two younger sisters, one of whom became dangerously anorexic shortly after their mother’s death. Propping up her father became Denise’s first and most significant relationship with a man, and this deeply influenced her criteria for romantic relationships today.

Pushed into premature adulthood and expected to attend to everyone else’s needs in addition to her own, Denise grew into a hypercompetent, fiercely independent woman who says learning to depend on others is one of her biggest challenges as an adult. “I’m still trying to learn that I can delegate tasks at work,” she says. “And I’m very close with my rabbi, who supports me in a way I’m not used to. I’m not used to having a strong figure who won’t topple over if I direct some energy toward it.” She’s still searching for a romantic partner who can meet the standards she set after living for seven years in a helpless father’s home.

Leaning forward attentively as Denise tells her story, Jane, thirty-eight, grasps the first opportunity to speak. Jane was thirteen when her mother, who was an alcoholic, died of ovarian cancer, and she became her father’s only source of emotional support until his death four years ago. Today, Jane says she fears relying on a partner, yet longs for a relationship with someone who will care for her. “I attract every wimp and his brother,” she says. “But I was never mothered, and I never had children. I feel like saying to some men, ‘You want to be mothered? Fuck you. I don’t want to be anybody’s mother.’ I find all these men who want mommies, but I want them to be my
father.
I want somebody now who’ll come home and take care of
me.
” Instead of looking for lovers or husbands they can care for—though that does happen—women who played the parental role too young may look to their adult partners or their own children to take care of
them.

Ronnie, twenty-five, describes herself as “ultra-independent, and much more hard-nosed than most women I know.” These are qualities she had to develop at the age of fifteen when her mother died, leaving her with a seventeen-year-old sister she constantly fought with and a father she felt she barely knew. Her mother had been her primary parent, and after she died, Ronnie’s father maintained the emotional gulf that already existed between him and his daughters.

“My father was always the pseudo-boss of our family,” Ronnie says. “My mother let him think he was the boss, but everybody knew that she was. So after she died, my father just had no clue. I think he was afraid of us, because we were two women and he had no idea how to raise two girls. My mother had done all the raising, and my father had been the breadwinner. So after she died, he would just say, ‘Okay. Here’s my checkbook. If you need anything, write yourself a check.’”

Ronnie is the daughter of a “distant father,” one who had little involvement in his daughter’s life to begin with and withdrew even further after her mother’s death. Whereas mothers tend to think of their children as extensions of themselves, fathers are more likely—even when they’re well-versed in childcare—to create boundaries between themselves and their children. After a mother dies or leaves, a father’s distance can be either psychological, the result of addiction or emotional withdrawal, or physical, as with divorce or departure. Oftentimes, this distance intensifies during a daughter’s adolescence, when fathers feel particularly inept and fearful about raising daughters. At the same time, daughters recognize their fathers as sexual beings and retreat in a panic. Adolescence is such a tricky time for fathers and daughters that even fathers with young girls become preoccupied with thoughts of how they’ll handle those years.

Several women—all of whom were adolescents when their mothers died—told me that shortly after the loss, their fathers moved out of the family house, leaving teenage children to fend for themselves with minimal supervision at home. That’s what happened in Ronnie’s family. Less than two years after her mother died, her father
accepted a job promotion that required a move to the Midwest. The sisters remained in their East Coast home with a full-time housekeeper while their father bought another house in Michigan. At first he commuted back on weekends, then twice a month, and then just for holidays. “At the time, I was very understanding,” Ronnie says. “I wanted everyone to think I was mature and had total control. But subconsciously, I was very resentful about him leaving us. About five years later, after I graduated from college and wasn’t dependent on him anymore, all that anger came pouring out. I couldn’t even talk to him for eight months. I was that furious.”

Left alone in the house during their teen years, Ronnie and her sister hosted all-night parties and spent huge sums of their father’s money. Financial support was the only consistent connection they had to him. “That was his love—the checkbook,” Ronnie explains. “It was the only way he knew how to show his affection, and my sister and I totally took advantage of him. We would buy two hundred dollars’ worth of food for one week, and even then, he wouldn’t complain.” Those years scrambled Ronnie’s ideas about money and love, and she says some confusion persists today. When she’s feeling sad or upset, her first impulse is to buy herself a gift—the same tactic her father relied on to keep her happy as a teen.

When Ronnie and her sister woke the neighbors with their parties and spent money designated for household expenses on makeup and clothes, they were really trying to evoke a response—any response—from the father who was quickly receding toward the horizon of their lives. I’ve heard similar stories from women who say they smoked marijuana in the kitchen and had sex with their boyfriends in the den while their fathers watched TV in the next room, all desperate attempts to force their fathers to pay attention to them and exercise parental control.

The daughter of a distant father views any attention—even anger—as evidence that he cares. She may alternate between being so good he’ll have to notice her, and so bad he can’t ignore her. But as a daughter often learns, her efforts to be good typically receive little more than a quick smile and a pat on the head. Trouble is more likely to push a father into action, if for no other reason than to force him to reinstate family peace. So the motherless daughter provokes her
distant father, trying to elicit a response. Her catch-22 is that the attention she really hopes to receive—affection and warmth—invariably doesn’t come from disruptive behavior. Instead, she gets anger and conflict. After her initial rush of success, disappointment leads to a feeling of worthlessness, and from there it’s a quick slide into resentment and shattered self-esteem.