Motherless Daughters (24 page)

“I swore I was going to get my father to recognize me,” says thirty-three-year-old Jackie, who was thirteen when her mother died. “But after about two years of getting notes sent home from school and staying out past my curfew, I realized he was never going to say anything about it to me. What was he thinking? That if he ignored it, it would just go away? Well, my need for attention didn’t disappear. What happened was, I eventually gave up on my father and tried to get it from other men. I went through a very promiscuous period in college, and I lost my first job because I was trying to please my male department supervisor instead of my female boss. That’s been a major theme of my life: trying to get men to notice me.”

A 1983 study of seventy-two female college students, the first to look at the significance of father control (the degree to which a father sets and enforces appropriate regulations), found that daughters whose fathers exercised high levels of support, affection and—as the researchers had suspected—structure, were the girls most likely to become secure, content women who had developed age-appropriately. In a home run by a distant father, however, such rules and restrictions are often ambiguous, and sometimes altogether absent. Ronnie feels fortunate that the anarchy of her home was offset by the strict rules of her parochial high school. “I think I really would have gotten into a lot of trouble if I didn’t have authority figures around me most of the day at an all-girls’ school,” she explains. “They became my only models for self-control.”

Like many other daughters of distant fathers, Ronnie developed a strong sense of independence. While the daughter of a helpless father develops a hypercompetent
physical
self-reliance that encourages her to take responsibility for those around her, the daughter of a distant father becomes more
emotionally
independent. As an adult, she’s wary of depending on others; feeling physically abandoned by one parent and emotionally abandoned by the other, she selects only
a handful of people to whom she’ll get close. “Very removed, very cold: That’s how people sometimes describe me,” Ronnie admits, with a hint of sadness—or is it resignation?—in her voice. “I really need to be with the right person before I feel that I can open up. I’m so afraid of abandonment.”

A distant father’s incapacity to give his daughter emotional support after her mother dies arises not from his inability to care about her, but his inability to show his concern. We’re often told that our fathers did the best they could and that by understanding their limits and lowering our expectations we can heal some of our past father-daughter wounds. And this is all true. But such advice doesn’t erase the memory of inadequate emotional support; it doesn’t magically turn “the best they could do” into “good enough.” Daughters of distant fathers either must learn to parent themselves or find nurturing from other sources. “When my father got into therapy a few years ago,” Ronnie says, “he decided he wanted to redo all those years I spent alone, and be the father to me that he never was. I had to tell him, ‘It’s too late. I’m already grown up.’” Like many other daughters of distant fathers, Ronnie has become so highly proficient at taking care of herself that she’s reluctant to let anyone else—especially someone who let her down before—try.

Samantha’s father held a full-time job, headed a household, and attended to his five children’s emotional and physical needs. He was a “heroic father,” and his daughter credits him with the security and emotional strength she feels today.

Her family had always been close, says Samantha, now thirty-two. After her mother’s death when Samantha was fourteen, her father continued and even deepened his relationship with his four daughters and one son when he became their only parent.

The heroic father typically shared child-rearing and household tasks when his wife was present and had warm, loving relationships with his children before their mother died. After her death, he mourns appropriately, providing his children with a safe forum for expressing their feelings, and reallocates roles fairly, taking on what he can and delegating the rest. Most daughters who describe their fathers as heroic come from families with several children, where siblings could offer additional support when a father felt overburdened or overwhelmed. This is an important characteristic of the heroic-father family. When a daughter can split her needs between her father and other reliable family members, when she doesn’t have to place unrealistically high expectations on him, his chances of disappointing her decrease.

The heroic father isn’t perfect and is still prone to bouts of depression or doubt, but he’s clearly a parent in control. Despite his own grief, he manages to maintain a safe, supportive environment that absorbs some of the shock of a daughter’s loss and helps her continue developing confidence and self-esteem. For these reasons, his death is likely to be a major blow to her. Unlike daughters of helpless or distant fathers, who must either withdraw some of their
dependency needs or face disappointment, the daughter of a heroic father has a dad she can depend on. Even as an adult, she typically continues to rely on him for emotional support. Although her response to his death is free of the intense resentment and guilt that often plague other daughters, the loss leaves her feeling truly alone for the first time—a state that daughters of other fathers say they felt soon after their mothers died.

The only time that thirty-two-year-old Kim begins to cry during our two-hour interview is when she speaks of her father’s death from cancer seven years ago. After her mother died when she was two, Kim lived with her older sister and brother, and a father she describes as “awesome, generous, great.” Even though her father remarried three times, Kim says she never felt displaced or overlooked.

Kim credits her heroic father, who was the only consistent parent of her childhood, with helping her achieve the emotional stability she says is central to her happy marriage today.

Like Kim, Kristen, twenty-two, praises her heroic father and her heroic stepfather, who both helped her mourn her mother’s death five years ago and gave her an emotional foundation she knows she can rely on today. Even so, she acknowledges that the heroic father has his limits. When she recently developed a gynecological condition
that required immediate attention and she needed financial and emotional support, she appealed to both fathers for help. “As soon as I found a physician, they both were like, ‘So it’s taken care of? Good!’ They didn’t want to talk about it anymore. They just wanted to make sure I was okay.” Her voice and her eyes drop slightly as she says, “As wonderful as the two of them are, they never 100 percent understand.”

Despite all his assets, the heroic father can’t fully replace an attentive, nurturing mother. In his quest to try, he runs the risk of devoting too
much
time and energy to his children, which can cause parent-child conflict when he begins dating or pursuing interests beyond the home.

Let’s imagine a best-case father-daughter scenario after a mother’s death: Parent and child mourn together, and the family slowly adjusts to its new configuration. The daughter still misses her mother but feels secure enough to trust her father to fill most of her needs. She’s his little girl, and he’s her perfect dad. The seasons change once, maybe twice. And then one night the doorbell rings, and the father walks into the den and says, “Kids? I’d like you to meet Marjorie (or Angie, or Sandy, or Sue).”

Corinne, thirty-five, still remembers every detail of that moment twenty-four years ago. She refused to acknowledge her father’s girlfriend when they started dating eight months after her mother’s death, when Corinne was eleven.

A father’s entry into the dating sphere requires a significant reordering of a daughter’s psyche. No longer does she have Dad to herself; he’s now a commodity to be shared. When a daughter has to make room for a new adult woman before she’s ready, the father-daughter relationship suffers. Among the women surveyed for this book, those whose fathers remarried quickly were most likely to have long-term father-daughter problems. Seventy-six percent of the women who described their current father-daughter relationships as “poor” had fathers who’d remarried within one year of a mother’s death, compared to only 9 percent of those who said their relationship is now “excellent.”

Twenty-six-year-old Audrey remembers the shock she felt at fourteen, when her father announced his upcoming marriage only six months after her mother had committed suicide. An only child, Audrey had been accustomed to receiving both of her parents’ undivided attention, and after her mother’s death she secretly expected her father to devote twice as much time to her.

“I went through an enormous rebellion against him at fifteen,” she says. “It was like, Father with
another woman
? And she had two kids. I thought, ‘Who is this person in my father’s life with all her tagalongs, and what makes her think she can become a part of my life, too?’ I gave her a really hard time until after I left for college. Now, I think of her as my father’s wife, and as long as she doesn’t try to be my mother, we can get along fine. She’s the one who tries to keep the family together, which I kind of appreciate. But my relationship with my father is still a mess. I needed him to help me through those first months after my mother died, and he was off wining and dining all the divorced women in our town. I’m still trying to work through my anger about that. In the meantime, it’s hard for me to even have lunch with him.”

Audrey says that much of her resentment comes from her father’s resistance toward speaking about her mother after the suicide. As an only child, Audrey had taken care of her mother through her
bouts of depression, and felt betrayed and abandoned after her death. She needed validation for those feelings, but her father refused to talk about the loss. His solution to his grief was to date and remarry quickly. Like many other motherless daughters, Audrey perceived her father’s behavior as a betrayal of her mother and felt as if she were the only one left honoring the original connection to her.

Naomi Lowinsky refers to the Cinderella story as an illustration of this conflict. In the version by the seventeenth-century French writer Charles Perrault, Cinderella asks her father to bring her a tree branch from town, which she then plants at her mother’s grave. When the tree grows, it speaks to Cinderella in her mother’s voice. “So the daughter is maintaining the connection with her true mother, even though her father has abandoned it by marrying a total witch,” Dr. Lowinsky explains. “That’s a very, very heavy burden for a little girl to be carrying. You can see how she’d get very mad at her dad about it, and maybe project the archetypal Bad Father onto him, because it feels like by remarrying he’s abandoning not only her, but also her mother.”

Older daughters usually have greater compassion for a widowed father. Less egocentric than younger children, they can understand his need for companionship beyond the family. Even so, a union with another woman usually is difficult for them to accept at first, especially when it occurs before they’ve had time to mourn their mothers.

Cecile and Beth, who were twenty-nine and twenty-six respectively when their mother died after a two-year illness, displaced the frustration and rage they felt after the loss onto their father when, five weeks after the funeral, he told them he’d met another woman. “I immediately went from grief to anger and hate,” Beth, now twenty-eight, recalls. “I was mean and miserable. I was almost possessed.”