Motherless Daughters (28 page)

Younger siblings often benefit from strong relationships with their older brothers and sisters after a loss, a bond that’s often gratefully acknowledged during adulthood even if it wasn’t always appreciated during childhood. A 1983 study of seven adolescents who’d lost a parent to death between the ages of seven and ten and a half found that the four children who coped best were all deeply involved with an older sibling. Thirty-two-year-old Kim says her brother, now forty-two, helped her develop self-esteem and feelings of worthiness after her mother died when she was two. “I always tell people I’d be a pile of mush without my big brother,” she says, with a laugh. “Even when I was a little kid, he took me everywhere with him. When he was sixteen and playing in bands, going through a real wild stage, he still brought me with him. Think about it: Who would want
a six-year-old sister tagging along? But he let me, and that always helped me feel like there was someplace I belonged.”

There are, however, some serious risks involved when one sibling views another as a replacement, rather than a substitute, for the lost parent. An older sister or brother may become the object of a younger sibling’s displaced anger toward the mother, and those feelings, if not reconciled, can turn into resentment and deep hatred. The younger sibling may feel angry and resentful when the older one leaves to pursue a life beyond the family. An older sibling may develop an exaggerated illusion of power over a younger one and refuse to let her separate. Or a younger sister may shift her expectations for total support from her mother to a sibling who just as forcefully rejects that role.

“When I was in high school, I turned to my sister, who was five years older than me,” remembers thirty-two-year-old Roberta, who was fifteen when her mother died. “And she told me, ‘No, I’m not going to take on your problems.’ She made it very clear to me that no matter how much pain I was in, she was not willing to take it on. And I was amazed. I was totally insulted. Just stunned that she would be what I thought was that selfish. I’d always thought she had so many answers. To this day, she tells me, ‘No. Go to a shrink. I don’t have any answers.’ Which basically isn’t bad advice, but it was hurtful to hear that first time.” Roberta does admit, however, that her sister’s resistance to taking on the mother role allowed her to remain a sister. Although the two are not particularly close today, Roberta says she has a clear idea of what their sibling relationship does and does not entail.

When an older sister tries to become a mother replacement for a younger sister, the two may become enmeshed in the developmental struggles—including adolescent separation and rebellion—that typically occur in mother-daughter relationships. But an older sister usually is ill-equipped to handle these changes, and the younger sister may suffer developmental confusion if she begins the process and then discovers it can’t progress very far.

Mary Jo, forty-three, was eight years old and the youngest of three sisters when her mother died. She was virtually raised by her older sister Patty, who was thirteen when she took over the family’s
cooking and cleaning, and became Mary Jo’s primary day-to-day caretaker. “I went to Patty when I started menstruating, and for those type of things,” Mary Jo recalls. “She really became a mother to me, which had advantages to me at the time but serious drawbacks to her. She’d been severely depressed all her life, and that, combined with her sense of ‘I’m the oldest female in the house now, and I have to take on the responsibility,’ was not a good mix.”

Mary Jo grew up identifying with Patty, who in turn overidentified with their mother. Six years ago, when she reached the same age their mother had been when she was diagnosed with cancer, Patty attempted suicide. Mary Jo visited her in the hospital and pleaded with her to get help. A few months later, Patty overdosed again. She died that day.

Mary Jo is now in therapy working through this loss and sorting through her Good Mother/Bad Mother issues—which she has with her
sister. “
Patty really tried to make my life better when I was a kid, but she was all fucked up herself, and some of those things came out in negative and controlling ways,” she explains. “We were close in such a love-hate kind of way. I’m working hard to remember and integrate those times when she was wonderful to me, but I can also see how a lot of my negative patterns come from her, and from the way she controlled my emotional life because of the power I felt she had over me.”

In an ideal situation, a motherless daughter with older siblings places most of her dependency needs on an available father and draws added—but not total—security from one or more siblings, if she has them. Middle children who can take on small, additional amounts of responsibility, yet still have other family members they can rely on when they need to regress during times of stress, may fare the best. They can gain a sense of competence but also have the family foundation they need to feel emotionally secure. Thirty-two-year-old Samantha, who at age twelve was the second of five children when her mother died, had a father she could rely on, a younger sister who relied on her, and an older sister to whom she brought her questions and concerns about her body, her friends, and boys. The three oldest girls in her family were close before their mother died, and today they live in neighboring towns and talk several times a week.

Samantha says that she’d like to become a mother one day but is in no hurry. After mothering her youngest sister for almost twenty years, she wants a rest before she starts again. Many motherless women who’ve cared for younger siblings express the same opinion. “I already raised three children,” they say. “Now I want to devote some time to myself.”

Of course, it’s a different experience to raise a child whose birth you’ve planned and prepared for, and to do it as an adult. Nonetheless, women who raised younger siblings and later had children of their own often find that their previous experience helped prepare them for some of motherhood’s demands. Thirty-six-year-old Bridget, who took care of her two younger brothers from the time she was twelve until she left home for college, says that being a mother to her son felt like a natural role for her to assume. She never worried that she’d be a bad mother. “The nurturing part isn’t difficult at all,” she explains. “But I didn’t raise my brothers when they were very young, so in some areas my experience is evident, while in others I’m pretty clueless.”

Bridget has no contact with her father or stepmother, and all of her grandparents have died. But her brothers, she says, have stepped in to give her son the kind of unconditional yet distanced love that she once received from her grandparents. “My brothers don’t know how to deal with babies, so at first they were like, ‘Oh, he’s very cute and sweet, and we love him,’” she says. “But now Alex is four, and he’ll get on the phone and talk with them about someone at school who’s being a bully,
and he’ll ask what he should do. My brothers really have to put their thinking caps on. I’m always thrilled to see them all interacting like that. That’s when I have a sense that even though my mother is gone and I had to raise my brothers, the three of us are definitely a family.”

We’re not usually aware of the influence that birth order has on us, but our sibling position spawns a set of internalized roles and ideas that affect how we see the world. According to the psychologists Margaret M. Hoopes, Ph.D., and James M. Harper, Ph.D., the death of a parent changes the signals about sibling role assignments that a child received at birth. A middle child accustomed to relying on others may suddenly have to become the caretaker if an older sibling is unavailable or defects from the family. A younger child used to being babied may need to take on more responsibility for herself than she ever had to before.

Sibling roles can go haywire when a father remarries and stepsiblings enter the constellation. If, for example, a stepfamily joins two oldest children under the same roof, they often go head-to-head in competition for the slot of leader of the new sibling group. When sibling positions duplicate, confusion and conflict are typical states until a new pecking order emerges.

The following characteristics, drawn from personal interviews, survey data,
⁷
and published psychological research, are common birth-order responses for daughters in families that lose a mother.

 

AN OLDEST CHILD

A MIDDLE CHILD

A YOUNGEST CHILD

AN ONLY CHILD

A DAUGHTER IN A LARGE FAMILY (FIVE OR MORE CHILDREN)