Motherless Daughters (3 page)

And yet, the more we know about children’s bereavement, it seems, the more the actual experience of losing a mother remains the same.

I received an e-mail from a college freshman the other day. Her mother died five years ago, and throughout high school in her small town she was known as the Girl Whose Mother Died. Now she’s in college in another state, far from anyone who knows her, and she’s feeling terribly isolated and lonely. Nobody there ever knew her mother, and her new friends don’t understand the profundity of her loss. When someone asks about her parents, she tries to answer without using the words “mother” or “died.” Putting those two words together, she has learned, is a guaranteed conversation stopper. No one wants to talk about a mother dying. No one, it seems, wants to hear about it. Some even claim not to understand. “I don’t have a mother anymore,” she once mumbled to a classmate. “You don’t
have
one?” the classmate repeated, incredulous. “You mean, like, your parents are divorced?”

Who can blame a peer for acting on what we all wish were true?
Mothers are immortal. Mothers don’t die young. Mothers never leave the children they love.
“My dad never even began to grieve my mother’s death,” says thirty-four-year-old Leigh, who was three when her mother died. “He was overwhelmed by it. It didn’t fit in with his picture of how life should be. Mothers should not die and leave five children behind. He told himself that shouldn’t happen, so it wouldn’t. And then it did.” The same false security protected Kristen until her sixteenth year, when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died the following year. Kristen, now twenty-four, still sounds slightly stunned when she talks about the loss. “If you’d asked me ten years ago if I thought my mother could die, I would have said, ‘Me? Never. My mother? No way,’” she says. “I’d never, ever,
never
thought about it. I knew no one in my secluded, little town whose mother had died. I thought it couldn’t happen to me because my family was so happy. My mother’s death completely rocked my world.”

A father’s death, although often equally as traumatic, usually doesn’t inspire such indignation or surprise. It violates our assumptions
about the world a little less. To some degree, we expect our fathers to die before our mothers. Females may be stereotyped as the weaker sex, but they have more physical longevity. In every racial group in America for the past hundred years, men have been expected to die younger than women. Today, the average twenty-year-old Caucasian male is expected to live to seventy-six, but a twenty-year-old Caucasian woman has a good chance of turning eighty-one. Among African Americans, the difference is even more dramatic: The average twenty-year-old man lives until only seventy, but his wife will probably see seventy-seven. American men of all races are almost
twice
as likely as women to die before reaching fifty-five.

Yet this hardly means that mothers don’t die young. Quite the opposite. In 2003 alone, more than 110,000 American women died between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, one-third of them from cancer. More than 676,000 American children currently under age eighteen have lost a mother, about 330,000 of them girls. Nearly 25,000 girls have lost both parents. I calculate that there are more than 1.1 million girls and women under the age of sixty in the United States who lost mothers to death during childhood and adolescence—an extremely conservative estimate because it doesn’t include daughters who were ages eighteen to twenty-five when their mothers died, or daughters who lost mothers through abandonment, divorce, alcoholism, incarceration, or long-term mental or physical illness.
³

And yet, at some very deep level, nobody wants to believe that motherless children exist. It’s a denial that originates from the place in our psyches where
mother
represents comfort and security no matter what our age, and where the mother-child bond is so primal that we equate its severing with a child’s emotional demise. Everyone carries into adulthood the child’s fear of being left alone and unprovided for. The motherless child thus symbolizes a darker, less fortunate self. Her plight is everyone’s nightmare, at once impossible to
imagine and impossible to ignore. Yet to accept the magnitude of her loss, or the duration of her mourning, would mean to acknowledge the same potential for one’s self. I remember a phone conversation with my best friend in high school, a few months after my mother died. I was describing some current hardship or another, and relating it directly to the fact that my mother had just died. “Hope,” she said, gently yet firmly, “you’ve got to stop thinking like this. You can’t keep blaming everything bad that happens to you on your mother’s death. How much of your life is it really going to affect, anyway?”

She had a point, I knew. I was looking for relationships that didn’t always exist, connecting dots that might not legitimately warrant connections, in an effort to explain and excuse any untoward behaviors. Sometimes the act felt inauthentic even as I was doing it. Yet at the same time, I knew without doubt that my mother’s death had irrevocably altered who I was and who I would become. When a parent dies young, says Maxine Harris, Ph.D., in
The Loss That Is Forever,
children have a personal encounter with death that influences the way they see the world for the rest of their lives. “Some events are so big and so powerful that they cannot help but change everything they touch,” she writes. How could all I thought and felt, then, not trace its path back to the event that had created such a jagged fault line through my history, dividing it into a permanent Before and After?

I was fifteen when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, barely seventeen when she died. Unlike the adult, who experiences parent loss with a relatively intact personality, a girl who loses her mother during childhood or adolescence co-opts the loss into her emerging personality, where it becomes a dominant, defining characteristic of her identity. From learning at an early age that dependent relationships can be impermanent, security ephemeral, and
family
capable of being redefined, the motherless daughter develops an adult insight while she is still a child, with only juvenile resources to help her cope.

Early loss is a maturing experience, forcing a daughter to age faster than her peers—both cognitively and behaviorally. As Maxine Harris points out, more than any other event, the death of a parent marks the end of one’s childhood. A teenage daughter may have to
plan a funeral, take on responsibility for younger siblings or the home, and care for an ailing grandparent—all before graduating from high school. When a mother’s death also means the loss of the consistent, supportive family system that once supplied her with a secure home base, she then has to develop her self-confidence and self-esteem through alternate means. Without a mother or mother-figure to guide her, a daughter also has to piece together a female self-image on her own.

While most girls separate from their mothers during the teen years to create an individual identity and then spend the later years trying to return as an autonomous adult, the motherless daughter moves forward alone. Adulthood, marriage, and motherhood are significantly different adult experiences for the woman who travels through them with a maternal void and the memory of a dramatic loss. “You have to learn how to be a mother for yourself,” says Karen, a twenty-nine-year-old woman whose alcoholic mother died nine years ago. “You have to become that person who says, ‘Don’t worry, you’re doing fine. You’re doing the best you can.’ Sure, you can call friends who’ll say that to you. And maybe you can call other relatives you’re close to, and they’ll say it, too. But hearing it from the person who taped up all your scraped knees, and consoled you through all the Cs you brought home from school, and helped you with your first lemonade stand, that person who watched you take every step and really knows you, or at least the one you perceive as really knowing you, that’s the one you count on. That’s the one you keep looking for.”

 

How often is one able to revisit and revise the past? Motherhood gives me that opportunity, as the daily minutiae of life with two daughters repeatedly kicks me back in memory to moments when I was the child, and my mother stood in the place I occupy today. I see her so differently now. How resourceful, and patient, and devoted she was, I have come to realize. Yet also how inexperienced and frustrated. And how very, very young. I turned forty-one this year, the same age she was when her cancer was first found. Next year, I’ll turn the age she was when she died. And the year after that, I’ll pass
her by. How strange that will be, to be older than my mother, and to reach that personal tipping point so young.

This issue is one, among many, that motherless women of all backgrounds talk about in great detail. No matter how many years this book remains on the shelf, no matter how many motherless women I meet in my travels, I never stop being surprised by how much we have in common, despite our obvious differences. This is true regardless of the ages we were when our mothers died; the exact causes of loss; our families’ racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic makeup; and the ages we are now. Mother loss is a great equalizer among women, as if the core identity issues it creates cut straight through the superficial variables that might otherwise define us. As motherless women, we share characteristics we don’t usually find in other female friends, including a keen sense of isolation from family; a sharp awareness of our own mortality; the overall feeling of being “stuck” in our emotional development, as if never having matured beyond the age we were when our mothers died; the tendency to look for nurturing in relationships with partners who can’t possibly meet our needs; the strong desire to give our children the kind of mothering we lost, or never had; an intense anxiety about losing other loved ones; a gratitude for the “small moments” in each day; and the awareness that early loss has shaped, toughened, and even freed us so that we can make changes and decisions we might not have otherwise made.

Most of the original interviews in this book remain, although I have added some new women’s voices, in addition to the words of four experts whose research had not yet been published in 1994. This new edition now includes interviews with ninety-nine motherless women interviewed in person and by way of e-mail, as well as data from the original Motherless Daughters survey in 1994 (see appendix 1) and a new Internet survey of 1,322 motherless mothers conducted between October 2002 and June 2005. Although these women all volunteered to be interviewed and therefore do not represent a random sample, they come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. When interviewed, the youngest woman was seventeen and the oldest eighty-two, and were anywhere from infancy
to their early thirties when their mothers died or left their families. All names and hometowns have been changed, and only in rare instances, and with a woman’s permission, does a woman’s profession appear in print.

Writing a book is a fluid, evolutionary process, one that continues even after the product appears on the shelf. I have been blessed over the years with readers who send me their stories of mother loss, sometimes as many as five or six a day, to help me keep learning about what motivates them, what challenges them, and what helps them feel whole. As a result, this new edition includes expanded sections on subjects that readers have specifically asked for: more information on very early mother loss (before age six); mother loss as an adult; the loss of both parents during childhood; chronic illnesses and ambiguous loss; and the transition to motherhood. I’ve also included a new appendix featuring popular motherless protagonists in contemporary memoirs, novels, and young-adult fiction, including synopses of the books in which they appear, and another appendix listing contact information for Motherless Daughters support groups worldwide.

A good deal has changed in my life, too, since the first edition of this book. Twelve years ago, I was single and living in a tiny apartment in New York, just starting my career and wondering whether I’d ever marry and have children. Today, I share a house in the Santa Monica Mountains with a husband and two young daughters who are the very epicenter of my world. I pack school lunches, braid hair, schlep around to after-school activities, listen to heartbreaking playground stories, play Tickle Monster, and bandage fingers and knees. In many ways, I have become that which I once lost.

And yet there is a great deal that has not changed at all. There is still a huge hole in my life where a mother—and now a maternal grandmother for my children—should be. I still wish I had a mother to call when something good happens, when something bad happens, or when nothing at all has happened, just to talk about the day. I’m still stubbornly self-reliant, and still find my highest levels of comfort in an orderly, predictable existence. And I’m still afraid of dying young, and of losing someone else I love. Even more so now, when the stakes are so much higher. Every day, I look at my
daughters and pray that what happened to my mother won’t happen to me. Or to them.

Sometimes I think of calling back that high school friend, the one who asked me how much of my life my mother’s death would affect, anyway. And with the certainty of twenty-four years, I would tell her: Everything. It affects everything. When a mother dies, a daughter grieves. And then her life moves on. She does, thankfully, feel happiness again. But the missing her, the wanting her, the wishing she were still here—I will not lie to you, although you probably already know. That part never ends.

The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.

—Adrienne Rich,
Of Woman Born

MY MOTHER DIED IN THE MIDDLE of summer, with everything in full bloom. It had been sixteen months since the afternoon she returned from a doctor’s office with the news of a malignancy in her breast, sixteen months of chemotherapy and CAT scans and desperate attempts to hang on to the little rituals that amounted to a normal day. We still took our orange juice and vitamins together in the morning, but then she swallowed the white, oval pills that were supposed to stop the cancer’s spread. After school I would drive her across town for her oncology appointments, and on the way home in the car she promised me she would live. Because I wanted so badly to believe her, I did, even as I watched her lose her hair, then her dignity, and finally her hope. The end came quickly, and we all were unprepared. On July 1 she was sunning herself in the backyard; before dawn on the twelfth, she was gone.