Motherless Daughters (37 page)

Whether she’s a corporate vice-president or a homemaker, a single parent or a wife, the mother is the primary female image a daughter internalizes and refers to for comparison throughout her life, the mile marker against which the daughter measures her own travels. A twenty-year-old daughter with a forty-five-year-old mother mentally compares herself with two versions of her mother: the twenty-year-old she has pieced together in imagination from her mother’s stories, and the forty-five-year-old she sees. When the daughter herself turns forty-five, she then compares herself to the forty-five-year-old mother she remembers, and also to the seventy-year-old one she knows.

But a mother who dies young is a woman interrupted, and her daughter’s image of her freezes at that point. When I try to identify the similarities and differences between my mother and myself, I’m working with limited material. On the one hand, I’m comparing myself to a forty-one-year-old Marcia I knew only from a seventeen-year-old’s point of view; on the other, I’m comparing myself to a woman who never ages. When I turned seventeen, she was forty-two. Now I’m forty-one and she’s still forty-two. My mother will remain older and more experienced than me for only one more year. And I wonder, what then?

Twenty-nine-year-old Karen also is concerned about losing her mother as a psychological guide. Even though she won’t reach her mother’s age for more than thirty years, Karen is starting to pass her in other ways.

During Karen’s childhood, her domineering mother frequently asserted her own superiority. After her mother’s death nine years ago, Karen continued to perceive herself as the weak daughter of a powerful mother. But as she gets ready to complete her college degree, Karen is beginning to reconceive herself as intelligent and worthwhile, and now she wonders what place a mother who tried to convince her otherwise can occupy in her life.

Karen is right: Without a living mother to refer to for comparison, a daughter invents much of her identity alone. In theory, she’s free to make her own decisions and learn from her own mistakes. In practice, however, she is frightened by the solitude this entails. Hoping to find a guide, she seeks out as much information as she can find about her mother’s life. This generally happens during a woman’s twenties, when the developmental urge to return to the mother seizes hold of her. A daughter’s need for a woman-to-woman reunion doesn’t disappear just because her mother is no longer alive. By collecting information to re-create the mother as she was—not only as a parent, but also as a woman—the daughter tries to mature her image of her mother by imagining what their relationship might have evolved into and giving herself the closest approximation to a reunion she can have. She also searches for similarities
between her mother and herself in an effort to secure her place in the Motherline.

Until Margie, now twenty-five, began gathering information about her mother, she remembered her only as the solemn, depressed woman who committed suicide eighteen years ago. She hadn’t wanted to identify with this mother in any way. But in her early twenties, Margie felt she needed to connect with a woman in her family, and she asked her maternal grandparents for the first time to tell her stories about her mother as a young woman.

Instead of fearing a maternal connection because of its association with depression and death, Margie is reestablishing a bond with a mother she’s still getting to know. But she’s only completed half of her journey. Rediscovering the mother is a two-step process, first requiring the resurrection of her as a woman and then, through imagination, aging her to the point where she might be today. And that’s the harder part. To have a sense of how my mother and I might have related now and to compare myself to both mothers—the forty-one-year-old I knew and the sixty-seven-year-old she would be today—I have to fast-forward her in my mind. I have to theorize how the cultural forces of the 1980s and 1990s might have shaped her, to imagine what she might have become if she hadn’t
been slowed down by cancer, to envision all the places she might have gone to, if she hadn’t died.

 

I thought I knew what my mother wanted for me. I used to imagine the deathbed conversation we never had. She would hold my hand as she relayed her final wish. “I want you to grow up and be happy,” she would have said. “Go to college and find a good husband. Preferably a Jewish doctor, who’ll buy you a house on Long Island. But not Great Neck or the Five Towns. Go a little farther out, maybe Massapequa. Will you promise to do that for me?”

You think I’m joking, but I’m not. My mother grew up in the sector of suburban, Jewish New York in the 1950s and 1960s that sent daughters to college to marry professionals and measured a woman’s success by the carat-count of her diamond ring. I’d like to think my mother would have developed more expansive dreams for her daughters if she had lived long enough to see us succeed in other areas—or at least as she watched the country’s economy turn dual-career marriages into a necessity—but I remember her prepping me only for a future that included a white dress, a long aisle, and one of those good men who were so hard to find. This was her vision of female success, and she wanted it all for me. She was appalled by my first boyfriend, a reformed juvenile delinquent who wore his hair down to his chin. Of course, I chose him partly because I knew how strongly she’d object. We were at that stage of mother-daughter rebellion. And we were still in it nearly a decade later, because I got stuck there when she died.

Because certain elements of a daughter’s personality can arrest when a mother dies, she may grow into adulthood retaining characteristics of the developmental phase she was in at that time. The child then grows into a woman still dependent on the lost mother. The adolescent may continue to reject and rebel against her as an adult.

That was how I operated for the first nine years after my mother’s death, and it was a handy way of keeping the mother-daughter relationship alive. Death didn’t silence my mother’s demands. Inside the confines of my head, she still tried to give me advice I didn’t want to hear, and I still refused to take it. I left New York at eighteen with no intention of living within a hundred miles
of Long Island ever again, and I avoided pre-med students as if they were the eleventh plague. I remained determined not to live the life my mother had intended for me, and to assert my independence by creating one of my own design.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have continued to rebel so forcefully if I hadn’t felt a simultaneous, subterranean pull toward precisely the future I was rejecting so vehemently. That was the part of my little drama I never discussed with anyone: the deep guilt I felt for straying from my mother’s preordained path, and a secret longing for the security that she had assured me such a future would supply. So at the same time that I was deliberately resisting my mother’s wishes, I was also taking steps to accommodate us both. When I was twenty-three, I pledged my future to my college boyfriend. He wasn’t Jewish and he wasn’t from New York, but he was about to begin law school, and that seemed like an acceptable compromise to me. As I edged him toward marriage, I believed my mother would have been proud, knowing I was about to become a wife.

Only with my broken engagement and the hindsight of several years was I able to see that I wasn’t just trying to live the life I thought my mother wanted for me. No, I was also trying to live the one she never had. She never lived outside New York. She taught music for a few years before I was born, but she never turned it into a career. And she never married that doctor (or dentist or lawyer or CEO) and bought that big house, all of which her mother had once wished for her, too.

I’ve yet to meet a daughter with a mother who would willingly sacrifice her own identity to satisfy her mother’s vicarious urges, but motherless daughters do this all the time—out of guilt, out of obligation, out of grief, out of love. We try to honor our mothers’ unfulfilled desires, as if we can somehow give them the years they never got to live. It’s as if we believe that by becoming the daughters our mothers always wanted us to be, or by living the lives they always wanted to live—by, in effect,
becoming them
—we can keep our mothers with us and prevent them from leaving us again.

It’s challenging enough to run one life. It can be utter confusion trying to fulfill the dreams of two. Gayle, now thirty-two, has been struggling with this identity conflict for the past fourteen years. She
and her mother were closely bound during her childhood and adolescence, and since her mother’s death from cancer when she was eighteen, Gayle has vacillated between the impulse to become her mother and the desire to remain her mother’s daughter—both to the exclusion of claiming an identity for herself.

When her mother died, Gayle was just beginning a delayed and difficult psychological separation from her. Like every other adolescent girl, she had the confusing task of having to identify with the same person she was trying to separate from, and to somehow emerge from those years with an identity of her own. Her mother’s death arrested this process at a critical point, leaving her half bound to her mother and half committed to herself. Like many other motherless women, Gayle then remained caught between the fear of repeating her mother’s past (thus, the distance she put between herself and the word
cancer
) and her strong need to remain connected (which fueled her impulse to finish her mother’s life). Kept in check
by a psychological maternal police that still tailored its punishment and praise for an eighteen-year-old, Gayle had entered her thirties nearly powerless against the influence of a mother long dead.

Gayle is an example of a woman stuck between the competing forces of
matrophobia
and what I call
matridentity.
Matrophobia, as Adrienne Rich explains in
Of Woman Born,
is the daughter’s fear of becoming her mother. A daughter sees her mother’s weaknesses and feels helpless against the forces of heredity. At the same time that she chastises her mother for her mistakes, she prays she won’t make the same ones. (“Oh, my God!” that anguished woman on the T-shirt cries. “I’m turning into my mother!”) Matrophobia can be a source of intense psychological distress for the motherless daughter. To her, it often includes the additional fears of becoming the mother who lost control of her body or her mind, who abandoned her children too young, who lived an abbreviated life, who had too many dreams she never realized because she had too little time.

It would be easier to separate ourselves from these fears and suppress matrophobia for good if not for its twin sister, who snares us with equivalent guile. Matridentity—the inevitability that a daughter will identify with some of her mother’s traits—makes it impossible for us to dissociate completely from someone when our bodies, mannerisms, and behaviors evoke memories of hers. Every time I catch myself saying, “That woman
sure is a piece of work,
” my little “Mom alert” sounds. It’s a phrase my mother always used. I’m not even particularly fond of it, but sometimes the words just appear. With seventeen years of shared experience and 50 percent of her genes, it’s bound to happen sometimes, I guess. And that makes me wonder how much of her I’ve internalized that I’m not aware of and, despite my conscious choices to differentiate, how similar to her I already am.