Motherless Daughters (44 page)

At the same time, the lack of control a pregnant woman feels over her body and the gestation process can be disorienting and difficult—especially for those who became accustomed to taking charge of their own destinies at an early age. As the sociologist Susan Maushart describes pregnancy in
The Mask of Motherhood, “
Physically, it’s like taking the backseat in what used to be your own car. Someone—or is it something?—else is doing the driving. And what’s more, the route, at times stunningly beautiful, at times terrifying and precipitous, is at all times unfamiliar. . . . Some women make marvelous passengers in the journey of pregnancy: They sit back and wonder and delight at the passing strangeness. For others, the anxiety of having surrendered the wheel makes joy-riding impossible.”

An expectant mother’s need to feel nurtured and supported peaks around the time of birth when, in the span of only minutes, she transforms from a laboring woman in need of assistance to a primary
caretaker of a fully dependent infant. Even though few grandmothers actually assist in the births of their grandchildren and many are too physically or emotionally distant to share in the postpartum period, these are nevertheless times when motherless daughters deeply miss their mothers. They mourn the loss of advice and assistance, and often glamorize their mothers’ birthing experiences, forgetting that women of the previous generation frequently bore their children in a drug-induced “twilight sleep” while their partners paced outside in the hall.

As birthing embraces more natural techniques, researchers have begun to notice that laboring women and new mothers benefit from the presence and assistance of a nurturing, experienced woman. In their studies of 1,500 pregnant women, Phyllis Klaus and Marshall Klaus, M.D., discovered that women who were aided during childbirth by trained, female labor companions required fewer cesarean births, needed less anesthesia, had more interest in their newborns, and interacted more with their babies than women who delivered without this assistance.

The Klauses call these birthing companions
doulas,
the Greek term for an experienced woman who helps other women. A doula optimally meets with the prospective parents a few times during the third trimester of pregnancy, returns when the woman begins her labor, and remains with her throughout the labor and delivery. She holds the mother close when she needs physical reassurance, massages her back, and helps her breathe. “She never leaves the mother alone, and that is an essential aspect of this,” explains Phyllis Klaus. “She tells her, ‘I will never leave your side.’ Just that assurance is incredibly powerful for the pregnant woman. If she has lost her mother, or if her own mother is unable to be involved in the birth, the doula becomes a mothering figure to her. She helps the laboring woman allow her body to work for her, so the woman can become dependent and independent at the same time. She feels both nurtured and empowered. Women have told me afterward, ‘I never realized how much nurturing I needed until I had that experience. I’d put all my nurturing needs aside.’ Other women have told their doulas, ‘Your trust in me and your support at that time have made me realize I can do anything I want to in my life.’

“We’ve noticed that the mother seems to internalize the doula’s nurturing behaviors,” she continues. “The labor period is a time when the mother is especially sensitive to environmental factors and open to learning and growth. When she’s held close in such an emotional way at this time, and feels nurtured, she becomes more able to give the same care to her child.” According to the Klauses, the women who received doula support had higher self-esteem and decreased incidence of postpartum depression six weeks after delivery than mothers who delivered without this support. The mothers who had doulas felt more confident and competent when caring for their newborns and also benefited from continued visits and advice from their doulas for as long as a year and a half after the birth.

What does this mean for the motherless woman? Support, advice, and the assurance that she’s not alone. Unlike the woman who feels her support system is guaranteed, the motherless woman has to create her own, and she fears its failure—and, by extension, hers as a mother—more intensely than most new mothers do. Her childhood fears of being left alone and unprovided for are reactivated at precisely the time when she needs to calm those fears in her child. And often, they’re not unfounded. When asked, “Who helped you, other than a husband or spouse, after the birth of your first child?” 52 percent of motherless mothers surveyed answered, “No one.” When the same question was presented to a comparison group of women with mothers still alive, only 15 percent said they’d had to manage alone. More than half of the women in that second group cited their mothers as the person who helped them with newborn care.

Is the disparity because motherless mothers truly have no one to turn to for help? Or because they’ve become so practiced at not asking for or expecting it? Because their needs often went unmet after their mothers died, many of these women grew up believing that “no one noticed,” which may have become internalized as “no one cares.”

“Women who have experienced early mother loss are more likely to be caretakers to other people in their lives,” Nancy Maguire explains. “And that part of their personality style would prohibit them from being able to ask for the support they need, and to feel justified in getting their own needs met.”

All new parents have periods of self-doubt, but a motherless mother often has the additional worry that if a real problem develops, she won’t have anyone to call. She flips through Dr. Spock books with the frenzy of a dozen hummingbirds. She puts 911 on her speed-dial—twice.

“The bottom drops out when you bring that first baby home from the hospital and you just don’t know what to do,” says Alice, who has two daughters and a grandson. The presence of a supportive, experienced woman during her first postpartum period helped her find the self-confidence she needed as a new mother.

In 1957, Alice was somewhat of a double anomaly: She was giving birth to her first child at the age of thirty-six, and she knew virtually nothing about babies. She hadn’t worried much about the delivery, having grown up with a mother who frequently told her what a joyful experience it had been. Birthing was the easy part. Infant care was her challenge.

Dr. Spock’s advice had seemed straightforward enough when she was still pregnant. But as soon as she was alone with a screaming baby in the nursery, Alice was terrified by her lack of experience. She found herself longing for advice, guidance, and reassurance from her mother, who died just before Alice turned twenty-four.

“I’d never been around a baby before, and I worried about everything,” she recalls. “Should I let her cry? Pick her up? Why did she want orange juice for breakfast and milk for a snack instead of the other way around, as the book said it should be? Every book and pamphlet I had began with a description of bathing the baby, but she cried every time I tried to bathe her, and I didn’t know why.”

When her mother’s first cousin announced she’d be paying a visit, Alice began to worry. She looked forward to seeing the woman she’d grown up calling “Aunt” Elaine, but she was afraid an experienced mother would label her clumsy and inept. Necessity quickly overtook Alice’s pride, however, and when Elaine arrived, Alice shared her self-doubt and fears. Instead of affirming her incompetence, the older woman provided her with a much-needed infusion of relief.

“Elaine was wonderful,” Alice recalls. “She’d go and get the baby when she cried and sit holding her, gently rocking her and murmuring, ‘You win!’ When I confessed my problems with the bath she said, ‘Well, she’s not really very dirty. Why don’t you just use oil for now?’

“I told her how grateful I was, and she told me about her experience with her first baby. ‘Everyone criticized me,’ she said. ‘I was so busy that the house was a mess. Every time I sat down I saw the clutter and the dust balls under the furniture. And then your grandmother came over one day. She was not in the least critical. She said I was doing fine. Instead of standing there asking how she could help, she just went and got a mop. I’ll always remember that.’”

Just three days with a practical, nurturing, and experienced model for infant care helped calm Alice’s fears. Equally as important, Elaine’s visit helped her reconnect with her maternal line. Elaine and Alice’s mothers had raised their children side by side, and Alice’s grandmother had been their resource for advice and reassurance. “Having Elaine in my house reestablished the feeling of continuity in my life,” Alice explains. “I had that feeling of being back in the family, and that everything would be all right.”

In 1962, Alice gave birth again. She felt confident with the rudiments of childcare this time, yet she found herself missing her mother again. “My second daughter was a difficult child to bring up,” she explains. “And so was I. I really would have appreciated hearing my mother tell me I was doing okay, and assure me that my daughter would turn out all right.” Today, Alice smiles when she tells this part of her story. Not only did her second daughter grow up without major incident, but she also became a mother herself four years ago, and Alice was right there coaching in the birthing room as her grandson entered the world.

Just as Alice’s mother had told her daughter about the joy of childbirth, Alice told her daughter the same. Of all the women in her Lamaze class, Alice’s daughter was the only one who said she didn’t fear the pain. Her primary fear—just like her mother’s—was of bringing the baby home and not knowing how to care for it alone. This time Alice knew exactly what to do. “I kept telling my daughter, ‘You’ll be okay,’” she says. “I assured her she’d have help.” And
she did—from her mother. Alice took great pride in giving her daughter the immediate maternal encouragement, assistance, and advice that had once taken several anxious months to reach her.

“I read every book there was on how to raise children,” remembers Sarah, who lost her mother at the age of one and went on to have two children. “I searched high and wide, because my daughter and I were having problems when she was young, and I couldn’t find anything on first daughters or firstborns. I had no model at all. But there were things I figured out based on common sense. I believed that we had to take responsibility for ourselves, and that there was such a thing as consequences, good and bad. And I didn’t believe in punishing, because I was never punished. My kids used to say, ‘Please shut up already and hit us,’ because I talked them to death, rationalizing everything. I think that was the way I finally accepted my mother’s death, by figuring out how to raise my children by myself.”

Although many motherless women spent childhood and adolescence watching their mothers raise their younger siblings, or even raising those siblings after her death, they still feel the loss of a living mother-model. Many of them say they learned how to parent on their own. Yet as individual as their approaches have been, studies with motherless mothers reveal they share common challenges, triumphs, and fears.

In the early 1990s, Donald Zall, D.S.W., a psychotherapist in Concord, Massachussetts, studied twenty-eight middle-class mothers whose own mothers had died when they were children or adolescents, and who now had at least one child between the ages of six months and fifteen years. Zall identified six distinct parenting traits the women shared. These were an overprotective parenting style; an increased determination to be a good mother; an emphasis on cherishing time with their children; a belief in the fragility of life; a fixation on the possibility that they, too, could die; and the impulse to prepare their children for a premature separation.

“The bereaved women saw the impact of their mother’s death burdening them with anxieties with which other mothers did not
have to deal but which also provided them with an impetus to ‘be the best that they could be,’” he explains.

Zall, as well as other researchers, found that motherless mothers report higher levels of stress, sadness, and depression than other mothers do. They also think of themselves as less competent in the mothering role than other women, are more preoccupied with their roles as mothers, are more focused on how well they’re doing, and, not surprisingly, frequently report they “feel different” from other mothers.

Nonetheless, many of these studies found that the process of parenting—despite the deficits, real or perceived, in these women’s backgrounds—deepened and enriched their mourning processes. Raising children, and giving them emotionally engaged, involved, and loving mothers went far to undo much of the pain of the past. And this focus and determination on good parenting seems to have a positive effect on children, as well. Despite motherless mothers’ self-doubt and uncertainty about filling the maternal role, their children appear just as well-adjusted as children raised by women whose mothers did not die. As Gina Mireault, Ph.D., the author of a 2002 study on this subject explains, the women she interviewed “were kind of hard on themselves [as mothers], but they seemed to be doing the good job they were afraid they
weren’t
doing.”

Interviews with motherless mothers also revealed the following shared parenting experiences:

When a daughter believes she was well mothered, she often tries to replicate specific parenting behaviors she remembers from her past. This allows her to identify positively with her mother, as well as to relive and perpetuate happy moments of her childhood. For many women, particularly those who’ve mourned their mothers, this approach can be both successful and fulfilling.

Daughters who have idealized the lost mother, however, create a standard for parenting that is difficult, and occasionally impossible, for them to achieve. When comparing themselves to the idealized Good Mother, these daughters often interpret their own
“shortcomings” as evidence that they’re Bad Mothers. But mothers are perfect only in our minds. Trying to replicate their approaches exactly, without acknowledging their deficits, is often a daughter’s attempt to honor her mother after death, and she frequently overlooks the circumstances that make her experience as a mother unique.