Motherless Daughters (46 page)

When Emma was a young mother with a daughter and son, she reproduced her mother’s parenting behaviors almost perfectly. She kept her children home with her and had few outside friends. She
designed and implemented all their daily activities. She took for granted that her son would become independent but gave her daughter an extra push. And she maintained a cool emotional distance, trusting them to handle matters of the heart alone.

She thought it had all gone just fine, until one day a few years ago when she was visiting her daughter at home. As she watched her young granddaughter acting out, Emma recognized something was terribly wrong.

“I realized that the three of us just have an awful time together,” she explains. “Two of us are fine. My granddaughter and I are fine. My daughter and I are fine. But the minute the three of us get together, something triggers that little girl. She just turns into a brat. It’s horrible to watch. My daughter and I obviously do something that sets off this kid. I’m still not sure what it is, except that none of us seem to know how we’re supposed to be. There are pieces missing. And I can’t help but believe it comes from my mother not having anybody teach her first how to be a person, then a wife, and then a mother.”

Not long after that afternoon in her daughter’s home, Emma entered therapy to examine her relationships with both her mother and her daughter. It took almost three years for her to break through her idealized image of her mother. “One of the first things I said in therapy was that my mother was perfect,” she says. “Over time, I realized you could probably find fault with everything she did. And I became very angry with her. How could she have been the way she was? Why didn’t she know we needed more than just a rock that was never able to be anything but strong? That doesn’t allow a child to be the least bit weak.” With the help of her counselor, Emma is moving beyond blame and anger as she reevaluates her mother as a motherless child to understand some of her behaviors. “I’m at the point now where I can see my mother’s strength as something wonderful again,” she explains. “And I can also see that what went on wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t give me what she didn’t have. But that hasn’t made it any less painful for me, my daughter, or my granddaughter.”

Emma’s daughter recently joined her in therapy, where they’re working together to revise their mother-daughter relationship and
model new parenting behaviors for her granddaughter. Emma has also been encouraging her mother, who’s now seventy-six, to join them. She doesn’t expect a turnaround, but she’s hopeful. As multiple generations of women in her family are learning, it’s never too late for a daughter to reconsider the past, and to heal.

 

 

 

 

 

FROM THE AGE OF THIRTEEN until her forty-fourth year, Virginia Woolf was obsessed by the memory of her mother. Julia Stephen, who died of rheumatic fever when her youngest daughter was thirteen, lived on as an “invisible presence” in Woolf’s life as she emerged first as a literary critic and then as a novelist. “Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books,
To the Lighthouse;
in a great, apparently involuntary rush,” she explained in the essay “A Sketch of the Past.”

Ever since Freud described creativity as an attempt to compensate for childhood dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment, psychologists and artists have been theorizing about connections between early loss, creativity, and achievement. “When we talk about parent loss, we usually talk about the pathology and the pain,” Phyllis Klaus says. “But any kind of tragedy in life can be a springboard for creativity
and growth, and for working that tragedy out in very healthy ways. What’s interesting is to look at what helps these people get to that point. Sometimes it’s their own ability to look inside and develop who they really want to be, to make life count and not waste it.”

Throughout history, early mother loss has acted as an impetus for a daughter’s later success. Just as tuberculosis was the artist’s disease, mother loss was her early tragedy. Dozens of eminent women throughout history lost their mothers during childhood or adolescence, including Dorothy Wordsworth (at birth); Harriet Beecher Stowe (age five); Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë (five, three, and one); George Eliot (sixteen); Jane Addams (two); Marie Curie (eleven); Gertrude Stein (fourteen); Eleanor Roosevelt (eight); Dorothy Parker (five); Margaret Mitchell (nineteen); and Marilyn Monroe, who spent her entire childhood in foster care and orphanages.

History books are also filled with men who lost their mothers young, including statesmen (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln), artists (Michelangelo, Ludwig van Beethoven), thinkers (Charles Darwin, Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant), and writers (Joseph Conrad, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe). When the psychologist Marvin Eisenstadt conducted a historical study of 573 famous individuals from Homer to John F. Kennedy, he found that the rate of mother loss among “eminent” or “historical geniuses” in the arts, the humanities, the sciences, and the military is as much as three times that of the general population, even after the mortality rates of earlier centuries are taken into account.

But other studies have revealed equally high rates of mother loss among juvenile delinquents and prisoners. It appears that children who lose parents generally respond in one of two ways: they develop a sense of fatalism, expecting and even encouraging future unfortunate events to occur, or they pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and find the determination and motivation to continue.

What guides one girl who loses her mother into brushes with the law and another into personal or creative success? With any motherless daughter, the age at the time of loss, the cause of a mother’s death, and the support systems available afterward all affect how she will cope. Two additional conditions also appear necessary:
the drive to accomplish goals early and evidence of an already existing artistic or intellectual talent.

Veronika Denes-Raj, who has studied the relationship between early parent loss and perceptions of life expectancy, believes that an early confrontation with death inspires some children to adopt a more existential philosophy toward life, which in turn motivates them to succeed. “Freud said we can’t look at our own deaths,” Dr. Denes-Raj explains, “but existentialists believe you must be aware of your own limits to succeed. Only if you feel that life exists between two anchors—birth and death—can you accomplish what you want. Existentialists understand that life is not infinite. After a parent dies, they’ll look around and ask, ‘What’s left to do?’ and then try to do it.”

Because a mother’s death is as close as a daughter can get to experiencing her own, the loss teaches her that all life—and especially hers—has limits and can end quickly, without warning. Even though she typically sees the world as less controllable than other women do, she sets explicit goals for herself and becomes determined to achieve them before her time runs out. Explains Dr. Denes-Raj, “These people will say, ‘Okay, I may only live until the age of fifty-five or sixty, but I want to do X or Y. Therefore, I have to do it faster. And then if I live longer, I’ll do other things, too.’” Her mother may have died with dreams she never fulfilled, but this daughter is insistent that the same won’t happen to her. Death she can’t control, but personal action she can.

Anna Quindlen
,
the
Newsweek
columnist and best-selling author, was already planning to write for a living before her mother died of ovarian cancer when Quindlen was nineteen, but the experience, she says, made her determined to achieve even more in less time. “When I was a young reporter—because I got to be a reporter when I was nineteen, and I went to the
New York Times
when I was twenty-four—people would say to me, ‘Why are you in such a hurry? You’ve got the rest of your life,’” she recalls. “And there was a part of me that just thought, ‘Tell it to the Marines, buster. The whole rest of my life could be five years, ten years.’ I felt like everything was sort of speeded up.”

Like Quindlen, most other successful motherless daughters had a predisposition toward intellectual or artistic ability before their mothers died. Loss doesn’t give a daughter skills she didn’t possess. Instead, it acts as a trigger event that inspires a latent talent to emerge, or it provokes the spirit and will she needs to push her abilities beyond safe and predictable limits.

When early loss becomes a defining element of a daughter’s identity, it can consciously or unconsciously steer her specific career choices. A forty-one-year-old fiction writer who was eight when her mother died, for example, says she writes stories about mother-daughter relationships because stories allow her to mourn from a safe distance. A forty-nine-year-old attorney who was sixteen when her mother died now fights for women’s rights because she remembers how her mother strained against traditional gender limits during the 1950s. And a fifty-four-year-old professor of tumor biology, who watched her mother die of breast cancer in 1953 decided, at the age of thirteen, to devote her professional life to researching the disease:

Today, we need only turn on the television, open the newspaper, or walk into a bookstore to find motherless women who’ve earned
acclaim in spite of their early losses. Jane Fonda was fifteen and Roma Downey ten when their mothers died; country singer Shania Twain was twenty-two; the actress Mariska Hargitay three; and the author Jacqueline Mitchard nineteen. Carol Burnett was raised by her grandmother, while her alcoholic mother lived in a separate apartment down the hall. Liza Minelli was twenty-three when Judy Garland overdosed. From the age of three onward, Maya Angelou lived mostly with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. And two of the most influential women in the American entertainment industry—Oprah Winfrey and Madonna—grew up without their mothers. Oprah was raised by her maternal grandmother for her first six years and her father for most of her teens, and Madonna was five when her mother died.

Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University and the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution, was 15 when she lost her mother. Olympic track-and-field star Jackie Joyner Kersee was eighteen. Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, grew up with an absentee mother. The actress Meg Ryan was fourteen when her parents divorced; she remained with her father. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author and presidential historian, was thirteen when she lost her mother; actress and comedian Janeane Garafolo was twenty; and Olympic gold-medal figure skater Oksana Baiul was orphaned at thirteen. Rosie O’Donnell, the comedian and former talk-show host whose acting career began with the 1992 movie
A League of Their Own,
was ten when her mother died. The first day she met Madonna on the movie set, she shared this bit of personal background with her and the two became fast friends.

It’s no coincidence that motherless women rise to the top of their respective fields. Many of the conditions that are advantageous to achievement—conditions other women typically have to strive to attain—already exist in a motherless daughter’s life, making her a natural candidate for superior creativity, accomplishment, and success.

Throughout childhood and adolescence, girls are typically more obedient and compliant with parental attitudes than boys are. This is particularly true when a daughter is deeply under her mother’s influence. But when the mother or mother-figure is removed from the family, a girl with a role-reversed, distant, or nonexistent father-daughter relationship suddenly can choose and decide for herself. Although this absence of social control nearly overwhelms some daughters, for others it offers an environment without limits and provides the freedom necessary for individual growth.

The author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin says she was well on her way to becoming “a kind of ’50s kid, very much a demure, self-effacing, male-oriented, marriage-directed, I-need-a-man-to-take-care-of-me sort of person” before her mother died when she was fifteen. Her mother had been the parent who offered her consistent care and warmth, and after her father’s quick remarriage and withdrawal from her life, Pogrebin clearly understood that she had to take care of herself. To defend against her feelings of abandonment and anger, she says, she reconceived herself as a brave, independent soul. Instead of marrying or moving in with relatives, as most women in her college graduating class did when they finished school, at the age of twenty she found a publishing job in New York City and took her own apartment in Greenwich Village.