Motherless Daughters (6 page)

When we allow ourselves to mourn, we make way for a virtual onslaught of emotions: fear, resentment, abandonment, guilt. And anger. Rage, rather than grief, is the most common reaction to the death of a parent during childhood or adolescence. This creates a dilemma for the motherless daughter, who’s been taught from an early age that “good girls” don’t show strong negative emotions, at least not for public scrutiny. Popular culture has spent decades depicting angry women as violent and crazed, hardly the tragic hero an infuriated man is allowed to be. Rambo gunned his way through the jungle to thunderous applause, but Thelma and Louise’s pistol-packing road trip shocked the nation. As women, we have few adequate models for releasing rage, and we often give in to the impulse to pretend it isn’t there.

Which is really an unfortunate consequence, because anger can be our ally, at least for a while. As a first-response emotion, it can protect us from feeling intense sadness until we’ve passed through an initial adjustment stage. But clinging to anger too long keeps us from addressing the emotions underneath, and those—resentment, desertion, confusion, guilt, love—are the ones on which true mourning is based.

For seven full years after my mother died, I carried my anger around like a righteous and heavy cross, all too willing to let it define me as a noble sufferer but secretly unsure of how to relinquish its weight. I couldn’t exactly dump it in the middle of a Psych 101 lecture and nonchalantly walk home, weightless and free. I’m sure my college roommates still remember the periodic temper tantrums I
threw. During the years I lived with them, I immersed myself in activity—a full class load, the college newspaper, a sorority, volunteer work, a part-time job—anything to keep me from having to spend time alone. But in the brief interludes between those commitments, I occasionally came home, slammed my bedroom door, and hurled my possessions across the room, screaming nonsensical sentences until my throat turned raw. Clothing ripped from hangers, books slammed to the floor, stuffed animals hurled against the walls. The physical release was liberating, and even necessary, but the mania of it was a terror to us all. Yet it was the only way I could think of to free the rage that kept welling up inside.

This was a diffuse anger, largely nonspecific, and one I didn’t understand. Anger, I’d always thought, had to be object directed, and though I focused some of mine toward my father, I didn’t know where to direct the rest. Without a discrete target, it shot out at wholly unpredictable moments: on the telephone with the electric company, over dinner with my boyfriend, at the history paper I couldn’t concentrate on long enough to write. I glared at the mothers and daughters I saw trying on clothes together in department-store dressing rooms. I wanted to destroy every Hallmark Mother’s Day card display I saw. Rationality was not an issue. For a long time I hated the month of October, because the leaves insisted on turning color and falling to the ground even when my mother, who’d loved the fire of autumn, wasn’t there to see it anymore.

“You know this feeling,” says Debby, thirty-one, whose mother died of cancer eight years ago. “You’re driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, ‘Goddamit. What gives you the right to laugh?’ Because nothing has happened to them. You don’t understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.”

This is a reactionary rage, often fueled by a sense of deprivation and a belief the world owes something to the daughter who lost her mother too young. But underneath it is usually a deep anger toward the mother herself. Even though she loved us, even though we’re not supposed to be angry with someone who’s dead, we resent her for leaving us behind. The mother who abandoned her child or took her
own life leaves a daughter with the most direct access route to anger—she
left
me—but even the mother who falls ill and dies can be an object of blame.

“In the early sixties when my friends were getting married and having babies, I was cleaning bedpans,” recalls fifty-two-year-old Rochelle, who was twenty-four when her mother died of cancer. “I was angry at my mother because she didn’t have a life, and I was angry at her because
I
didn’t have a life.” Explains Cynthia, fifty-two, who lost her mother at nine, “In my twenties and thirties and forties, I would think back in anger at how my mother left us. It was totally irrational. She didn’t voluntarily contract pneumonia and choose to die. Nevertheless, there was this gray cloud in the background of my thoughts, a cool kind of anger at what she’d done to me, personally, that ruined my life.”

Like Cynthia, I know my mother didn’t want to leave me. I know that she, with a desire I can’t possibly comprehend, wanted to see her children grow. But the fact is that she went away and left us all to cope with the wreckage she left behind. Even now, twenty-four years later, her absence remains a terrible hole. No home to return to for a holiday celebration. No one to tell me what I was like as a child, or to reassure or comfort me as a new mother. No maternal grandmother for my children. The anger and sadness I once felt when seeing a mother and daughter shopping or lunching together has been replaced by the venom I feel when I pass three generations of women walking on the street, the grandmother and the mother pushing the daughter’s stroller together, laughing at a joke I didn’t hear, out for just another regular afternoon in their shared lives.

I can still get angry about this, so angry sometimes that I could stamp my feet and scream. I’ve substituted yoga for domestic destruction, overcome my dressing-room fits, and attacked empty chairs that represent my mother in several Gestalt-inspired episodes, but a residue of rancor persists. Am I still just trying to hold on to my mother? Or has this sense of outrage become a permanent part of me?

Like most other emotions, anger carries extra baggage, and mine tends to travel with a significant amount of guilt. From an early age I received the subtle cues that told me never to speak out against the dead. The sanctification process following a mother’s death is one
that surpasses the rigor of any church, elevating all subsequent mention of her to the most laudatory and idealized heights. As Virginia Woolf, who was thirteen when her mother died, wrote, “Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.”

Because we loved them, because we
wanted
them to be flawless when they lived, we honor our mothers by granting them posthumous perfection, and we soothe ourselves by creating the mothers we wish we’d had. Karen, twenty-nine, whose mother died nine years ago, had a childhood so torn apart by her mother’s alcoholism that she ran away from home at fourteen. Nevertheless, she has exalted her mother to nearly mythic proportion in her mind. “I know that despite her alcoholism, she’s smarter and more perfect now in my head than she was when she was alive,” Karen admits. “As far as I’m concerned, there was never a wrinkle in anything I ever wore from the time I was born until I left home. I know I’ve done this as a type of memorial, a way of remembering her in a way she would want to be remembered. She very much wanted to be perfect. Giving her that gives her the respect she always wanted.”

Like anger, idealization is a normal and useful early response to loss. Focusing on a mother’s good traits reaffirms the importance of her presence, and processing the happy side of a relationship is a gentle way to activate mourning. But every human relationship is affected by ambivalence, every mother an amalgam of the good and the bad. To mourn a mother fully, we have to look back and acknowledge the flip sides of perfection and love. Without this, we remember our mothers as only half of what they were, and we end up trying to mourn someone who simply didn’t exist.

“Mommy was a saint,” my sister once said, several years ago, to a chorus of audible nods. And I thought,
a saint?
She was charitable and compassionate, and she routinely took care of others first—all that, I maintain, is true. But she was often nervous and unhappy, and she made more than a few decisions that haven’t served me all that well. I don’t particularly like to remember those parts, don’t necessarily want to recall the things she did that even today, from an adult perspective, seem unreasonable or unfair. I want to look over my shoulder and see my mother only as the woman who shared cigarettes and PTA gossip at our kitchen table with her neighborhood
friends; who carefully and methodically combed the knots out of my long, tangled hair before school when I was six; who curled up on my bed and listened patiently to an off-key version of the haftorah I would sing at my bat mitzvah at thirteen; and who clutched a box of tampons and shouted directions at a closed bathroom door to help my best friend in the ninth grade.

But that’s not all of who she was. She was also the mother who constantly coerced her children to hide information from their father so he wouldn’t get upset and, when he slammed the garage door and drove off one night, sat in the kitchen and cried, “What am I going to do? I’m nothing without him”; who was so frustrated with her own constant, unsuccessful dieting that she said nothing about my rapid and deliberate weight loss in 1978 until I had dropped to 102 pounds on a five-foot, seven-inch frame; who screamed at me all the way home from my second failed driver’s license road test, shouting, “If you think I’m going to continue taking time out of
my
day to drive
you
around, you can just forget it”; and who turned a sixteen-year-old daughter into a bedroom confidante, telling me all the reasons why she should leave my father as well as all the reasons why she couldn’t and, in the end, turning me against him as well.

I’ve heard that every emotion contains within itself the impulse for its opposite, but where does one end and the other begin? When I think too long about my mother, love and anger and guilt become incestuously intertwined. I have to work actively to separate them out, to differentiate the good from the bad, and, in doing so, to allow my mother to become a composite of positive and negative traits. I couldn’t mourn my mother until I was ready to allow her, after death, to be nothing less—and nothing more—than she had been in life. If I can’t mourn the Bad Mother, a piece of me remains forever connected to the piece of her I refuse to see.

It’s hard to understand how we can harbor negative feelings toward someone we love when the two appear to sit at such competing ends of a spectrum. But negative emotion can bind people together just as tightly as positive emotion does, which is why even daughters of abusive mothers need to mourn the loss. At first, this may sound like a cross between the impossible and the absurd: Why grieve for a mother who gave you virtually nothing but grief? Why bother
mourning if you
wanted
her to leave, or if her departure freed you, giving you more than you feel you lost?

All ties, positive and negative, have to be evaluated before a daughter can reconcile her mother’s death or departure and move on. When the mother was a victimizer, this process involves a more difficult, more painful, and potentially more confusing journey for the daughter left behind. She often chooses to accentuate the positive, idealizing the lost mother and minimizing the abuse, or she may focus only on the negative, unable to acknowledge that a mother who hurt her so badly could have possibly loved her, too. This bewilderment is evident when twenty-two-year-old Laura reviews her relationship with her mother, who was murdered two years ago:

Like Laura, twenty-five-year-old Juliet first had to work through her ambivalence toward her family before she could accept the loss of her mother, who died when she was seventeen. The youngest of eight children, Juliet grew up in an alcoholic home where both parents drank. She was her mother’s protector, and after the funeral, Juliet relied on alcohol to numb out her feelings for nearly seven years. At twenty-three, she found herself “just stuck.” “I’d painted myself into a corner,” she says. Her older sister was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Juliet decided to join. As she sobered up, seven years of feelings slowly returned, and she began to mourn what her mother had, and hadn’t, been to the family. But first she had to break through years of family training that had taught her to resist or ignore her emotions, and to sanctify her lost mother.