Motherless Daughters (7 page)

A mother who inflicted physical, sexual, or emotional abuse on a daughter damages her child’s healthy sense of self, ability to trust, belief in personal safety, and perception of the world as a meaningful place. Mourning the abusive mother is an attempt to take back as much as possible of what was robbed. It doesn’t invalidate the abuse, or mean the daughter wishes the mother could return. It doesn’t have to be about feeling sad. It’s about letting go, and setting oneself free.

“Half of me isn’t sad my mother died, because I know she’s a lot happier,” says Donna, whose mother committed suicide three years
ago. “She felt so much pain all her life—back pains, stomach pains, and then alcoholism. She was always happy on the outside, but deep inside there was a little girl on her hands and knees, crying and just wishing somebody would take care of her. She always needed to feel loved. That was why our bond, I think, was so close. I would always hug her and tell her I loved her, and cook her meals and drag her from bed to bathroom to make her throw up.

“For a couple of months after she passed away, I have to say I couldn’t think of anything good that came from her,” she continues. “I couldn’t think of any nice things she’d done, or anything about her person that had been pretty neat at all. But I know my mother did a lot of good. Once the haze started to clear, I was able to grab hold of the things flying in front of my face and stare at them and figure out what they were and why they made me feel a certain way. My mother’s death basically released me. It gave me freedom to do things I’d never have been able to do.”

When an abusive mother dies or leaves, her daughter’s chance for reconciliation also disappears. As long as the mother was present, the possibility of reunion, however slim, remained. For a daughter who clung to the hope of an apology, a reversal, or a payback for all the lost years, the dashed potential is another loss that needs to be acknowledged and mourned. Her mother will never say, “I’m sorry.” She’ll never quit drinking. She’ll never find the therapist who’ll help her change. She’ll never, in effect, become the mother she never was. But she’ll also never be physically able to abuse her daughter again.

Several mornings a year I fight the impulse to crawl back under the blankets and hide. On those days, the calendar is not my friend. July 10, my parents’ anniversary, is the first, followed closely by July 12, the day my mother died. Then comes her birthday on September 19, which gives me a brief respite before the holiday season begins. One month later, while I’m trying to figure out how to revise the Roman calendar to catapult myself straight from October to January, the card stores and supermarket set up their holiday displays, reminding me we won’t be flying anywhere again this year, and that whatever
Thanksgiving we have will be haphazardly fashioned with friends in California, 2,600 miles from the place that still shows up in my dreams as “home.”

I used to pretend these days didn’t bother me, even tried to ignore them at first, but the insidious thing about anniversaries is that the psyche always knows they’re there. Our internal calendar doesn’t let them just slip by. Thirty-two-year-old Eileen, whose mother died when she was three, wrote to me about the intense sadness she always felt when she saw sunsets. She physically avoided them for most of her life. Driving home one day, she finally decided to watch one and experience the accompanying emotions. In doing so, she remembered that after her mother died, she frequently ran away from her father’s house at dinnertime and sat on a curb, watching the sun set and waiting for her mother to appear and bring her home. After making this connection, she went to mark the event on her calendar—and discovered her mother’s birthday was the day she had finally chosen to watch the sun go down.

Certain days or times of the day, week, or year can act as cyclical triggers, resurrecting grief responses. Holidays, crises, and sensory reminders can bring up the old feelings again, too. Therese Rando calls these “STUG reactions,” or subsequent temporary upsurges of grief, and points out that intermittent periods of acute longing for the lost loved one are part of the normal mourning process. When we can anticipate their arrival, as in the case of distinct calendar days, we can take steps to prepare. At a time when collective ritual has lost ground to individual concerns, we are free to create our own traditions. Thirty-one-year-old Addie, who was nineteen when her mother died of heart failure, used to dread spending Mother’s Day alone. “When I was working at a gift shop, I once worked on Mother’s Day for a co-worker who wanted to be with his mother,” she recalls. “All day long, mothers and daughters came into the shop together. I hated it—I felt so angry and sad. Cheated. I went home that night and cried for at least an hour. Just this past year my therapist helped me to see I needed a way to still honor my mother. So I decided to garden on Mother’s Day. I made a ritual of planting flowers and praying for strength, life, and light. It fits for me because I’m honoring my mother and nature, and celebrating the
life-giving aspect of myself—which was truly the gift my mother gave to me.”

Birthdays also activate grief responses, not only because they remind us of the phone call or card that never comes but because each one we celebrate brings us closer to the neon number: the age a mother was when she died. Because we identify so strongly with our mother’s body, and because our fate was once so intertwined with hers, many of us fear that the age of her physical demise will also be our own. To reach the year is a milestone; to pass it becomes one of our most glorious achievements.

“I see this over and over again,” says Naomi Lowinsky, Ph.D., a Jungian analyst in Berkeley, California, who frequently counsels motherless women. “As some women approach the age their mothers were when they died, they just start going bananas in one way or another. They have weird symptoms, they’re depressed, they’re suddenly having heart palpitations, or other things there’s no medical explanation for. It’s a very, very powerful connection.” Vanderlyn Pine, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and one of the country’s leading experts on death and American society, found this grief response to be so common that he created a name for it: the “parental trigger.” Dr. Pine, who was nineteen when his father died, says that reaching a same-sex parent’s age at time of death suddenly catapults a child into an awareness of personal mortality and a type of mourning for the parent that he or she wasn’t capable of experiencing until that point. “As I was approaching the age my father was when he died, I realized I was getting very focused on that date,” he explains. “His death was triggering my reactions at the time, but it didn’t trigger me back to being nineteen. Instead, I was getting ready to look at the death of a forty-eight-year-old man through the eyes of a forty-eight-year-old man. It was like,
boom.
My father had pulled a trigger inside me. When I woke up that morning, I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘I’m forty-eight years old. But I look pretty good for forty-eight.’ I sort of looked myself over and thought, ‘How could you have been so
young?
How the fuck could you have
died?
There I was at forty-eight, judging my father’s death in a way I wasn’t capable of at nineteen. I was suddenly a forty-eight-year-old
man looking at a 48-year-old man dying and thinking, ‘How shocking!’”

And then there are the subtle triggers, the ones that sidle up to you without warning, emerging from around a corner, tapping you on the shoulder when you thought you had other things on your mind. These grief responses are often related to transitional times in a woman’s life—graduation, a wedding, childbirth, a new job. As maturational steps, these transitions involve added responsibility, which calls up fears and indecision that leave us longing for protection and searching for a safe haven. “In a general sense, these responses have to do with the danger of growing up,” says Benjamin Garber, M.D., the director of the Barr-Harris Children’s Grief Center. “If you grow up, bad things happen to you. You die.” On a more personal level, he notes, “Transitional times come with heightened expectations. More will be expected of you. Each time you move forward, there’s a wish to regress. And when you regress, you watch for the parent to be there. If you look back and there’s nobody there, it’s really scary.” Evelyn Bassoff, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, and the author of
Mothering Ourselves,
adds, “In those times of transition, our psychic systems are not in harmony. There’s a lot of inner conflict. We cling to protective figures or memories of protective figures. There’s a longing to be safe.”

When we reach these milestones, a mother’s absence is painfully obvious. Either consciously or subconsciously, we once imagined these occasions and expected her to be there. When she isn’t, our assumptions clash with reality in the most dissonant of ways. The daughter mourns not only what was lost, but what will never be—and, if her mother didn’t offer protection and support when alive, the daughter also grieves for what she once needed but never had.

I missed my mother, terribly, when I graduated from college and no one from my family was there. I missed her when I got my first job promotion and wanted to share the news with someone who’d be proud. I missed her when both my daughters were born, I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the obstetrician’s office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she
were alive isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.

I wish I believed that mourning ends one day or that grief eventually disappears for good. The word
resolution
dangles before us like a piñata filled with promise, telling us we need only to approach it from the right angle to obtain its prize. But if grieving truly did have an attainable, ultimate goal, more of us would feel we were reaching it. Of the 154 motherless women surveyed for this book, more than 80 percent said they were still mourning their mothers, even though their losses occurred an average of twenty-four years ago.

Full resolution of mourning is a state of consciousness so difficult—if not impossible—to reach that most of our attempts will inevitably fall short and leave us feeling inept. Some losses you truly don’t get over. Instead, you get around them, and past.
“Resolution?
I hate that word,” Therese Rando says. “I use the term
accommodate,
because at different points in time you can have accommodated the loss, made room for it in your life, and have come to a relative peace with it, but then something else can bring it up again later on. Grief is something that continues to get reworked. Even if you lose a parent after childhood, in your teenage years or later in life, you’re still going to have to rework it, and rework it. The notion of ‘forever-after resolved, never going to come up again’ is one I don’t buy at all.” Says fifty-three-year-old Caroline, who was eleven when her mother died of heart disease, “I still miss my mother. If I were someone listening to me, I’d be surprised that someone can miss somebody for forty-two years. Like, Why don’t you get over it? I used to think grieving was like going through a tunnel, and after you get through it, somehow at the other end the pain and feeling of loss would be gone. When I realized that I didn’t have to get over the loss, and that if I didn’t get over it I was still okay, then it took the pressure off me. I could just sort of embrace it and say, ‘Well, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.’”

Sigmund Freud believed that true mourning involved a slow and total psychic detachment from the loved object, with an ultimate goal of later reattachment to someone else. His theory served as the basis for decades of mourning research, but more recent scholars of bereavement have seriously questioned whether this is even possible, let alone beneficial. When Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions and the author of
Never Too Young to Know
, studied eighteen college-aged women who had lost parents during childhood, she found that instead of detaching from their parents completely, these women were trying to remain connected and find a place for the lost parent in their current lives. Especially for women, who are socialized to maintain relationships rather than break away and seek emotional autonomy, ongoing connections to a lost parent may be a more natural and comfortable response. Asking them to sever ties to the past, Silverman says, may only confound their bereavement.

Many of the 125 children interviewed in the Harvard Child Bereavement Study, all of whom had lost a mother or father, also found ways to remain connected to the deceased parent. In fact, children who could not construct an internal image of the dead parent, or maintain a relationship with him or her, seemed to have the most difficulty over time. It seems that a child’s memory of the missing parent, and the ability to maintain an ongoing, evolving inner relationship with that parent, is vital to the child’s healthy development. We’re finally moving, Silverman explains, to “a relational view of grief,” in which maintaining connections to our lost loved ones will be valued more than disengaging or cutting the ties to minimize pain and suffering.

When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother because she died when you were seventeen.