Motherless Daughters (9 page)

Tricia was three when her mother died after a two-year struggle with cancer, and what she can best recall now, at twenty-five, is the general feeling of confusion and abandonment she experienced at the time:

Tricia spent only three years with her mother, but it was enough time for her to feel a deep connection to her and to understand that an important part of her livelihood had been taken away. She’s been trying to recapture it ever since. Today, she still seeks out stories, photographs, and items that can tell her more about her mother’s life and the brief time they shared.

To experience the loss of her mother, a child first must develop the ability to miss someone. This usually occurs between the ages of six months and one year. A girl who loses her mother before this time grows up with little sense of connection to her. Preverbal, sensual memories of very early care may be lodged deep within her psyche, but she retains no conscious memories of being held, talked to, or fed by any particular caregiver. Twenty-seven-year-old Lisa, who was four months old when her mother died, says with evident regret, “I don’t feel anything between us. I have pictures of her and my father when they first got married, and pictures of her by herself, and I look at them and wonder, What was she like? It’s like I’m
looking at someone who’s a stranger but not a stranger. I’m sure that just from being in her womb, I have some subconscious connection to my mother, so there has to be something there, but I don’t have anything I can point to and say, ‘This is my mother and this is how I knew her.’”

Daughters whose mothers died when they were infants or toddlers grow up feeling a strong sense of absence rather than loss. “Because the parent was never known, the surviving child does not have the experience of being torn away from a parent who was loved and cherished,” explains Maxine Harris
.
These children have to contend with what’s known as “the absent memory,” the story of a mother whose face is neither remembered nor preserved in the family album. “Loss requires some prior relationship,” Harris writes in
The Loss That Is Forever
. “One can experience emptiness, however, when one has known only absence. For the survivors of the very early death of a parent, emptiness and void are inextricably tied with the enigmatic image of a parent they never knew.”

Although young children’s capacity for memory and understanding is limited, as the British psychiatrist John Bowlby emphasized, it is not zero. He observed that children as young as one will look for a mother in the last place she appeared, and that this association may persist into adulthood. The daughter whose mother favored a particular wing chair, for example, may continue to look toward that chair longingly as she grows up, and associate such chairs with desire or distress as an adult.

A woman who was a toddler when she lost her mother may be able to recall specific tactile or visual images—such as hair, hands, or skin—that she associates with her mother. Amanda, thirty-three, who was separated from her mother at the age of three when her parents divorced, says she’s still not sure whether some of her early memories of her mother are real or imagined. “In my twenties, I started asking my father about places and people I remembered, and he’d say, ‘Well, that sounds pretty accurate,’ or ‘That doesn’t sound right to me,’” she recalls. “Once, I remembered her taking her hair and rubbing it on her face, and he remembered that about her, too. It blew me away, because it was like this hidden, weird thing that I did. Whenever I was under stress, I would play with my hair and pull it.”
Discovering this connection, small as it may be, Amanda says, helped her feel closer to the mother she never expects to see again.

The trauma of separation often illuminates a particular scene or event and fixes it in a young child’s memory. Women who were three or four when their mothers died report having fairly detailed memories of particular events. Although toddlers don’t yet fully understand death, and typically won’t for at least another five or six years, they can sense when something has gone seriously wrong, often from interpreting the responses of those around them. If a child of this age is left alone with her confusion, certain memories may continue to trouble her for years after the actual event.

Claudia, forty-one, who was four when she lost her mother, remembers the night her mother died, the casket in the home, the funeral, and the burial. “I remember going to the interment, and standing over the grave,” she says. “It seemed like it would never stop when they were lowering the casket. I wondered how deep they were going to put her. They gave us flowers to put in, and when I walked over to put mine in, the hole was so deep. I felt like I should jump in. I didn’t, but really I wanted to jump in with her. That’s what I felt.” The moment left such an emotional imprint on Claudia that she refused to return to the cemetery for more than twenty years, until her father died. As she stepped up to the family plot again, the sadness and fear she’d felt at the age of four returned. “My aunt touched me on my back and said, ‘Go ahead, baby. Go ahead. Put the flower on his casket,’” she recalls. “I didn’t want to do it, because I could remember looking into that hole before. I didn’t want to get near it. So I went up very quickly, put the flower in, and rushed back.”

Young children are totally dependent on someone to help them through the intricate maze of early developmental skills and to offer encouragement and support. This person is usually the mother. A child’s first and most profound social experience is with her mother, and that relationship influences her psychological and physical development. As Bowlby and other attachment theorists have observed, children whose mothers are responsive to their signals and interact socially with them during their first year are likely to become more
socially advanced and more capable of forming secure attachments to others than infants whose mothers are preoccupied or avoidant.

When this first consistent relationship is interrupted or severed, a father, grandmother, older sister, housekeeper—any warm, involved, stable caretaker willing to invest time and patience in the child’s growth—may fill this role. Among children of all ages, the critical factor that determines later distress is not mother loss per se but instead the availability of consistent, loving, and supportive care afterward. A child who can attach to another adult after losing a mother has the best chance of developing without serious ongoing difficulties. Although she often makes it clear that her substitute is second-best to the mother she lost, a daughter may find comfort in recreating with this new mother-figure some version of the relationship she had with her own mother.

Amanda believes she eventually managed to enter a stable marriage, start a family, and find happiness despite her early abandonment and later difficulties with a distant father and stepmother because she spent four years in her grandmother’s care. After her parents’ divorce when she was three, Amanda lived with her paternal grandparents and uncle until her father remarried. “That was a very nurturing family,” she explains. “I don’t know why my grandparents let me stay with them, but I always wished they’d said to my father, ‘Let us keep Mandy, and you go on with your life.’ I’m still very close with my grandma and grandpa. We relate to each other better than I can with my father and stepmother.” Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Amanda relied on her grandmother for the love and care she never found at home. Her grandmother helped her through her first menstruation and gave her financial assistance to return to school just last year.

Amanda’s ability to bond with a stable adult in early childhood and maintain that bond until the present gave her the solid foundation she needed to leave her father’s home at eighteen and feel confident in her ability to create a life of her own. If Amanda hadn’t found a substitute after her mother died, her early development might have detoured in a number of ways. Elizabeth Fleming’s case study of Lucy, which appears in Erna Furman’s book,
A Child’s
Parent Dies,
illustrates the resonating effects of early mother loss when subsequent caretakers are inconsistent or indifferent.

Lucy was ten weeks old when her mother suddenly died. Maternal relatives raised Lucy for a short period until a cousin took over while her father traveled for work. When Lucy was six, her father married a woman with three children and brought Lucy to live in the new home. Throughout this time, he refused to answer her questions about her birth mother, about whom she knew virtually nothing. Lucy was eleven, overweight, and still wetting the bed when she started seeing Fleming. The therapist believed that the combination of a lack of early consistent mothering, childhood instability, and a taboo surrounding the natural mother had led Lucy to overeat, isolate herself, tune out her feelings, take on the traits of people around her, and consistently start new relationships with the hope that she would find what she had lost.

Lucy’s resistance to later attachments was a defense against her expectation of abandonment. Many motherless women who were young children when their mothers died or left echo Lucy’s experience. To love someone, they say, involves the risk of loss. Trust and security already were destroyed once. Why should they chance losing those again?

“If a child doesn’t have a secure and stable relationship after a parent leaves, she keeps her feelings inside because it’s not safe to put them out there,” Therese Rando explains. “Later on, the child thinks, ‘I’m not going to trust. I’ve learned it’s not safe. You might be nice, but I’m not going to trust you.’ Her future attachments get compromised, because she never worked through the attachments she did have. All she had to do was protect herself, and part of that protection was not to attach to anyone.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Janine says she has encapsulated herself in this kind of protective cocoon for almost thirty-seven years. She was twenty-one months old when her mother died, and twelve when she lost the grandmother who became her mother substitute. The double loss, followed by an adolescence with an emotionally distant father and stepmother, forced her into a withdrawal she’s just learning how to emerge from today:

Some therapists believe that children who lose a parent during this next developmental stage have the hardest time coping. They’re cognitively and emotionally advanced enough to feel a profound loss, but their resources for managing their emotions haven’t yet reached a level of mastery. Stuck between change and adaptation, school-age
children often try to ward off their sad feelings forcefully. As the psychologist Judith Mishne writes:

Sigmund Freud called this phenomenon—allowing fact and fantasy, acceptance and denial, to exist side by side—“splitting the ego,” and to some degree, we all do this when a parent dies. During late childhood, however, this inner tension intensifies when a girl receives minimal or false information about what she knows is a dramatic event. Whereas a young daughter usually is told that her mother has “gone away” or is in “a deep sleep” and often takes these euphemisms literally, an older child—who typically understands most of the implications of illness and death by age seven or eight and recognizes euphemistic language—feels left out of the action, like a bit-part player in the family’s drama.