Motherless Daughters (12 page)

No one knew. I hadn’t told them. These friends were my refuge from the tragedy I’d left behind, the sorority house, a place where I
could reinvent myself as a carefree party girl unencumbered by baggage from my past. In the house’s tastefully decorated living room, I could pretend to be a girl no different from the others, 800 miles from the high school where I’d been known as the girl whose mother died.

The peer group, that all-powerful teenage tribunal in the life of an adolescent girl, plays a critical role in the aftermath of a mother’s death. Most adolescents transfer much of the energy they once invested in their parents to their peers or a “best friend” so common at this time. In fact, a teen is more likely to turn to a friend for help during her bereavement than to any other source of support. But because most adolescents have little experience with profound loss, a girl’s peers often are unable to validate her feelings, or to understand the magnitude of her loss.

Robin, twenty-seven, who was sixteen when her mother died, remembers how difficult her peer relations were at that time. She still remembers and appreciates the classmate who helped her through the following year:

Few adolescent anxieties are greater than that of the girl who fears rejection or an upset within her clique, especially when family members coping with the loss have less time to devote to her. Adolescents, as they undergo symbolic separation from their families, actually have much in common with orphans: Characterizing both groups are feelings of alienation, isolation, and low self-esteem; turbulent home conditions; and a fear of being left out. Adolescents without mothers are often deeply ashamed of having lost the parent other girls view as so central to a daughter’s well-being. The teenaged girl who thinks her mother’s absence will make her appear different or abnormal—and therefore subject to rejection from her peers—often will avoid talking about the loss or revealing any anger, depression, guilt, anxiety, or confusion to her friends, to her friends, adopting a stoic and unemotional coping style instead. This is in part to conform to “acceptable” group behavior, but may also be a self-protective act to shield her from overwhelming feelings of anxiety and grief. The more composed a teen appears, however, the greater her risk is of experiencing long-term, unresolved grief, and researchers now know that unresolved grief in turn places individuals at risk for depression, physical illness, and drug and alcohol abuse.

At the same time the teenager pushes the mourner’s emotions aside, she may also be expending a great deal of energy to appear as normal as she can to the outside world. It’s almost as if she’s saying, “Look—I’m captain of the soccer team, class treasurer, an honors student, and the lead in the school play. Nothing’s wrong with me!” Her self-definition began forming in a family with a mother, only to
be changed by the force of an event she didn’t anticipate and couldn’t reverse. To let her identity continue developing along this new pathway would mean having to define herself as a teen without a mother—not exactly the description she would have chosen for herself, and not one she wants to advertise. So she tries to manufacture a new identity, one that exists independent of her past.

In this quest to reinvent herself, she frequently aims for a persona of competence and control. It’s no coincidence that motherless women who report having eating disorders and drug or alcohol addictions say these compulsions began during their teen years. Adolescence is a time of anxiety and exploration anyway, but for the motherless daughter who needs to feel in command of her body or environment, addictive or self-destructive behavior is a common manifestation of suppressed grief. Bereaved children often internalize their feelings, but adolescents have more resources for acting out. Juliet, twenty-five, started smoking and drinking the year her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and every time her mother’s condition worsened, she acted out. “The day before she started chemotherapy I was caught shoplifting with $30 in my pocket,” she recalls. “I went and stole a $1.69 bottle of fingernail polish and got arrested. Then she went into remission, but the day she had her thyroid removed because of a precancerous growth, I got drunk at a dance, threw up on everybody, and almost got into a fight. I was acting out with pot and alcohol when she died, and it just progressed until I was about twenty-three, and finally sobered up.” When change is occurring both around her and within her, the adolescent motherless daughter looks for comfort in what she can—or thinks she can—control.

Almost immediately after my family completed the eight-day mourning period designated by Jewish law, I began driving my brother for haircuts, taking my sister to the dentist, and carrying the household’s incidental cash in my wallet. I even inherited my mother’s car. I’d somehow stepped on a fast-forward button that transported me from seventeen to forty-two, and though I never questioned taking over my mother’s role like this, I secretly counted
the minutes until I could flee. When the time to begin college arrived the following autumn, I was out of town so quickly that I left skid marks. And then my sister, at fifteen, had to take over where I’d left off.

Adolescent daughters often become involuntary minimothers to fathers and siblings when the biological mother falls ill, leaves, or dies. An unfortunate byproduct of a culture that still views child care and domestic duties as “women’s work” is that the eldest or next-to-eldest daughter—even when an older brother lives at home—is the one expected to step into the mother’s role. When the daughter is an adolescent, her very identity is at risk. After Mariana’s mother died, Mariana had to take over the household chores at sixteen, including responsibility for her younger sister. “When you’re sixteen and your mother always did those things before, you respond like, ‘What do you
mean
I have to do the laundry? What do you
mean
I have to do all the dishes?’” she says. “Those first few months were very difficult. My aunt, who I called Mrs. Clean, would come in and inspect the house. It would drive me crazy. To this day, I hate doing dishes. I was also cooking dinner every night, and trying to take care of my sister, who was always a wild kid. In other words, I was doing all the normal things a teenager is supposed to do during the day at school, and then I’d come home and cook and clean, like a mother or a wife.”

Faced with this kind of responsibility, a girl has three options: She can try to meet the demands fully, meet them partially, or not meet them at all. Sometimes, if she’s old enough or autonomous enough to resist actively, she refuses to take on her mother’s role—but then feels guilty for abandoning her family. Sometimes she realizes that she alone cannot meet the family’s needs only after trying and failing for several years. “Girls who have to take over their mother’s roles can run into all kinds of problems,” says Phyllis Klaus, MFT, LCSW, a psychotherapist in Berkeley and Santa Rosa, California, who frequently counsels motherless women. “Either they become overachievers and exhaust themselves trying to meet their own expectations, or they get out of the responsibility in some way that’s unhealthy, such as getting into a bad relationship or running away.”

The adolescent who must become the nurse for an ailing mother, a parent for younger siblings, or a caretaker for a grieving father may develop characteristics, such as compassion and empathy, that serve her well in the future. Many of the admirable qualities society associates with caregivers—and especially with women—surface in the teenage girl who must care for others. And some research suggests that children who take responsibility for others after the death of a loved one gain a sense of competence and are more likely to accommodate the loss successfully. But the caretaking role is a premature one for an adolescent girl in Western cultures, and it hurtles her into the responsibilities of a later developmental stage before she can complete the one she was already in. It also forces her into maturity at exactly the time she needs to regress and be taken care of.

There’s nothing like the death of a parent to make an adolescent grow up fast. Her thoughts, responsibilities, and realizations mature tenfold overnight, but her body and environment constantly remind her that she’s not fully grown. It’s hard to be a real adult when you’re still taking a bus to school every day. “I felt so much older than people my age,” says Francine, thirty-two, who was thirteen when her mother suffered a massive heart attack that caused a permanent vegetative state, and seventeen when she moved out on her own. “Most of my friends now are still ten years older than me. I always wanted to hang out with people who were independent and on their own, like me. Yet at times I feel like a baby. My husband says sometimes I’m so mature and capable and other times I seem like I’m barely an adult. I had to grow up so fast, I wasn’t able to be a kid. One of the reasons I recently decided to work off hours and have three-day work weeks was to have time to be a kid. I’m glad that I finally feel safe enough to do that now.”

So much of the last twenty-four years of my life has been about trying to figure out what feels right for my chronological age. I’ve often felt that when my mother died, I split into even thirds. A part of me immediately aged to forty-two and took over some of her concerns; another part of me got stuck at seventeen, hanging on to the image of my mother and the relationship we had then; and a third part, the one I’ve often felt I know the least about, developed along normal lines. For many years I wanted nothing more than the ability
to spread my arms and grasp forty-two with one hand and seventeen with the other, and then to pull both ends in tight, until they met somewhere in between.

If adolescence is all about forming an identity, the twenties are about taking that identity and putting it to use in the larger world. That’s why a woman who loses her mother at this time may well be the most overlooked and misunderstood daughter of all. She’s the one most likely to be living outside the home, already caring for herself or for a family of her own—which also makes her the most likely to feel frustrated and confused when the loss of a mother reduces her to an emotional puddle. And she’s the one who most often hears, “When you were twenty-three? Well, you really didn’t need a mother anymore,” as if a mother’s importance somehow diminishes to zero the moment her daughter emerges from adolescence.

A departure for college, marriage, or a move out on one’s own all serve as developmental milestones, but the act of establishing a new home base doesn’t sever our emotional ties to the one left behind. Paradoxically, a successful launch depends on the young adult’s continuing to have a secure base—usually the nuclear family—to return to at times of stress. She’s in a revolving-door period of her life, trying things out and coming back home for encouragement or respite.

“If a woman loses her mother during early adulthood, from nineteen to maybe twenty-three, the loss presents a conflict because it touches every base,” says Phyllis Klaus. “She’s at the point of really beginning to develop her own career and move out, and that’s when she needs encouragement. But instead, she may need to go back to the family house and be helpful. Also, because the level of intellectual understanding is so much greater, all the thoughts of ‘How will I manage all of the events coming up in my life without my mother?’ come up. So she loses not only her mother but also the encouragement and revalidation of the self she needs as well as the real sharing she would want to do with her mother at that time.”

It’s not much different from the toddler who ventures forth in stages and repeatedly returns to the mother for security and reassurance, except that now the child is a woman, her journeys span several weeks or months, and her reconnections may be by e-mail or by telephone.

“There’s an enormous yearning to be in relation to a home ground in your twenties and thirties,” says Naomi Lowinsky. “And mother is a reference point. You might be mad at her and not want to be like her, but your mother is the source. She’s the origin. You’re always kind of looking back at her to see where you are. If you’re twenty-five and you know your mother is full of bullshit, you know where
you
are. It’s very defining. But if you’re twenty-five and you’ve lost your mother, how do you know where you are? It’s really, really difficult to not know where you are at that age. You need to be in relation to something. Dad may be really important and helpful, but he’s not a woman. His is a different kind of help, a kind of attention that’s contrasexual.”