Motherless Daughters (18 page)

An abandoned daughter is left feeling angry, resentful, and sad. She also has the emotional injury of having been given up, put aside, left, or lost. The question “Why did she leave?” always includes the appendix “me.”

Amanda, thirty-three, remembers how she used to sit at the curb, pulling on her hair and wondering where her mother was, and if she would return. She was three when her mother lost custody of her and then disappeared, and Amanda recalls a childhood filled with longing. “I wanted a mommy so bad,” she says. “My favorite book was
Are You My Mother?
by P. D. Eastman. My grandmother would read it to me. The baby bird gets separated from its mother and goes up to all the different animals and objects and asks, ‘Are you my mother?’ I would fixate on that book. I don’t even think I paid attention to the end, when the bird finds its mother. I was more interested in the search. The feelings of loss were so real to me.”

Fantasies of a mother-daughter reunion and the desire to compensate for lost years may consume an abandoned daughter’s
thoughts. At the same time, the fear of a second rejection or an absence of information may prevent her from taking steps to find her lost mother as an adolescent or adult. “She would want me now” is complicated by the thought “But she didn’t want me then,” and the daughter grows up in a motherless limbo, left to piece together a feminine identity based on scraps of memory, idealized images, and whatever nuggets of information she can uncover from family members and friends.

When a mother deserts her child, or when a mother is incarcerated, family bitterness or shame may discourage a daughter from uncovering the details of the past. If the marriage went sour, Evelyn Bassoff points out, the loss may not be as severe for the father as it is for the daughter, and her fact-finding efforts that require his help may dead-end. Amanda’s father occasionally validated her early memories, but he was reluctant to share new information with her. “Whenever I felt bold enough to ask him, he would tell me stories like, ‘Well, Amanda, she joined the Hell’s Angels, and the reason I know that is because she had a leather Hell’s Angels jacket. Do you know how you get one of those?’ I said, ‘No, Dad,’ and he told me you get one by having sex with thirteen of them on a pool table, which just made a lasting, sick impression on me. That time when I asked, it was like he was tired of my questions. He just wanted to bury this so deep. But there was always some dialogue going on with her in my head. I would hear a song, and I would know that my mom liked that song. You know? I don’t know how to describe it, but I know the cord was never fully cut.”

An abandoned daughter’s illusion of the mythic mother hardly meshes with the reality of a biological mother who chose to leave her child, or who consciously jeopardized their chances of staying together. Without the ongoing presence of the real mother, against whom the daughter can test her images of her fantasy mother and modify her expectations accordingly, the hyperidealized version often takes over. A daughter then clings to her image of the Good Mother because she fears the anger and pain that will result if she acknowledges the Bad Mother. But until she can accept both mothers, and relinquish the extremes, she can never truly mourn or accommodate her loss.

Linda, now forty-three, says she finally let go of her idealized images of her mother when she realized in her early twenties that the mother-daughter reunion she’d hoped for was never going to occur. Unlike Amanda, Linda had occasional contact with her mother throughout most of her childhood. She was one when her parents divorced, and she went to live with her grandparents, seeing her mother and father on alternate weekends. When she was five, her mother remarried and moved seven hundred miles away. Instead of bringing Linda to live with her, she bought her a plane ticket once a year so that she could visit. “As far as I know, my mother always had legal custody of me,” Linda says. “But my mother and my grandmother never got along. My mother claims she wanted to take me, but my grandmother threatened to take her to court if she tried. My mother said she didn’t want to put me through a custody battle, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s ridiculous. You don’t leave your child behind because you’re afraid your mother will fight you. Even if it were true, it’s not a reasonable explanation, as far as I’m concerned.”

After her grandmother’s death when she was eleven, Linda went to live with her father and stepmother. Her mother, who’d given birth to three more children during her second marriage, never made an attempt to claim her. Nine years later, as an autonomous adult who was angry about the repeated abandonments of her childhood, Linda wrote to her mother and explained her distress. She never received a response. After her surprise had turned to indignation, she swore she’d never contact her mother again. Hard as it was for her to accept this ultimate rejection, Linda says, she hasn’t regretted her decision. Today, she’s a working artist, has a happy second marriage, and is the mother of a six-year-old son. “I think it all turned out for the best, in terms of what happened with my life,” she says, without evident resentment. But she also says she has to work hard every day to overcome a deep fear of abandonment in her adult life, the enduring reminder of her early loss.

Alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, childhood abuse—all can render a mother incapable of responding to her child emotionally.
Victoria Secunda, the author of
When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends,
describes this type of mothering as a “sort of muteness.” The mother is physically present but offers no emotional substance; she is like the body of a car with nothing under the hood. But the daughter keeps turning the key in the ignition, hoping that if she does it just right, the motor might start up this time.

“These kind of abandonment issues are much more confusing,” says Andrea Campbell. “When a mother leaves mentally, that child feels, even more strongly than the child whose mother dies, ‘I didn’t deserve to have her with me. I must have done something bad. I’m not worthy of having Mother stay. If I were lovable, she would have stayed.’”

Thirty-seven-year-old Jocelyn remembers being five years old and believing her mother’s mental illness was her fault. Between the ages of five and eight, Jocelyn lived with her grandmother while her mother was institutionalized; her repeated requests to see her mother and to be taken home were ignored. “Eventually, I reasoned that my mom must not love me or she would come and get me, and I also felt that way about my dad, because he wouldn’t take me home either,” she recalls. “So from a very young age, I really felt that I was on my own.” That conviction, she says, has been a determining factor of her adult life. Though she speaks in a calm, thoughtful voice, her anger is obvious. “Yes, my mother was physically there,” she says. “But I couldn’t depend on her. That’s what it came down to. I had a real bitterness about that. Because I never had anyone to depend on, I knew I had to take care of myself all the time. Now, I have this attitude that I don’t need anybody, and that I can do everything on my own.”

Jocelyn says she’s had to relinquish the hope that her mother will one day become the mother she always needed. As Evelyn Bassoff explains in her book
Mothers and Daughters: Loving and Letting Go,
a major step in the abandoned daughter’s healing process is to acknowledge that her mother did not love her properly, or did not love her at all.

Twenty-nine-year-old Karen says she has done just this. At fourteen, Karen willingly left home to escape her mother’s alcoholism, and despite her mother’s emotional coldness during and after her departure, Karen nevertheless spent the next six years expecting her mother to welcome her back.

Ever since her mother’s death, Karen has been searching for the validation she never received. Among lovers, friends, and colleagues, she has developed a reputation for being “adoptable,” she says. This is her method for winning the attention and praise as an adult that she never received as a daughter. When an unavailable mother dies, a daughter often finds herself grieving not just for what she has lost but for what might have been, what she didn’t get
but might—one day, maybe, under different circumstances—have gotten from her.

Many women have found ways to compensate for the lack of mother love, Dr. Bassoff says. “Feeling and talking through the pain—the humiliation of being an unloved child, the anger toward the cold mother, the anxiety of turning into her, the fear of maternal retribution for hating her—became the healing salve,” she writes. “Where therapy was successful, these women came to understand that their mothers, who were unfortunate, inadequate, insecure people,
did not have the power
to hurt them anymore. If their mothers continued to act destructively, they could walk away from them.”

The presence of a nurturing and involved father also can help soften the daughter’s feelings of rejection, and many of the women who describe their mothers as emotionally detached credit their fathers with giving them the love and security they believe helped them develop self-esteem and go on to have fulfilling relationships as adults.

Thirty-five-year-old Shari grew up with a mother who was manic-depressive and erratic in her parenting behaviors. Her father, however, was a warm and stable parent, and she believes he made her childhood more bearable than it otherwise would have been.

Two years after her mother died, Shari moved back to her hometown to care for her father, who had been diagnosed with cancer. She wanted to provide him with the secure base that he had given her during times of stress. As she prepares to marry, Shari says, her father remains her model for how she would like to parent one day. Her mother, she says, has provided her mostly with an example of what she doesn’t want to be.

The fear of identifying with one’s mother as a mother is particularly profound in daughters such as Shari, Phyllis Klaus says. “Women who’ve had bad mothering often get very frightened,” she says. “They wonder, ‘Will I hurt like my mother? Will I get angry like my mother?’ They’ll often do many things to be the opposite of their mother, but if they’re not conscious of it in a clear, reflective way, they will in fact re-create those activities and ways of being.” The pattern repeats when women who had to care for their mothers become mothers, she says, and expect their daughters to nurture them.

Like a woman who loses a mother to death or to physical separation, a daughter who is emotionally abandoned must move beyond the image of the Bad Mother and also push the mythic to the side. Her task is to look at her mother as objectively as she can, choose the memories and traits she wants to adopt, and carry them with her as she moves forward. Ultimately, the abandoned daughter is never completely abandoned unless she, too, leaves herself, her needs, and her desires behind.

WE MET AT A PARTY in college, where I heard him discussing Thomas Hardy’s poetry on the back porch. I’d read only one of the poems, and even that was back in high school, but I joined the conversation anyway. He was someone I wanted to know. Before the night was over, we found other topics to talk about . . . and talk about and talk about, and by the end of the week I knew this was a man I could marry. Three and a half years later for Christmas he gave me a teddy bear and a diamond ring.