Motherless Daughters (20 page)

Motherless daughters frequently feel this intense and disproportionate fear of losing a loved one and, because of their psychological identifications with their mothers’ bodies, they also develop an excessive concern for their own safety or health. “The same person might not have any aversion to risk in her career or in other areas of her life,” Phyllis Klaus explains. “Her fears are very specific, linked to illness, or accidents, or whatever. There’s a residue of delayed post-traumatic stress from the first loss that gets triggered by the potential for certain events.”

Potential:
That’s the critical word here. It’s not certainty we’re frightened of. It’s what might happen. When the loss of a mother results in family chaos or feelings of abandonment, even the risk of subsequent loss can cause anxiety in a child and inspire behaviors designed to preserve the status quo. As the child matures, this anxiety may extend to concerns beyond and unrelated to the original loss,
turning her into an adult who has difficulty making decisions out of fear of catastrophic results. Taking chances may feel too risky to her, and instead she seeks safety through controlling whatever aspects of her life she can.

Candace, thirty-two, describes her romantic past as a patchwork of compromise and denial, a series of attempts to hold onto relationships she knew were destined to fail. “Many times, I put up with deterioration rather than risk the possibility of separation,” she admits. “I’m also a people-pleaser, in part, I think, because I don’t want to risk
anyone’s
rejection. At some level, I’ve equated my mother’s death when I was fourteen with her rejection of life, and of us—her family.” When potential change evokes the memory of disaster, sameness represents security. That’s one reason why so many motherless women will cling to outmoded relationships, jobs, or homes, long after they know they should have moved on.

Someone recently asked me what the biggest challenge of my adult life has been. I didn’t need to think about it for long: It’s been learning to cope with separation and loss. Some days I can make the critical decision to walk away from a friendship or an obligation, trusting that my reasoning is valid. But there are also days when I’m so hypersensitive to abandonment that I start crying as I leave my cheerful three-year-old at preschool, afraid that she’ll miss me during the day and I won’t be there. “Is everything okay?” the school receptionist asks, and I know she’s asking about me, not my daughter.

“It’s just so hard to leave her sometimes,” I explain.

“She’ll be fine,” the receptionist assures me, with the wisdom of someone who’s seen hundreds of children pass by her desk over the years.

Okay. So she’s probably right. My daughter isn’t going to curl up unresponsively in a corner because I’ve driven off to work. (In fact, through the window on my way to the car I can see that she’s already doing Play-Doh with the other kids.) And my husband isn’t going to disappear without warning or explanation at any moment. And my sore throat is probably just a sore throat, and not an esophageal tumor. I know the odds are in my favor. But until I see concrete proof these things won’t happen, until I know for certain, a
part of me is always watching. Always waiting. Always making elaborate, unnecessary plans.

When I was twenty, I demanded that my father tell me the terms of his life insurance policy. He wasn’t in particularly poor health, but I needed the assurance that my brother, sister, and I would be provided for. Anything could happen to him, at any moment; that was all I knew for sure. Late at night, I would pause outside his closed bedroom door as I walked down the hall, listening for the steady breathing on the other side. If I didn’t hear it, I’d open the door a crack, just to see his chest rise and fall.

Just checking, I told myself. Just making sure we’re still safe.

He lived for another twenty years. As sad and tragic as his dying was, it contained a small element of relief, the knowledge that the worst had finally come to pass. Like my mother, he died of liver failure; but his death took place while he was under hospice care at home, in a setting of full disclosure, surrounded by family until the end. His was an entirely different departure from that of my mother in 1981, and it was healing for that reason. Yet at the same time, I hadn’t fully anticipated what a large hole his death would leave behind, how much I would miss him as a father and grandfather.

I’d lost a parent before, yes, but this was something else. “You’ve been through this,” friends reminded me, trying to help me find perspective. Well, yes. And no. My role as daughter, had narrowed when my mother died. Now it had been taken away completely. With my father’s death, there was no longer any space in the world for me to be a child. For weeks, I sleepwalked through my daily activities, stunned that I was no longer anyone’s daughter.

Losing one parent teaches us about just that—how to lose one parent. It doesn’t prepare us for the loss of the second. “The death of the last parent is a whole other dimension,” says Therese Rando, who lost both of her parents by the age of eighteen. “When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of
all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you’re an adult, it’s weird to be orphaned.”

A daughter’s identity changes dramatically when both her parents die. The roof above her is stripped away. When she’s a young adult, capable of making her own decisions, this second loss pushes her into a phase of individuality where she’s accountable only to herself. “I lost both of my parents by the time I was twenty-six,” says Christine, now thirty-five. “And suddenly I didn’t have anybody telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. That’s a scary feeling, when you’re suddenly let loose and realize there’s nobody to check in with. Nobody to ask, ‘What are you doing?’ or say, ‘Maybe you should think about this.’ All of a sudden you have all this responsibility for yourself, and you think,
What do I do
?”

Losing both parents so young, Christine says, helped turn her into a more mature, independent woman than she believes she would have been otherwise. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, orphans both lose and gain. “They’re highly intuitive, because they’ve suffered so much,” she says. “They learned to develop radar to know where the next kick or hit was coming from. So as adults, they’re very, very alert, and often uncannily so. They not only can tell bad things but also good things about people. The only problem is, they often override their intuition, especially if they think they’ll get love. It’s almost like a currency exchange that they do.”

For the daughter who loses one parent young, the death of the second parent may trigger a new mourning cycle for the first. Thirty-two-year-old Mariana was sixteen when her mother died, and after an initial two-month period of shock and denial, she began to mourn intensely.

Though her second loss reactivated additional mourning for her mother and introduced the new pain of being left parentless, Mariana approached her father’s death as a thirty-one-year-old adult, more self-reliant and emotionally mature than she’d been at sixteen. Her acute grief phase for him began immediately and lasted for less than a year. As she prepares for the first anniversary of his death, Mariana says she feels stronger and more prepared to face the day than she did as an adolescent after her mother died.

Eva, who lost her mother when she was eight and her father when she was thirty-five, attached a different meaning to parent loss as an adult. Her peers were beginning to experience the same, and she perceived the death as a traumatic but timely event. As a result, she could mourn and accommodate the loss without long-term, ongoing distress. “A child really has a different perception of death than an adult does,” she says. “I just didn’t have a clue when I was eight. As tragic and as sad as my dad’s death was, it wasn’t confusing. It made sense to me. I hadn’t known how confusing my mother’s death was until my father died twenty-five years later.”

The loss of one parent during childhood or adolescence is traumatic enough, but for some unfortunate young daughters the death of a mother either follows or is closely followed by the loss of a father. Every month I receive several e-mails from women who’ve lost both parents young, detailing the uniqueness of their situations.

Although
orphan
is defined as a child under the age of eighteen who has had at least one parent die, most of us associate the term with a Dickensian image of a child alone, without either biological parent alive. In 2003, 29,140 U.S. children under eighteen fit this description—“double orphans,” they’re called—and about another 32,000 were between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six.

For such a child, Tamar Granot says, “the sense of calamity and loss is absolute. The child’s entire world is instantaneously shattered, and he feels he is left alone in the world. Suddenly, he goes from being
an ordinary child with parents and a family to one who has nothing.” To a child in need of a legal guardian, the loss of the last surviving parent usually means a change of residence and new caretakers. Outsiders intrude on the family system in the form of relatives, neighbors, social workers, and other professionals compelled by altruism or law to intervene. The child may go live with relatives or move into a foster home. If she has siblings, they become her only living connection to her nuclear family, and their importance to her may increase.

Darlene, forty-three, says her younger sister became the only constant figure in her childhood after she lost both her parents in separate accidents by the age of ten. “My sister and I were always very, very close,” Darlene recalls. “If anyone had tried to separate us, that would have been the last straw. I don’t think I would have been able to accept that at all. If I were an only child, I would have had to handle things differently, I think. But because I had my sister, we depended on each other a lot for support and acceptance and approval. As adults, we still do.”

Multiple losses within short periods can seriously stress a child’s coping skills. Instead of mourning for the lost parents, an early orphan often has to pour all her emotional energy into just getting from day to day. The enormity of such a trauma is too overwhelming for someone who is still a child to touch. Only years later, as an adult who’s found stability within herself and through external relationships, can she revisit the losses, take in the significance of the pain, and begin to process it.

Along the way, the early orphan may endure long and lonely stretches in her quest to find a replacement for the parental love she lost. After both her parents died in a car accident when she was thirteen, Diane, now thirty-nine, lived in nine places over the next three years, searching for one where she felt she belonged. “I was such a lost soul,” she says. “I tried drugs. I was pretty loose and easy with the sexual things in my early years. I was looking for love, looking for anything that would dull the pain and make me feel like I fit in.” Jokes, she discovered, decreased tension and earned her positive feedback, and humor became the coping skill she relied on to alleviate her feelings of dislocation and isolation.

Today, Diane is a successful stand-up comedian. Her early experience as an orphan instilled in her a strong will to survive, which she believes members of her audience can recognize and appreciate. “The life force is very strong in me, and people are drawn to it,” she says. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I get after my shows, just incredible stories of pain and anguish. A lot of women come over and tell me they’re on the road to healing themselves. They say, ‘You know, you’ve given me a lot of strength.’ I’m not sure why. I don’t particularly talk about my past on stage. It’s just something they get out of me.”

The very term
orphan
reflects the uniqueness of a solitary, insightful state. The alchemists originally used the word to name a unique gem once found in an emperor’s crown, similar to what we call a solitaire today. They compared the orphan stone to the lapis philosophorum, or the philosophers’ stone, considered worthless and priceless at the same time, despised by fools but loved by the wise. Even then, it was believed that orphans held special knowledge and had acquired an insight that others had not attained.

Some early orphans find solace in this archetypal association, using it to attach meaning to and justify their double loss. Twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her mother died and then went to live with an indifferent father and antagonistic stepmother, neither of whom she speaks to today, says, “I’ve felt emotionally alone since my mother died, and that kind of heightens my feelings of difference and uniqueness. I’ve felt that I’ve had to raise and take care of myself. Sometimes I wonder if my feeling of uniqueness is all bad. I wonder if I’m getting something out of that, thinking that I’m extraordinarily different.” Reminding herself that she was “special” became the defense that helped Margie through a difficult and lonely adolescence. It became her compensation for losing her mother physically and her father emotionally at such a young age. As an adult, however, she’s now aware of how risky this self-definition can be. She’s secretly pleased about being different from most other women she knows, but she’s cautious about letting her self-perception slide into delusions of grandeur.