Motherless Daughters (25 page)

“She was,” Cecile agrees, nodding her head. “But I think she had a right to be. My dad really didn’t deal with the death. He started going out every single night, and then he got together with this woman. She’s great today, but he just shoved her down our throats, and we resented it. We said, ‘We just lost our mother. Granted, you say you grieved for two years as she was dying, but now it’s time to grieve after, and you’re not giving us that opportunity.’”

The sisters felt abandoned by their father at a time when they needed to rely on the close-knit family they’d always known. They both recognized their dilemma: They wanted their father to be happy, but they felt their mother deserved more respect. And they decided to side with her.

“It wasn’t so much that he was dating,” Cecile explains, “but that he was forcing us to accept it before we were ready to. Three months after my mother died, he said he loved this woman and planned to marry her. I mean,
three months.
”

Beth rolls her eyes when she recalls the turmoil of the next few months, as the sisters acted out of anger and fear that their father would abandon them in favor of his new wife-to-be. “We were just
mean,
” she says. “I said things to my dad that I would never think I’d say to anyone, like, ‘Let me out of this car. I never want to see you again. I hate you.’ And he’d cry, but in his own way, he had to go on with his life, and he did.”

When their father restated his plan to remarry, the sisters suggested a compromise: They asked him to wait for at least one calendar year after their mother’s death. He agreed, and their relationship slowly started to improve. When the sisters realized that their father was willing to prioritize in favor of his original family, they began to regain their trust and respect for him. The year gave them time to adjust to their mother’s absence, and to the idea of another woman living in their father’s house. They also saw that he didn’t intend to abandon his daughters.

“His priorities were very well defined,” Cecile says. “He put Beth and me before everyone else. To this day, he still does it. He has distinctly separated his life with us from his life with his wife. She’s turned out to be a great friend to us, and her two kids are really nice. Once we stopped feeling threatened, we warmed up to the idea like you’d normally expect. It’s just when it was being pushed down our throats that we objected.”

Beth laughs a little as she says, “I don’t even remember when I started liking my father again. Today, I wish the circumstances of his remarriage had been different, but he’s really happy. He treats his new wife as well as he treated my mother, but only to an extent. I can see the difference.” And that, the sisters agree, shows the respect
for their mother and their original family that they believe is deserved.

In a two-parent family, a mother’s presence and a father’s conscience ideally suppress a father’s sexual impulses toward his daughter. Although some degree of father-daughter attraction is normal, as Victoria Secunda explains in
Women and Their Fathers,
the incest taboo is so deeply ingrained in most men that they can barely imagine an attraction for their daughters, let alone talk about it. These sexual feelings are unconscious in most men, yet they nevertheless cause fathers to withdraw slightly from preadolescent daughters. Daughters typically experience this withdrawal as a rejection, which adds to their overall adolescent sense of awkwardness and isolation.

A mother is both a sexual partner and a source of maternal protection in the home, and in most families she represents a symbolic barrier between father and daughter. When she is absent from the family, father and daughter lose that natural buffer. As a daughter’s sexuality emerges, she becomes increasingly aware of her father as a man with needs, and, if a stepmother or girlfriend is not present, acknowledges him as an adult sleeping alone. Believing that her father’s conscience may be all that keeps him away from her bedroom door, a
daughter may fear the potential for sexual abuse. Especially when parent-child boundaries relax to a degree where a daughter takes over most of her mother’s roles, confusion on either side of the father-daughter pair often leads to active avoidance or rejection.

“I often hear from women about how unsafe they felt with their fathers, without their mothers present,” says Colleen Russell, MFT, a therapist in Mill Valley, California, who for ten years has been leading support groups for motherless-daughters. “Even if there wasn’t any sexual behavior, there was a sexualized environment that felt scary and unpredictable. The daughter reminded the father of his wife, and a lot of the time his anger toward his wife was displaced onto the daughter.”

As Denise, who was twelve when her mother died, moved further into adolescence, she began to fear a violation of the incest taboo. “My father was so irresponsible,” she recalls. “The rule in my family was ‘He’s a kid, he can’t help himself. He’s not responsible for anything.’ So I felt like I was responsible for protecting my father from sexual impulses toward me and my sisters. In my case, I was projecting, because I was the one who was an adolescent and felt the impulses, and here I was in this house. I was the mother. I was making the dinner. I was doing all the housework. I think on some level, I
wanted
my father, and I hated the fact he wouldn’t sleep with me. Of course, I would have sooner died. It upsets me very much now to even say it out loud. If that thought had become conscious at the time, I probably would have slit my wrists.”

These thoughts often consciously develop in response to the “seductive father” who surrounds his daughter with sexual innuendos or treats her as what the author Signe Hammer calls a “surrogate goddess,” the replacement image for a sanctified dead wife. Even when sexual abuse doesn’t occur, these fears are real and damaging.

“On some level, the little girl feels she’s supposed to be the father’s wife, either emotionally or physically,” Naomi Lowinsky explains, “or the father feels the little girl is supposed to be his wife, and the burden of carrying the whole feminine side of the family gets put on a child who’s not ready to carry it.” If incest does occur, the trauma can confuse a girl’s sexual identity, thwart her normal developmental process, and complicate her later relationships with men.

She’s forced into a highly adult role too soon, becoming the equivalent of a woman in a child’s body.

Ginny Smith, the narrator of Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
A Thousand Acres,
reveals what can happen to a motherless daughter who becomes a victim of incest. The middle daughter in an Iowa farm family, Ginny, who was an adolescent when her mother died, grows up with deeply ambivalent feelings about sex and marriage. As the novel progresses, she begins to recover memories of her father in her bed at night, and her recollection of incest during her teen years sends her into an emotional tailspin that ultimately ends with her decision to leave her marriage, her family, and her hometown in a quest to reclaim her life.

It would be unfair and simply untrue to assume that fathers aren’t concerned about their motherless daughters. They know that love requires more expression than a check sent through the mail. Yet they’re also aware of the emotional limits American society forces on males. Grief does not come easily for them. As Therese
Rando explains, males in mourning tend to retreat into themselves, while females reach out. Neither party can be satisfied when a daughter needs to be comforted and a father needs to withdraw.

“
He
was the parent; he should have been taking care of
me,
” motherless women insist. This is the lament of the orphan, frustrated by the father who couldn’t meet her needs. We all have prescribed ideas, born at the point where society and family intersect, of what “parent” means, and we have even stricter ideas of which tasks belong to Mom and which to Dad. When a mother dies, a child typically transfers all of her expectations for care onto her surviving parent, although it’s the rare father who can take them all on himself.

Surviving parents assume a larger-than-life stature in a developing child’s life, Maxine Harris explains. “As the only parent, he or she bears the weight of all the child’s expectations and fantasies,” she writes. “No longer free to be just a parent, the survivor must be the ‘perfect’ parent,” which, to motherless daughters, means being father, mother, protector, nurturer, champion, safety net, role model, and provider, all rolled into one.

For many years, with my father, I just expected too much. I remember a phone conversation with my sister in which I was detailing some or another current grievance against him. “You know what the problem is?” she said. “You want him to be a mother. And he’s not ever going to be one.”

She had a point—a valid, accurate, straight-to-the-point point. In that moment, I understood that my frustration came as much from what I wanted and never had as it did from what I did have. I knew my father had human limitations. I’d just been reluctant to accept them.

By constantly expecting my father to be more than he could be, I could hang on to the belief that the nurturing parental element of my family didn’t die with my mother when, in truth, it pretty much did. And so as I worked to let go of my illusion, I also had to let go of the dream of ever having the strong, decisive, emotionally available protector I always wished for, the one who would solve every problem for me.

I know that not so deep inside my psyche still resides a place where I feel worthless and unloved, because one parent died and the
other withdrew into his room. When I meet another motherless woman who feels the same way, we have that electric moment of connection, the instantaneous joy of finding someone with whom we feel no impulse to explain. We already know each other’s secrets; we share each other’s fears. But we always speak of our fathers tentatively, our voices low, as if a difficult relationship with the first man in our lives so damages our confidence that we then deny ourselves the right to speak about it later with conviction, or with strength.

My father and I did not have an easy time together. We were not bound by similar bodies or mutual impulses or comparable dreams. For many years, it seemed as if all we shared was a surname and the memory of a woman who died decades ago. Then my children came along and, through his interest in and love for them, we found a common ground. Sometimes it was hard to watch them enjoy the playful, curious, happy part of him, a part I hadn’t known since childhood, if ever. But most of the time I would sit on my hands, press my lips shut, and let them get to know each other without intrusions from the past. The problems I had with him were my problems, not theirs.

Until the very end, my father and I both tried to have a relationship, as best as we knew how. A few weeks before he died, I flew from my home in California to his in suburban New York. My siblings and I needed to know what kind of burial arrangements he wanted, but none of us particularly wanted to ask. It was my turn to visit, so I volunteered for the task.

It was early December and my father had been bedridden for a week or two by then, attended to by a revolving staff of hospice volunteers and a devoted full-time aide. The day after I arrived, I pulled a chair up to the side of his bed. I took his hand, still pudgy despite a precipitous weight loss, and held it between mine.

“We still have some time left,” I told him, “but there’s something I really need to ask you now. If you don’t want to talk about it we don’t have to, but it would be good if you could try.” I’d been prepped for this conversation by my friend Susan, a social worker, and so far I thought it was going well.

“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”

“Is there anything you want me to take care of? Any arrangements you’d like me to make?”

He shook his head quizzically, as if he were surprised I’d ask. “All the finances are in order, and I have a will,” he said. “No, everything’s done.”

“And the burial? Do you want to be buried with Mom?”

“Of course,” he said.

The conversation
was
going well,
too
well, actually. Too clinical. Too different. I’d gotten the answer I needed, but I wanted something more. Something substantial, damn it. There would be no more chances to get this right. And with that thought, emotion came charging through.

“I’m going to miss you,” I told him. “A lot.” Tears and mucus started pouring down my face but I didn’t have a Kleenex nearby. “Is there anything you want to tell me while there’s still time?” I asked. “Anything you want me to know?”