Motherless Daughters (26 page)

He scrunched his lips and rolled his eyes up in thought, then shook his head. No.

We sat together quietly for a moment. “Are you scared?” I asked him. I couldn’t help wondering.

“No,” he said, more matter-of-factly than I would have expected. He angled his chin toward the photographs of his grandchildren taped to the mirror on the wall. “That’s the only part that hurts,” he said.

He died two weeks later, a peaceful passing just before dawn, with my sister by his side. It was the kind of death I’d always wished my mother had had. In her final days she had been blindsided by the severity of her illness, refusing to believe her life was coming to an end. In his dying, my father faced his mortality head on with a courage, a dignity, and a kind of inner strength I’d never seen him model in life. It made me wonder what other secrets he’d held, what other capacities could have been revealed. There had been, I realized, still so much to learn from him. This wasn’t the answer I was looking for in his bedroom that day, but I think, over time, it will turn out to be exactly the answer I need.

 

 

 

 

MY SISTER MOVED TO LOS ANGELES in 1992, two months after I returned to New York. This hadn’t been part of the plan. For months we’d been discussing how I would finally end a decade of circuitous wanderings in Manhattan, where we would then live twenty city blocks apart in mutual sibling bliss. But six weeks after I unpacked my boxes, Michele called and said an interview in Los Angeles had come up, so she flew west to check it out, and of course they wanted her immediately, and, well, it was too good a deal for her to pass up. Within three weeks she was gone.

I was, mildly speaking, devastated—that old Abandonment sign flashing its neon warning again—but I can’t say I was all that surprised. Michele had moved to Manhattan the year our brother, Glenn, left for college, a silent exchange that kept at least one child in close proximity to our father (in case of emergency, as if mere presence could prevent one). Like so many agreements in our family, this one has always been unspoken, so when Michele started filling my empty boxes I didn’t object. We both knew what was happening. It was my turn to be the anchor and her turn to sail.

Five years later, after Glenn had returned to New York, I left for Los Angeles. I moved there to join my fiancé, but found solace in the knowledge that my sister was nearby. She helped plan my wedding, pulling together a planner, a caterer, and a photographer in three days flat. She was my only bridesmaid, and during the reception she brought guests to tears of laughter and warmth with her toast.

Compassion and support came late to us two. Until we reached adulthood, we didn’t get along. Like most sisters separated by three years—too few for us to play parent and child, too many for us to be peers—we grew up on a shared diet of rivalry and rancor as we competed for our brother’s adoration and our parents’ limited time. It makes sense to me now that when our mother died, Michele and I found little comfort in each other. Instead, we intensified the division we knew so well. Familiarity offers false security when change permeates the house, and competition was our established code.

We’d been raised to protect and care for our younger brother, which we continued to do the best we could. But we exhibited no such empathy for each other. Tension between siblings is often a barely restrained, misdirected rage, and after our mother died, Michele became the target of mine. She, in turn, remained perpetually on the defensive. And as we argued and glared and ignored each other, a new, bizarre competition developed between us: who’d suffered more hardship when Mommy died, who could do the most for Glenn, and who could persuade Daddy to give her more.

All this was taking place in a confusing milieu of enforced normalcy and unexpressed grief, with our father periodically delivering short speeches about how the individual is more important than the unit, and how we should all learn to fend for ourselves. This sounded, at first, like a fine idea to me. At seventeen, I didn’t want the responsibility I felt for my younger siblings, and I chose to attend a college nine hundred miles from New York. Escape was my original plan. But underneath all the resentment I felt toward Michele must have been a protective instinct and a bond even rivalry and distance couldn’t kill. The night my father called me at college, threatening to desert the family, I tried to negotiate with him by phone, finally resorting to threat—“If you leave those kids, so help me God, I’ll bring them here to live with me”—and I understood at that moment how committed I was to those words. Despite all our previous troubles, Michele knew it, too. When we talk about that night now, she says she, too, was packing her bags, ready to come live with me.

I’m not sure I can identify a discrete turning point between us—perhaps maturity took care of most of the repair—but I know that night marked the beginning of a new understanding between Michele
and me. In our shared adversity we found a common ground. Losing a mother ultimately meant we each gained a sister. I’m not sure that otherwise we’d have become friends.

Lest this story sound too pat and tidy, I’ll admit we’re hardly adequate mother substitutes for each other. Michele is still the younger sister, and she’s often frustrated when I’m not a good role model; I’m still the older one, and I’m often surprised and annoyed when she acts more capable than I. And even when we work to overcome them, the tiny crimes of the past don’t necessarily evaporate by will.

That night in 1992 before Michele moved to L.A., I finally broke down and cried.

“Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “I need you to be strong for me.”

“I can’t always be the strong one,” I said. “Goddamit. You’re the only security I feel I have in this family. I don’t want you to leave.”

And then, very quickly, as if waiting for her cue, she shot back with, “Well, what about when you left for college when I was fifteen?” and I understood how deep these memories of betrayal lie, that no matter how far Michele and I travel, we always come back to this.

 

Older daughter of two, middle daughter of five, younger sister of older brothers—the combinations are varied, and motherless women represent them all. Eighty-five percent of the women interviewed for this book have siblings, who are always central characters in the family histories they tell.

In an earlier chapter, I said a daughter’s relationship with her mother is likely to be one of the longest-lasting of her life. But those of us who have siblings, and especially those of us with sisters, can expect these relationships to persist even longer than the ones we have with our parents. The quality and intensity of these sibling relationships fluctuate over our lifetimes, filled with as many storms and sunny days as the twenty-four-hour Weather Channel.

Sibling ties start developing the moment a second child is born. When a mother dies or leaves, their strength and quality quickly become apparent. Sibling relationships rarely do a 180 when a family undergoes a trauma such as mother loss. Instead, as in my family, previous patterns tend to exaggerate. Brothers and sisters who were
close and supportive beforehand typically draw together more tightly after the death. Likewise, siblings with loose connections usually split even further apart—especially when the mother was the force that held disparate family members together. While outer influences such as counseling or support from an extended family member can prevent extreme reactions, the intensification of previous patterns usually persists until the trauma phase subsides, and often continues into adulthood.

Margie, twenty-five, remembers sitting quietly with her younger brother on their grandmother’s couch the morning after their mother committed suicide. Her parents were divorced, and though Margie was barely seven, she transformed her panic and confusion into a quick and fierce desire to align with her five-year-old brother, whom she’d been raised to protect. “It seemed clear to me that all the adults around me were falling apart, and that nobody had the capacity or the desire to take care of me,” she says. “So I immediately started thinking about taking care of my brother. I started thinking that
he
was my family, and that we were in this together, like a team.” Today, the two siblings are “incredibly close,” Margie says, and she continues to offer nurturing and support to him in the town where they both live.

Margie’s immediate impulse to protect her brother may have been in part a defense against her own grief, providing her with a distraction from the confusion and anger she felt about her mother’s suicide. It also corroborates studies that suggest siblings can draw security from each other when a mother or mother-figure is gone. Children as young as three have shown evidence that they can calm their younger brother’s or sister’s fears. About half of all preschool-age children will offer comfort to a younger sibling who’s distressed.

Thirty-one-year-old Connie, who was seven when her mother died, remembers climbing into bed with her twelve-year-old sister the night they heard the news. “I was scared, and she hugged me while I cried,” Connie recalls. “Ever since then, she’s been the only one I feel safe enough to go to when I want to talk about our mom.”

In a 2002 study of two quartets of sisters, the psychologist Russell Hurd, Ph.D., found that sibling relationships can act as a protective factor in families that experience early parent loss. In both
families he studied, the girls had been between the ages of three and ten when their fathers died. Both their mothers had been preoccupied with grief, and the girls had no opportunity to discuss the loss and its impact on them. They banded together for emotional support, however, and as adults they were less likely than other daughters who had effectively lost both parents to suffer from depression later in life. “It appears that children working together and supporting each other, even being rivals with one another and learning how to resolve their conflicts together, can develop skills that carry them on to healthy mourning and non-depressed adulthoods,” Hurd explains.

Forty-six-year-old Claudia learned the value of close sibling relationships during an unpredictable childhood. “We moved eight times before I finished high school,” she explains. “The houses changed, the neighbors changed, the friends changed, my father was pretty absent because his affairs changed, and my mother did the best she could until she killed herself when I was fourteen.” The only constant in her childhood were her two sisters, one older and one younger, and her younger brother. After their mother’s death, the four children became de facto parents to each other, the older two raising the younger ones. They remain close as adults. Even though they now live in separate parts of the country, they come together for a family reunion with their children at least once a year.

Today, Claudia tries to encourage close ties between her son and daughter through discussion and modeling. “I want my kids to know in their hearts that they need to always be there for each other,” she explains. “My siblings are what saved my life. I recently flew to the Midwest to take care of my younger sister’s kids, and last April I left home for a while to help my older sister as they dealt with her husband’s stage three cancer. Each time, I told my kids how important it is to me to be there for my siblings.”

But far more common, I’ve found, are families in which siblings split apart after a mother’s death. Daughters in these families frequently describe their mothers as “the glue that held the family together,” or “the sun around which the separate planets revolved,” implying that the loss of this central figure caused the whole system to collapse. And although this may be true, these families were probably never tightly bound from the beginning.

Twenty-seven-year-old Leslie, who was sixteen when her mother died of cancer, remembers interacting very little with her two older brothers when she was a child, and she has limited contact with them today. “Maybe we were already more distant than we knew because my mom was there to rally us, but it became very evident after she died that we really weren’t a family,” she explains in a tone of muted but obvious regret. “We basically flung ourselves to separate ends of the earth.”

Thirty-one-year-old Victoria, who was eight and the youngest of three children when her mother died, is even more succinct: “My family is like the Bahamas,” she says. “Same name, but not connected.”

In her bestselling memoir
Blackbird,
Jennifer Lauck recreates a scene with her older brother, B.J., that took place the day of their mother’s death. When B.J. heard the news he ran out of the house. Jennifer found him in a neighborhood park a few hours later, but the siblings, who had a history of bickering and rivalry, found little comfort in each other that day. Their encounter in the park illustrates how a difficult sibling relationship can further isolate children after a mother dies: