Motherless Daughters (27 page)

Yet even siblings who fight bitterly occasionally can come together in a moment of crisis to offer each other support. The actress Roma Downey, who was ten when her mother died of heart failure in her native Ireland, remembers the ride she and her older brother took home from the hospital that day.

Sibling fragmentation often finds its origin in the dynamics of a mother’s family of birth, which may serve as her subconscious guide for the family she creates. A mother who was chronically jealous of her older sister, for example, may have inadvertently inspired a similar resentment between her two daughters by favoring the younger one. Or she may identify with the child who has characteristics—height, weight, personality, birth order—similar to her own. Because
a manipulative mother is often the source of frustration between siblings, her death may provide them with their first opportunity to assess each other as equals and repair their childhood breaks. Such a rosy resolution is difficult to achieve after decades of accumulated grievances, however, and in some families the chance may arrive too late. The mother may have departed, but her influence continues to live on in her children’s angry phone calls and disputes.

Siblings will often direct their anger or confusion toward each other after a mother’s death, especially when older children in a family feel overwhelmed by new responsibilities and younger ones feel overlooked or lost. Thirty-one-year-old Joy displaced her anger onto her older sister as their mother slowly died of cancer. “I was going to the hospital every day,” she says, “It was really difficult dealing with my father, and driving back and forth to the hospital every day for three weeks. My sister visited the hospital only twice during that whole time, and once she came in with a friend who barely knew my mother. I was furious. That’s how I coped with the pain of losing my mother—by becoming angry with my sister.”

Joy had always been the responsible daughter, the one who stayed at home and out of trouble while her sister battled a drug problem and had two children outside of marriage. Nevertheless, Joy had always believed that her mother loved her sister more. During her mother’s hospital stay, she was determined to become the perfect daughter and earn the praise she’d always hoped for. After her mother died, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she—and not her sister—had eased her mother’s final days.

Siblings often flaunt their good deeds, engaging each other in frustrating, circular disputes comparing one sister’s sacrifice to another’s.
I lost more than you did! I’m hurting more than you are! I was the better daughter at the end!

Therese Rando calls this kind of infighting “competition among mourners.” As rivalrous as these siblings may seem, they’re really more interested in earning attention and recognition for their pain than they are in staging a victory. “It’s a way a person tries to make herself feel special at a time when she’s feeling so deprived,” Dr. Rando explains. “She’s trying to give herself something she can hang on to when she feels overcome by what she’s lost. A different kind of
competition develops when adult siblings want to be less involved in the family. That’s when you hear, ‘I don’t want to take care of Dad.
You
take care of Dad,’ or ‘I took Dad last Christmas.
You
take him this Christmas.’”

Victoria says her older sister Meg, who returned home at twenty-six to care for the family after their mother died, still insists on viewing herself as the family martyr more than twenty years after the loss. Meg’s preoccupation with her sacrifice damaged the sisters’ relationship during Victoria’s childhood and makes it difficult for them to be friends today. Victoria makes no attempt to hide her bitterness when she speaks about Meg’s attitude after their mother died.

“I ruined her entire life,” Victoria says. “She told me that all the time. ‘I had to stay home and take care of you, you know. You ruined my life.’” Angry and resentful about her new responsibility after their mother’s death, Meg had unleashed her frustration on eight-year-old Victoria, who grew up with enormous guilt for being such a burden on the older sister she’d previously adored. She still feels the need to compensate for the inconvenience she caused, and she spends long hours on the telephone listening to Meg’s problems. “When my shrink said, ‘You know, you don’t have to listen to your sister’s complaints if you don’t want to,’ I told her, ‘You don’t understand. I have to take care of my sister, because I ruined her life,’” Victoria recalls. “And my shrink said, ‘Just stop it.’” Today, Victoria is trying to separate herself from Meg, who now expects her younger sister to care for her.

Victoria and Meg: sisters who might have avoided the powerful resentment they feel toward each other in the present if one had not been expected to raise the other in the past. Their story raises a much larger question: What happens when one sibling becomes an ersatz mother to another?

After a death in the family, the heaviest expectations usually fall on the oldest or most parentified child. Sons are usually expected to head the family and take over financial and structural matters. Daughters typically are expected to care for the younger siblings, surviving parent, and aging grandparents.

Although taking on the role of mother usually forces a daughter to assume an identity that’s inconsistent with her developmental stage, several studies suggest that caring for younger siblings can help a daughter gain self-confidence, develop a resilience toward later stress, and work through feelings of loss. When the psychologist Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues interviewed thirty young mothers who’d experienced the loss of an attachment figure during childhood, they found that those who had been most successful in resolving the loss shared two characteristics: They enjoyed a strong sense of family solidarity, with mutual comforting, expression of feelings, and sharing of grief; and they had the opportunity to take responsibility for other family members during the mourning period.

Twenty-seven-year-old Robin says that caring for her younger sister and brother helped her feel responsible and competent, but also gave her responsibilities too excessive for a sixteen-year-old to manage with ease. When her mother died, Robin became a full-time mother substitute for her thirteen-year-old sister and eight-year-old brother for the next two years, until their father remarried.

Caring for her younger siblings helped Robin identify with her mother, and indirectly mother herself after the loss. Today, she is well aware of how to care for herself, and often gives herself the same advice she still freely offers to her siblings when they ask her for help.

Thirty-two-year-old Kathleen also coped with her loss by voluntarily “becoming” her mother. The second of four children, Kathleen was the only daughter in her family. Raised to be a nurturer for her three brothers, she took this role to heart when, at eighteen, she gained custody of her thirteen-year-old brother and then raised him by herself.

Tall, gentle, and thoughtful, Kathleen looks and acts mature beyond her years. She was sixteen when her mother died of cancer. Her father died of alcoholism the following year. When her youngest brother, Paul, lonely and miserable in a foster home, called her at college one night, she became determined to bring him to her university town. As soon as she reached legal age, Kathleen went to family court and became his guardian. “A lot of people said, ‘You’re so young. How can you take on a teenage brother?’ but I realized helping him was doing something for me,” she recalls. “I didn’t have a place to go home to except a dorm room. I was just kind of out there. So by having Paul come live with me, I created a home for myself, too.” Kathleen and Paul found a sympathetic dean at her school who arranged for them to live in housing for married students, and they remained together until he began college four years later and joined their oldest brother on the West Coast. But when Kathleen divorced two years ago, both brothers moved back to the small New England town where she owns a house. “I don’t know if it’s me they’re drawn to, or if it’s what I represent,” she says. “I think, somehow, I’m home to them.” She and Paul are roommates again, their oldest brother lives down the road, and the third brother occasionally visits from California.

Approximately 140,000 children in the United States are currently being raised by siblings, a number that’s been rising steadily over the past twenty years as foster-care homes have become scarcer. The phenomenon has also been brought to public attention by the 1990s Fox television drama “Party of Five,” about five siblings who
lose both parents in an auto accident, and Dave Eggers’s bestselling book
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,
in which he writes of raising his younger brother after both their parents die.

When an older sibling becomes full- or part-time caretaker for a younger one, her natural family position is altered. She’s more than a sister but not quite a mother. Motherless mothers who cared for younger siblings say they frequently felt inadequate in one or both roles. Who am I? they wondered. Mother? Sister? Neither? Both? “After I left for college, my sister really felt that she had to become my brother’s mother,” Robin says. “But she never felt that she succeeded. And how could she? She admitted this to him not long ago, and I think he gave her a great gift when he said, ‘Melinda, you’re my
sister.
I never expected you to be my mother.’”

Although sisters can fill some of the gap after a mother dies or leaves, I’ve found little evidence that a sister can become an adequate surrogate mother. As Russell Hurd has pointed out, a sibling can’t reproduce the richness or complexity of adult caregiving and support. Of all the women who said they found mother substitutes after their mothers died, only 13 percent cited a sister—roughly the same percentage who named “teacher” or “friend.” Most often, a sister will assume physical care for another sibling. Emotionally, however, she’s rarely mature enough to meet the demands of a dependent child when she’s still one herself. Leading by example can be tricky when you are only a few years ahead of your charge.

“There are real problems when a sister has to become her siblings’ mother,” Evelyn Bassoff says. “She can’t do it very well. But she tries, and it sets her up for failure, which leads to guilt. Oftentimes, in cases where she can’t control the children, she resorts to corporal punishment, which also sets her up for guilt. It’s not like Wendy and the Lost Boys.”

Siblings are generational peers, sharing the same lateral plane in the family hierarchy. They grow up prepared to care for each other reciprocally, not in the type of one-sided and intensely emotionally invested relationship that a parent-child dyad represents. Because a mother-child relationship is one of unequal power, when a sister takes on the mother’s role and assumes more power than sibling relationships normally allow, the whole system gets thrown out of sync.

Sisters and brothers are no longer traveling on staggered but parallel paths; one has veered off in another direction entirely. Years later, this sister may find it impossible to rejoin the siblings she left behind.

Thirty-five-year-old Denise, who became a minimother to her two younger sisters after her mother died when she was twelve, explains that her feelings toward them took on a substantially maternal hue. “To this day, I don’t have a sisterly relationship with my sisters,” she says. “I have a motherly relationship with them. I would lay down on railroad tracks for them. I feel great love for them, but they would never tell me their innermost secrets. And I’d never tell them mine.” When Denise’s mother died and she took over the maternal role, her sisters began to view her as their protector and superior, instead of as their ally. In adulthood, when a six- or seven-year age difference between siblings normally shrinks in significance, these three sisters are still relating to each other according to the role reassignments that developed twenty-three years ago.

At the age of twelve, Denise saw stepping into the mother’s role as a necessity, not as a choice. Someone needed to care for her sisters, and she felt she was the most qualified candidate. Her involvement in their upbringing may have been age inappropriate for her, but the knowledge that they had one person they could depend on at home—inadequate as she may have been at times—helped them develop a sense of security that Denise says they have and she lacks today.