Motherless Daughters (29 page)

Three daughters speaking about three different mothers? Not quite. Those are the Lawrence sisters—Caitlin, Brenda, and Kelly—describing the same mother who died of cancer seventeen years ago.

As this example illustrates, sibling perceptions of mothers—and of mother loss—usually stop at a point short of mutual agreement. The death of a mother won’t affect her children uniformly for several reasons, including their different developmental stages; birth orders; previous encounters with illness, death, or loss; individual circumstances surrounding this death; and personal relationships with both parents. Even when children are raised side by side, as often happens with those close in age, their experiences of mother loss may appear similar in some respects yet differ wildly in others, at times sounding like a tabloid story of twins raised by different mothers.

Sometimes, this isn’t far from the truth. Siblings who are in late adolescence or early adulthood when a mother dies grew up mostly under her influence, and usually with two parents, while their younger brothers or sisters may spend most of their formative years with a single father or in a stepfamily. Eva, forty-five, says that until her most recent visit with her family, she always thought her thirty-eight-year-old
brother’s personality had been shaped by forces outside the family. “I’ve always seen Andrew as an organized, conservative kid,” she explains. “I know I have that potential, and I’ve seen it in my middle brother, too, though we’re much more relaxed. Andrew is the youngest, but he’s the most successful of us three. He works hard and plays hard. He’s very pragmatic. Last time I saw him with our stepmother, I realized it wasn’t the Vietnam War that made Andrew conservative. It was the difference in our mothers. My stepmother is extraordinarily pragmatic. She’s more obviously a result of the Depression, and less relaxed than my mother was.” This realization helped Eva pinpoint the source of a major difference between Andrew and herself, and relieved the pressure she felt each time she compared herself to him and felt guilty for choosing a more alternative lifestyle.

Even when siblings grow up with the same parents, their experiences of mother loss can vary dramatically. Caitlin, Brenda, and Kelly, for example, were all living at home when their mother was first diagnosed with cancer. But within two years, Caitlin had begun college, Brenda was in a boarding school eight hundred miles from home, and Kelly was the only child living with her parents. That was the year their mother began a rigorous radiation treatment program, and thirteen-year-old Kelly was the only daughter home to witness its effects. She vividly recalls making trips to the supermarket with her mother, who was so sick from the treatments that she would vomit first in the bread aisle, and again in the parking lot outside. Because Kelly was the only sister who experienced the fear and helplessness of those moments, it’s no surprise that she’s the daughter who speaks of breast cancer and illness with the most fear today.

Caitlin, Brenda, and Kelly say they can depend on each other’s memories to fill the blank spots in their own. But in other families, especially when siblings are distant to begin with, divergent memories and differing perceptions may only widen the rifts. Because a daughter often views early loss as the central, organizing event of her life and interprets the rest of her experiences in relation to it, her memories of her mother and her loss become fundamental building blocks of her identity. She’ll perceive a sibling who challenges her perception of the past as a threat to herself. A sibling with such a
strong emotional interest in preserving her memories will defend her version of past events long after it no longer coincides with verifiable fact.

“My brother, sister, and I have very different opinions about the two years when our parents died,” Therese Rando says. “Certainly, people are very divergent in the way they perceive things, and there’s no greater divergence than when the three of us look back on that period of time. My sister remembers things that I’d stake my life she’s totally wrong on. She’ll say, ‘Don’t you remember when Uncle Bob and Aunt Rhea came up every weekend for so long?’ My brother and I both know, no way did they come up every weekend. They came up like once—twice at the most. I have external validation for that. But my sister is absolutely sure they came up every weekend. You’d think the three of us weren’t in the same place, but we were.”

When sibling recollections diverge this dramatically, the salient issue is not whose memory is right and whose is wrong, but who remembers what, and why. Dr. Rando believes that her sister may need to believe her aunt and uncle visited because it offers her a memory of protection at a time when the three early orphans were feeling vulnerable and abandoned. To relinquish the memory would mean having to acknowledge the pain of being left parentless and alone so young.

Caroline, fifty-three, says her long-time resistance to her sister’s contrary memories of their childhood stemmed both from her arrogance as an older sibling and from her own difficulties with mourning. Caroline, who was eleven and the second of four children when her mother died, describes herself as “the sister with the airtight memory, the one who can still tell you what food each neighbor brought to the funeral.” So when she and her younger sister Linda started collaborating on a book about their childhood, Caroline insisted that her sister’s memories weren’t correct each time they didn’t coincide with hers. But Caroline had begun the book as part of her mourning process, and as her healing progressed, she found herself more willing to accept and integrate her sister’s memories with her own.

As Caroline became more willing to see her sister as a separate person, she realized she could mourn with Linda without arguing or disagreeing. Two months before I met with Caroline, the two sisters had taken a day trip into the mountains to grieve together for their mother and their first stepmother, who died three years ago.

Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow, As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe.

—Walt Whitman, “Vocalism”

 

 

 

MY FRIEND HEIDI SENT ME those lines on a postcard more than ten years ago. I still remember how each word was measured out in her neat calligraphy. Heidi and I met in the eighth grade, which gave us ample time to watch adult patterns develop and repeat. She counseled me through the dissolution of my first adult romance, and my second, and my third. By then, she knew my weaknesses. So on the back of the postcard, mailed from Boston the day after we’d discussed my most recent love affair, she gently warned me about following a false prophet who lured me with words I wanted to hear, and she signed the card, “Be careful with your heart, sweet you.”

This was not mere cautionary verse. Heidi had seen me, many times, give my heart away blindly, and too soon.

I won’t recount and relive every romance I had before the one that ultimately turned into a marriage. The details are messy, and they start to repeat themselves before long. I had several good relationships and a few long-term ones that started slowly, plateaued for a while, and ultimately ended when two people grew apart or found they couldn’t withstand change. But in between I had plenty of romances that ended before they really began. This is how I’ve always seen it: Once is an event, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a behavior. Everyone has her patterns. This was mine.

We would meet at a party or at a softball game or on a train. He would take my phone number, and call the next day. Then he started bringing presents, cooking dinners, asking to see me every night. I reveled in the attention, thinking,
I am adored. I am loved.
He wanted to know about every detail of my day. He told all his friends about me. “You’re are everything I’ve ever dreamed of,” he said. “I will make your life complete.” He would start planning for the future. That was week one.

Week two, I would start feeling the first shiver of unease. Should relationships begin so fast? I would muse to a close girlfriend, and ignore her wise response. If he felt this way, I would tell myself, it must be real; it must be true. We would spend our first night together, and he’d call in sick to work the next day. We would make crazy promises to each other on street corners, make love at midnight and again at dawn. I would know, even as I lay beneath him, that I was letting sex masquerade as love, but inside the parentheses of the moment I could make them one and the same. In the half-light of early morning with adorations whispered in my ear, I could convince myself that when two bodies merge together in an act designed to produce a third, if only his could sink far enough into mine, we could create a perfect whole: me.

The momentum would continue for a month, maybe a little more. And then the abrupt revelation—there was another woman, or some such obstacle or preoccupation, but couldn’t we still be friends? I was stunned, every time. Loss, again. Another week of crying, another month of swearing off men, and another series of hours spent sitting on a therapist’s couch, reviewing the warning signs that had been there all along.

Oh, I knew about the dangers of such high-speed romance. I’d heard the advice, read some of the books, and seen a half-dozen of the talk shows on TV. I’d learned that a man who steamrolls a woman so quickly has some other agenda in mind, and that genuine intimacy takes time, and so on. But when the need for affection is so great, desire always eclipses fact. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés points out, the unmothered woman will almost consistently override her intuition when she thinks she can find love. When someone offered me instant intimacy, my impulse was always to grab it, no questions
asked, pushing aside all I’d read or learned, afraid that such attention might not arrive again.

It wasn’t exactly an optimal way to conduct relationships. For one thing, it was exhausting, and for another, I’d wind up naming children with someone before I’d seen him interact with anyone under four feet tall. I’m not ruling out the possibility of love at first sight; I’m just acknowledging that the operative emotion here was more a form of narcissistic need. When a motherless woman attaches to a romantic partner so quickly and completely, her attraction often derives not from mutual affection but from the one-sided hope of what he can give to her.

To some extent, the motherless woman is anywoman; looking for wholeness through relationships is a search we all—motherless or not—pursue. When I ask Andrea Campbell whether such a quest isn’t hopelessly misguided, she laughs and says, “To call this kind of search misguided is to say the whole human race is misguided. Even if our parents did live, they didn’t fulfill us in the ways we needed to be fulfilled. The most wonderful, perfect mother can’t do it. And so we’re all wounded in a way, all looking for someone out there to heal us.” But the motherless daughter, she explains, feels a deprivation deeper than that of most other daughters.

In an ideal situation, a daughter’s emotional foundation begins with her family and then, as she matures, expands to include her partner, friends, and self. The motherless daughter—especially one without an available and supportive surviving parent—begins from a point one step back. She first has to establish or reestablish a secure emotional base. As John Bowlby observed when he analyzed data from a 1987 British study of women who lost mothers before their eleventh birthday, a girl without a secure emotional base “may become desperate to find a boyfriend who will care for her and that, combined with her negative self-image, makes her all too likely to settle for some totally unsuitable young man. . . . Having married him, the effects of her previous adverse experiences are apt to lead her either to make unduly heavy demands on him and/or to treat him badly.”