Motherless Daughters (30 page)

Although Bowlby’s analysis describes the plight of some motherless daughters, theirs isn’t the only possible outcome. Attachment
theorists generally divide individuals into three groups: those who form secure attachments with others as adults; those who are anxious or ambivalent about their social and romantic relationships; and those who avoid becoming close to others. Secure adults typically divide their emotional needs between several sources, including themselves; they can comfortably give and receive care. Anxious-ambivalent adults usually look to a partner to meet most of their needs; they give care in a self-sacrificing, compulsive manner and often attempt to find security and love through sexual contact. Avoidant adults rely almost exclusively on themselves; they’re unable or unwilling to give or receive care and are most likely to maintain emotional distance from others or become promiscuous.

Attachment patterns are believed to start forming in infancy, with their roots in a mother’s level of responsiveness to her infant’s signals. Mothers who warmly and quickly attend to an infant’s cries of distress, for example, are more likely to raise securely attached children than mothers who go through the motions mechanically, or without an emotional connection, and mothers who respond late, incompletely, or not at all. Most psychologists now agree that the kind of relationship an infant develops with his mother serves as a blueprint for the quality of relationships he’ll later have as an adult.

Even when an infant is raised by a loving mother and develops a secure bond with her, however, specific life events can disrupt his sense of security. These include a chronic, severe illness in the child or one of the parents; experience in foster care; mental illness in a parent; the dissolution of the family after parental death, separation, or divorce; and physical or sexual abuse of the child. A 1999 study of eighty-six children from birth to eighteen years found that those who’d experienced one or more adverse events during childhood, even if they’d received sensitive care as infants, were far more likely than other young adults to be insecure in their attachments and preoccupied with past relationships. The eighteen-year-olds who were securely attached to others had experienced few or no adverse events during childhood—a finding that points to the deleterious effect a parent’s mental illness, a parent’s death, and stress in the family subsequent can have on a child.

Studies that compare motherless daughters with other adults are even more illuminating. In a population of nonbereaved persons,
roughly 55 percent of individuals will show evidence of secure adult attachment, 25 percent will be avoidant, and about 20 percent are anxious-ambivalent. When the psychologist Bette Glickfield conducted a study with eighty-three adults who had lost parents during childhood and adolescence, however, she found that 46 percent of her subjects placed into the secure category, with 17 percent judged as avoidant and 37 percent anxious-ambivalent. The significantly higher percentage of anxious-ambivalent adults in her study, she says, suggests that early parent loss makes a child more vulnerable to feelings of abandonment and worthlessness, which makes her fear and desire relationships as an adult.

A 2001 study at Johnson State College in Vermont had similar findings: When thirty married motherless women were compared to a control group, the motherless women reported significantly more anxiety and avoidance in their relationships with husbands than the other women did, even though two-thirds of them described their relationships with their deceased mothers in positive terms. Taken together, these findings suggest that motherless women may be afraid of losing their spouses, and may be preparing themselves for what they perceive to be another inevitable loss by emotionally distancing themselves from their partners. At the same time, they feel highly anxious about the possibility that such a loss could occur.

Carol, thirty-six, describes her past six years as a series of rapid-fire romances that all began with the promise of immediate affection but never lasted more than two or three months each. Virtually all of the men she dated became unwitting participants in her attempt to find the emotional security she had lost at the age of seventeen, when her mother died.

Carol says she was never particularly close with her mother, whose Scandinavian stoicism discouraged any emotional displays, but she did draw security from her close-knit family. After her mother died, however, this system began to disintegrate. Within two years, both of Carol’s surviving grandparents also died, reducing an extended family of six that had once spent all holidays and vacations
together to only three: her father, herself, and an older sister who lived in another state. Since then, Carol has approached all of her romantic relationships, including a seven-year marriage in her twenties, with expectations too large for one person to fill.

Carol’s deep need for nurturing extends back beyond her mother’s actual death to the years spent with a mother who showed little affection or emotion. Her repeated attempts to pull affection from men too distant to satisfy her desire closely resemble a daughter’s efforts to extract attention from an unavailable mother. Motherless daughters who grew up with emotionally distant fathers after their mothers died are likely to respond the same way. A 1990 study of 118 undergraduates ages seventeen to twenty-four at the University of Southern California found that those who recalled their parents as cold or inconsistent caregivers were more likely to
worry about being abandoned or unloved, exhibit an obsessive and overly dependent love style, and suffer from low self-worth and social confidence than those who perceived their mothers and fathers as warm and responsive during their childhoods. During adulthood, the daughters of distant parents often formed relationships characterized by jealousy, fear of abandonment, and an obsessive preoccupation with finding and maintaining intimate bonds. As Maxine Harris also found in her interviews, many men and women who received little or no affection or emotional warmth after the death of a parent embarked on an almost desperate search for an all-powerful love they believed would save them.

The continual repetition of loss that Carol has tolerated in her adult relationships also indicates that her mother’s death has influenced her attachment patterns. Rather than retreating into self-protection like an avoidant daughter, she has remained willing to travel the same route over and over again, hoping each time that she can rewrite the past with a happy ending.
This time he will give me everything I need. This time he won’t leave.
In spite of her hypersensitivity to abandonment, an anxious-ambivalent lover often refuses to acknowledge a departure when it begins. As the psychologist Martha Wolfenstein pointed out in the 1969 article “Loss, Rage, and Repetition,” a motherless daughter frequently denies or ignores the warning signs of a troubled relationship, insisting that this time she can be special and worthwhile enough to prevent a loved one from leaving. Clinging to a dead relationship or pleading for a last-minute change of heart is less an adult’s attempt at reconciliation than a child’s cry for the parent to remain. But because the daughter’s behaviors do not change, neither does their outcome. What usually happens is just what she set out to prevent—she reactivates a cycle of loss.

“If the initial loss is never grieved, if there isn’t a working through and a reconciliation, then you’re going to have that repetition compulsion,” Evelyn Bassoff explains. “Going through an active grief process, mourning the loss of the mother, and finding peace with it makes the repetition of that kind of relationship less compelling.” In other words, when a daughter lets go of her lost mother, she also relinquishes the need to prevent other loved ones from separating from her.

When a woman looks to a partner to mother her, she sees the relationship through the eyes of a child. She instantaneously regresses, expecting to get what she wants, when she wants it, and she’ll stamp her feet and cry or silently sulk when she doesn’t win. And what she usually wants is constant affection and praise.

An inordinate “attachment hunger” typically develops in a daughter who feels she was ignored or overlooked during childhood. A daughter who can’t evoke an emotional response in a parent or parent figure begins to feel unreal and to doubt her own existence. As an adult, she then needs constant expressions of affection from a partner to assure her that she’s worthwhile and significant to others. But when her self-esteem and self-worth are completely dependent on this attention, she is unable to tolerate even the smallest deviation or complication in a romance. “She gets angrier quicker,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “More frustrated. Insulted. And so it’s harder for her as an adult to remain resilient and to maintain the tie. A narcissistic injury occurs with parent loss that makes her feel less important or not good enough. She carries that vulnerability right into adult relationships, and it makes for a difficult habit to break.” She perceives every sideways glance as an indication of her deficiency; only round-the-clock affection makes her feel totally secure. “Exactly,” says a twenty-three-year-old woman whose mother committed suicide when she was five. “And then the minute he stops paying total attention to me because he has to be normal—like, God forbid, go to work—I think, ‘God, he hates me. He’s not ever coming back.’” This daughter sees romance as a two-petaled daisy: Either he loves me or he loves me not.

Anxious lovers, who often bond with partners quickly and approach adult relationships with a child’s expectations, have enormous difficulty withdrawing emotionally when a romance comes to an end. Letting go of a lover is an especially heartbreaking process for the woman who experiences the event as the loss of her mother again and perceives even temporary separations as deep, personal rejections. Blinded by an early experience that keeps her emotionally tied to her childhood, she believes—as a child believes—that she has the power to control others, and therefore interprets all failures and losses as her fault.

Once a relationship has begun, survivors of early loss tend to remain overwhelmingly faithful to it. Maxine Harris’s interviewees had very low rates of divorce, reflecting the notion that relationships are too precious to relinquish willingly. But this kind of loyalty can go either way, explain Mary Ann and James Emswiler, founders and directors of the New England Center for Loss & Transition and the authors of
Guiding Your Child Through Grief. “
To the extent that it encourages someone to work hard on the knots in a relationship, it helps,” they write. “To the extent that it persuades someone to stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship, it hurts.”

Even though Amanda, thirty-three, has been in a stable marriage for ten years, she still lives with the intermittent fear that she’s “not good enough” for someone to stay with in the long term. She was three when her mother abandoned her, and six when her father married a chronically depressed woman who had little interest in another woman’s child. During high school, Amanda looked for comfort and affection through sex, moving from one boy to the next until she fell in love for the first time at seventeen. “When that boy broke up with me, you would have thought my world had ended,” she explains. “Nobody could believe how hard or how long I cried. I just couldn’t get a grip. I had a really strong feeling that ‘this person doesn’t like me,’ and that would get me somewhere deep inside. I suffered for a long time from a lack of self-esteem, and I still get bouts of it every once in a while. My husband is an entertainer, so sometimes he’ll be working with a very attractive, have-it-together woman, and I get the big, green monster worse than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

Amanda has begun to explore her feelings about mother loss in an attempt to overcome the childhood fears she has carried into adulthood. She is acknowledging that her anxieties have little to do with her husband’s behaviors, which indicate only his devotion to her. For Amanda, these are important steps toward righting the wrongs of her childhood. As she is learning, a daughter who keeps her mourning at a distance stunts her emotional growth. As an adult, she responds to situations she perceives as threats to the self the same way she responded to her mother’s departure when she was a child. If a young daughter, for example, withdrew into silence because she had no outlet for her rage and grief, she may sit home alone seething
silently twenty years later when her husband spends a Saturday night out with his male friends. “Nothing,” she says, when he asks her what’s wrong, because “nothing” was all she allowed herself to feel the last time someone she loved walked out the door.

Twenty-five-year-old Juliet and twenty-four-year-old Irene were strangers when they first met. But as they began to share their stories of loss with a group of motherless women, they discovered that they understood each other well. After the deaths of their mothers, Juliet and Irene developed coping skills that insulated them from further loss, but have also isolated them from romantic love.