Motherless Daughters (31 page)

Juliet, who grew up in an alcoholic family, lost her mother when she was seventeen. As an adolescent, she withdrew into self-reliance, insisting she could manage alone, and she grew into a relentlessly self-protective adult. “My thing was always, ‘I’m good, I’m okay, and I don’t need anything,’” she explains. “I had to depend on myself to survive. Now I find myself a person who’s unable to trust anyone else. I’ve never been in a relationship with a man. I’ve had a string of one-night stands. It’s like I say, ‘I’m so fine. I’m so taken care of. I don’t need you. Please keep your distance, because I’m in control.’ But it’s such a sad place to sit, because when I’m really upset and lonely, I want to be the kind of person who can ask for help if she needs it. And yet I feel totally incapable of intimacy. I’ve always needed to be so completely capable. I feel like I’m just starting to chip my way out of this block.”

Irene, who lost her mother five years ago, turns to Juliet and says, “I’m so glad you just said that, because I’ve had the exact same problem. My mother was so dear to me that I’m afraid of losing someone else. I don’t ever want to go through that again. I don’t want to depend on anyone anymore, because I feel that if I don’t depend and I don’t love, then I won’t have to go through the pain of loss again. I just keep my distance from people so I won’t get hurt.”

Intimacy doesn’t come easy for women who see it as an inevitable path to loss. Imagine the paralysis that results when you desperately want someone to love you, yet even more passionately
fear the consequences of loving back. Daughters are often raised to define themselves through their relationships, but the avoidant daughter defines herself through independence alone. Taking care of herself has been her method of survival, especially when her surviving parent is unreliable or emotionally withdrawn. “Self-reliance is perhaps the strongest of the barriers that individuals erect to keep themselves at a distance from others,” Maxine Harris explains. “As long as the individual remains supremely confident, she does not need the help or assistance of anyone.” Maintaining this self-reliance in adult relationships then acts as a surefire method for insulating oneself from future loss.

When a daughter fears loss so much that she believes it inevitable, she avoids forming relationships that might lead to the deep intimacy she craves. This daughter either dodges romance, chooses aloof partners, or extracts herself each time a relationship shows the first sign of long-term commitment. She refuses to make promises or respond to demands, afraid that such actions will lead to an intimacy that’ll be snatched from her again. She may become proficient at abruptly ending relationships before she has to make an emotional investment, an act that also allows her to exercise the control she didn’t have when her mother died. As a serial deserter, careful to leave lovers before they can leave her, she is not only sidestepping intimacy but also is looking for vindication for being left without warning once before. It’s as if she’s telling her mother, “See? I can leave you, too.”

The psychiatrist Benjamin Garber recalls a client—let’s call her Virginia—whose fear of loss and distrust of close relationships destroyed every chance she had to find acceptance and love. Fourteen when her mother died, Virginia started dating a few years later, but with an attitude so cavalier and cynical that she consistently sabotaged every relationship she began. “Every time she got involved with a boy, she’d say to me outright, ‘It’s not going to last,’” Dr. Garber remembers. “She always felt she had to be involved in a kind of cautious way. There was a constant uneasiness to her approach, a looking over her shoulder. She worried about it, she talked about it, and, of course, sometimes she did things to make the loss happen. The way she kept her distance automatically gave boys the impression
she couldn’t care less, and she went through a series of boyfriends. This was a very attractive, bright girl, but she couldn’t sustain a relationship.”

Virginia’s behavior was a smokescreen for her fear of abandonment, an anxiety so pervasive it extended to her relationship with Dr. Garber. As a psychiatrist, he hoped his client would begin to view their relationship as a secure base from which she could venture forth and return, eventually developing the self-confidence and self-esteem to form other relationships without expecting them to end. “We’d had a good rapport, and the treatment was quite successful in other ways,” Dr. Garber recalls. “It allowed her to go on to college and do well in school. But each time she came home from college, she would ask if I was willing to see her. I’d told her before she left for school that my door was always open to her, but she called on several different occasions and each time needed reassurance over the phone that I indeed wanted to see her. She just couldn’t believe that I’d want her to come back.” Dr. Garber believes that Virginia saw the act of leaving for school as an abandonment she had inflicted on him, and she felt guilty about hurting him as her mother’s death had hurt her. She also feared depending on him to any real degree, afraid that if she did, he, too, would leave her emotionally bereft. Shortly after the phone calls he mentioned, Virginia stopped calling Dr. Garber at all.

The avoidant daughter will feel safe enough to accept love from others only when she is certain she has created a secure base for herself. Ivy, forty-one, says she deliberately avoided marriage and motherhood until her midthirties for this reason. She was eight when her mother died of kidney failure, and despite the presence of a twenty-four-year-old sister who became her surrogate mother, Ivy felt she was a burden to her family. She became determined to achieve self-reliance as quickly as she could. Although she had several relationships with men during college and throughout her twenties, refusing to depend on others—or let others depend on her—became her compulsion during early adulthood. “I felt an
obligation
to take care of myself,” she explains. “As I grew older, being able to support myself emotionally and take care of myself financially became primary. Only when I felt I’d achieved that did I give myself permission to find a stable love, almost as if I had to make sure my life would have
stability or foundation before I took a chance on allowing myself to be dependent on someone else again.” She was willing to risk loss only after she felt certain that the departure of another loved one wouldn’t destroy her emotional equilibrium again.

Many motherless daughters can and do go on to have stable, committed relationships. Forty-six percent of the adults who lost parents during childhood in Bette Glickfield’s study showed evidence of secure attachments, and the majority of women interviewed for this book report that they’re currently involved in committed relationships. Of the 154 motherless women surveyed, 49 percent are married, compared to 32 percent who are single (including those with live-in lovers) and 16 percent who are currently separated or divorced.
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When loss—along with its accompanying fears—is such a determining event of a woman’s life, what helps her form warm, loving relationships as an adult? Bette Glickfield found the presence of a consistent, supportive, and emotionally attentive caregiver after a parent’s death to be the only reliable predictor of a daughter’s later attachment style. Those who had a surviving parent they felt they could depend on became adults who felt they could depend on others, and did. Other research indicates that good experiences at school, such as social relationships, athletic success, or scholastic achievement, lead to an increased feeling of self-efficacy, which bolsters a daughter’s self-esteem and makes her less likely to choose a marriage partner exclusively based on her overwhelming, subconscious need.

Choosing an emotionally stable partner also appears to increase a daughter’s feelings of security in her relationships. When she believes she can depend on her mate, she can release some of her anxiety about abandonment. Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D., a psychologist
and lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and the coauthor of
When Partners Become Parents,
found in her ten-year study of ninety-six couples from 1979 to 1989 that women from high-conflict families of origin (ones involving, for example, alcoholism, abuse, or loss) who married men from low-conflict families were much more likely to have secure partnerships and ease with child rearing than those who married men from troubled backgrounds.

“There’s something about a man being from a more nurturing, less conflicted family that brings him to a marriage and a new family with more tools at his disposal to be a nurturant partner, and parent as well,” Dr. Cowan explains. “Even when a woman comes from a family where she didn’t have very good models of how to be nurturing, her partner’s ability to nurture can make a difference to her. It seems to provide a relationship in which she can feel cared for without the conflict from her childhood that’s so scary, or rejecting it would keep her from getting connected to him. In other words, something about the nature of the relationship with her husband makes up for or buffers some of what we expect would be the negative effects of having grown up in a difficult family. And when we look at her with her children when they’re small, she appears as warm and responsive to the kids as women who come from more secure backgrounds.” These women may have achieved what psychologists call an “earned-secure” attachment status, meaning that with outside influence, and over time, their pattern changed from an insecure state to one more stable and trusting.

Twenty-five-year-old Margie says that after five years in a relationship with an emotionally stable partner she’s finally learning how to rebuild the trust and security she lost when her mother committed suicide eighteen years ago and she went to live with an emotionally detached father and stepmother for the next eleven years.

Like Margie, women who enter secure, long-term relationships with partners they feel they can trust often find that these unions act as stabilizing influences for their most intense fears of loss. Gary Jacobson, M.D., and Robert G. Ryder, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health, found that the formal act of marriage also allayed some of these concerns. As they prepared to study 120 married couples—90 with a history of parental death before marriage and 30 with no prior parent loss—they expected subjects who’d lost parents during childhood or adolescence to have the most problems during their first few years of marriage. Instead, they found that more than a third of the couples they rated “exceptionally close” had experienced parental death prior to marriage, twice the number they’d anticipated. These couples exhibited a strong degree of intimacy, were able to communicate openly, felt grateful for the spouse, and enjoyed a feeling of family reconstitution.

Forty-three-year-old Mary Jo, who was eight when her mother died, says she achieved this security in her second marriage, as she applied the lessons she’d learned from the breakup of her first. When her first husband left her, the abandonment she felt was so severe that she recognized a need for professional help. With the aid of an empathetic therapist, she began to mourn her mother’s death. As she worked through those feelings of loss, Mary Jo saw how she had
been approaching her romantic relationships looking for the mother love she felt lacking in her life. And she started to learn how to choose an emotionally available partner whom she hoped could meet some—but not all—of her needs. Today, she describes her second marriage as much healthier and more stable than her previous one. “My husband is really a rock of reliability and strength and love,” she says. “Fortunately, he’s very unlike me in terms of catastrophic thinking. He’ll tell me, ‘That fear has no basis in reality, Mary Jo,’ but he’s also wonderful about letting me cry when I need to cry. There are some times when I think about all the deaths in my life and need to cry for what looks like no reason, and he holds me or just sits with me. I think the combination of him, and my own resilience, and having good friends and a good therapist has been instrumental in getting me from a very dangerous place to here.” Mary Jo says that as she learned how to diffuse her dependency needs among several different people, each of her relationships, including her marriage, began to feel more secure.

Motherless daughters who choose women as lovers look for the same emotional security as those who choose men, and also find solace in those who offer stability and consistent care. Their desire for mother love, however, often involves a direct search for the same-sex connection they lost. Karen, twenty-nine, who came out at age fifteen, says she specifically looks for girlfriends who can offer the nurturing she kept trying to elicit from an alcoholic mother who died nine years ago. “After my mother died, I kept trying to find the validation she never gave me through my lovers,” she explains. “Being lovers with women has certainly made that one step more complex. I mean, I don’t look for Mommy and Daddy; I look for Mommy and Mommy. I tend to be attracted to older women, and that gives me no end of thought. I ask myself, ‘What exactly is going on here?’ and ‘Is there something suspect?’ My former lover was ten years older than me, and in a sense she adopted me. When my mother was sick, we went to see her together, and it was clear that my lover—and not my mother—was the one mothering me.” Today, Karen is living with her
lover of the past three years. During our interview, she waved her arm to indicate the comfortable furnishings of their apartment and explained that all the items that surrounded us belong to her partner, who literally and figuratively provides her with the sense of home she never had as a child.