Motherless Daughters (33 page)

And, more often, it happens like this: It’s our turn to host a dinner party, and everything goes wrong. The house is a mess, despite my best efforts to tidy it. Because I’ve haven’t timed the food properly, I’m still rushing everything into the oven when the first guests arrive. Also, there’s not much I can do to hide the embarrassing fact that I don’t know how to cook. I’ve put off the party for months already, knowing this would happen, but we couldn’t continue to accept invitations for much longer without reciprocating. So here we are, flinging open our doors for another set of acquaintances and colleagues to see me flounder through the night. At some point in the evening, one of the preteen guests wanders into the kitchen, where I’m sneaking a half a glass of wine and an extra slice of cake. She likes my skirt, she tells me, or maybe it’s my earrings—the object doesn’t really matter. She just wants to talk. So we do. I suspect that in my awkwardness she senses a kindred spirit, and she’s looking to me for clues. About what might come later for her, perhaps. I see a question in her eyes, even a little admiration.
Me
? I think.
You’re looking for answers from me
? I stare at the eleven-year-old staring at me, and I feel a brief surge of empathy and responsibility, but I also feel slightly absurd, like an imposter who didn’t mean to fool the town. Because really, even after all these years, I’m still not sure I know what it means to be a woman, at all.

 

I don’t mean to reduce my mother to a set of domestic cliches, to recall her only as a clothes hanger or a hostess or a detailed recipe. There was much more to her than this: time and maturity and certainly motherhood have made her appear more complex each year. But like most other women, I began learning at an early age that physical attractiveness and social niceties are the expected accoutrements of womanhood in a culture where a female’s success is so often still gauged by her involvement with partner, children, and home. My mother devoted herself to these pursuits, proudly writing “homemaker” in the space designated for “occupation” on every
McCall
’s survey she mailed in. This was one way she chose to
define herself, and how I defined her, too, for most of my first seventeen years.

I was too young then, or maybe just too uninterested, to pay much attention to how she filled her day. My quest was to separate from her, not to connect. Now when I’m reminded that I lack the bits of knowledge other women seem to have absorbed in their mothers’ homes, I feel somehow incomplete. Deficient. Wrong.

My female friends say this is nonsense. “You just have your own style,” they insist. (Thank God “Hippie Chic” is fashionable, now, I say.) But I’m not really talking about the facade here. I’m talking about interior design. I once was willing to attribute the difference I’ve always felt to a prolonged adolescence, or to fifteen years of patchwork geography, or even to a subtle renegade streak. Theories, I had them all; answers, none—until I sat down in a room full of motherless women and found others who felt the same way.

Jane, thirty-eight, inspired an hour-long outpouring of agreement and relief among five motherless women in my living room one evening when she described how being motherless since the age of thirteen has made the word
woman
a loaded term for her. “There are so many little nuances and subtleties in life that have just passed me by,” she explained. “Because a man raised me through adolescence, and because he was a farmer for most of my life, I feel like I should wear overalls and be in cow shit up to my knees. If a company made bras that looked like what a man would wear, that’s what I’d want to buy. Sometimes I just don’t feel feminine, or like a woman. That’s one of my biggest struggles. AmIawoman? And if so, what is a woman?”

The French author Simone de Beauvoir asked the same question fifty years ago in her introduction to
The Second Sex,
and her answer filled the next seven hundred pages. There are no shortcuts here. A serious problem arises when a motherless daughter assesses what she feels she’s missing and then quickly defines “woman” by what she lacks. My mother could cook fifteen or twenty different dinners; I’m lucky if I know the recipes for five. In my memory, she knew exactly how to shop for clothing; I can’t even fathom what kind of lingerie to wear underneath a cocktail dress. I’m aware that cooking and clothing and personal hygiene hardly amount to a feminine totality,
and that many women with mothers don’t know the difference between a clog and a mule and don’t particularly care, but when you’ve lost your primary model for womanhood it’s easy to fall into this perceptive trap. Without the presence of a woman who can show us how to be feminine in a man’s world, and who can serve as a point of reference for us to either accept or reject, we default into using gender stereotypes and cultural myths as definitions. “When I first got into therapy,” says Denise, thirty-five, who lost her mother at age twelve, “I realized I not only didn’t know how to be a woman, because I associated all those bullshit things like knowing how to make a cake and put on a garter belt with being a woman, but that I had started to believe those
were
the things that defined you as a woman.”

Like the child who mistakenly equates
to do
with
to be,
motherless daughters frequently confuse feminine behavior with feminine identity. Though one may reflect the other, they’re not the same thing. Behavior is derived from conscious observation and mimicry. Identity develops through an internalized alignment with a female model. When a daughter watches her mother step out of the shower and wrap her hair in a towel, that daughter may copy the same behavior one day. But she also begins to create an image and an expectation for how her own body will mature. Likewise, a daughter learns the rudiments of infant feeding when she watches her mother nurse a younger sibling. And she also recognizes that she, too, will have the ability to nurture and sustain a life one day.

A girl who loses her mother or mother-figure has little readily available, concrete evidence of the adult feminine to draw from. She has neither a direct guide for sex-typed behavior nor an immediate connection to her own gender. Left to piece together her own feminine identity, she looks to other females for signs that she’s developing along an appropriate gendered path, measuring her own adequacy by a quick and superficial comparison and contrast: Have I brought the right kind of present to the party? Does my haircut match those of the girls in my teen magazine?

All girls do this to some degree, but the daughter without a mother already carries a sense of deep inferiority and shame for having lost the figure she sees as so central to her well-being. Her need
to conform extends beyond the need for acceptance by her peer group. She’s looking for clues that will tell her how to be a girl and trying to create a feminine identity through observation and mimicry after her natural window to adult female experience has been closed.

“The development of femininity is complicated,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “Girls usually have some identifications already built in from their early experience with their mothers—it’s not like there’s nothing there. But those identifications don’t have a chance to mature. Sometimes an adolescent will depend on her childhood memories for guidance. What would Mom say about this? What would she advise? But memory isn’t as good as the real thing, and it’s not as alive as a current relationship with any other female.”

One of the most poignant stories I’ve heard over the years comes from forty-three-year-old Mary Jo, who was eight when she lost her mother. Although she had an older sister who took over her physical care as she entered adolescence, Mary Jo longed for the guidance of a mature, experienced woman who would teach her, in her own words, “how to be.”

Even as a child, Mary Jo equated being human with being female, aware of her gender identity but unable to feel connected to it.
She recognized that her father lacked the knowledge and her sister the adult experience she craved. Mary Jo believed that if only she could master the prescribed behaviors, she could overcome her feelings of deficiency. As she paged through books trying to learn the rules of social etiquette, she was really trying to connect with what Naomi Lowinsky calls the “deep feminine”—that subtle, often unconscious source of feminine authority and power we mistakenly believe is expressed in scarf knots and thank-you notes but instead originates from a more abstract, gendered core.

All daughters—and motherless ones are no exception—expect mothers to pass down the generational knowledge that transforms a girl into a woman. “When I was a kid, I used to wonder if your mother comes into your room at night when you’re asleep and whispers something in your ear,” says thirty-seven-year-old Jocelyn, whose mentally ill mother was institutionalized for most of her childhood. “Something that you don’t remember consciously, but that still goes in, and that if because I didn’t have a mom around, I never heard what I needed to know.”

Jocelyn’s metaphor aptly illustrates the silent, fluid exchange that links most mothers and daughters in an intimate duet. Adrienne Rich has described its content as “beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival—a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.” And as Mary Jo learned, its essence can’t be gleaned from a book.

As discussed in an earlier chapter, certain aspects of a girl’s femininity and aptitude for relating to men are linked to the quality of her relationship with her father, but that’s not the kind of femininity motherless women necessarily feel they lack. The sociologist Miriam Johnson, in a review of the research on fathers and femininity in daughters, divides a girl’s femininity into “heterosexual” and “maternal” components, which makes the distinction clear. Fathers, she says, influence the heterosexual element of a daughter’s femininity, which involves romantic intimacy; sexual object choice; and, insofar as marriages are perceived as male dominated, expectations of male authority. Mothers provide the maternal aspect, which relates to gender identity, the procreative capacity, the mother-daughter bond, and
expectations of maternal authority in the mother-child relationship. A motherless daughter may feel perfectly comfortable in the company of men, and many do. But how much does that teach her about being female?

When the maternal element is missing from her feminine development, the daughter grows up without an internalized, gendered sense of power and authority—not only as the political and social entity the term
woman
represents, but also as a female self. The power of the feminine, already diminished in a society run predominantly by men, is even harder for a motherless woman to claim. She has difficulty understanding, appreciating, and accepting herself as a gendered being when she has no constant model for adult femininity, or when the model she has convinces her that being female is wrong. So if gender, as she’s learned, is strictly either/or, where does she belong? Says Denise, “I’ve always felt like a creature in between a man and a woman. Like a mutant, neutered thing.” In a culture fueled by binary opposition, where
woman
is inevitably defined as “not man,” a motherless daughter searching for language to describe herself then wonders in frustration,
What am I
?

 

“I’m a survivor,” many motherless women claim. What they’re saying is that early adversity gave them a toughness, a resilience, a power of will that came from facing a profound loss and nevertheless finding the desire and the hope to press on. They’re saying, in effect, that they’ve acquired the kind of personal strength and indomitability our culture normally ascribes to men.

This isn’t necessarily detrimental—autonomy of spirit, after all, is what’s kept the motherless Nancy Drew in business for the past seventy-six years. One out of three motherless women who could identify a positive effect of their early losses named “independence” and “self-reliance,” often citing these as their passports to professional success. You don’t have to lose a mother to become an independent woman, but there’s often a strong relationship between the two. When a motherless daughter finds herself left with caretakers who are initially overcome by grief or who are unable to meet the demands of child rearing, she needs to develop assertion and self-sufficiency to survive childhood and adolescence as a female alone. She
has to learn how to fend for herself. “When you lose a mother, there’s no longer a fantasy of being able to go home to Mommy,” Dr. Lowinsky explains. “You get thrown head first into the water, and you have to learn how to swim.”

There can, however, be grave personal repercussions for the child thrust into self-reliance too young, which often produces adult frustration and anger in women who had to take on too much, far too soon. The girl who at sixteen or twelve or ten has to assume almost total responsibility and care for herself, her father, and even her younger siblings often develops a rigidity of pursuit and a false sense of personal power. Her vehement independence and self-assertion can become self-protective and exclusionary, setting her apart from her peers and frequently alienating her from other women. Because she was abandoned by the one woman she expected she could rely on, she may approach female friendships with a certain caution as an adult. Says twenty-eight-year-old Leslie, “When I think of friendships with women, the first thought that comes to mind is being wary. I have close women friends, but few. There always have been just a handful. I think I distrust women, somehow. I really experienced my mother’s death as a betrayal, as if she had done it to me somehow and could have avoided it. And there was so much silence and deception involved. I think I’m more afraid of women. There’s something very powerful about them.” When four or five motherless women sit together in a room, however, the camaraderie is nearly instantaneous.
Finally,
they say.
Others who understand.
Like veterans of the same war, the unmothered are drawn to each other. They can detect the subtlest inflection in each other’s behaviors, the tiniest insinuation in a gaze, the inaudible frequency of spirit that reveals: You are one of me. As a woman at a Motherless Daughters Support Group once said, “It’s like a secret handshake that we share.”