Motherless Daughters (35 page)

Amanda spent twelve years with a stepmother she once hoped would become her surrogate mom. She was three when her father gained custody of her in a divorce settlement that prevented her mother from seeing her again, and for the next four years, Amanda lived with her father and grandmother and prayed each night for a new mother. She eventually got her wish, but this new mother wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for.

It’s true that the Evil Stepmother stories I’ve heard are one-sided, but if even their most basic facts are accurate, many motherless women were raised by stepmothers who were, if not downright abusive, then at least coolly detached, ranging from those who gave preferential treatment to their biological children and turned stepdaughters into domestic servants to those who restricted a daughter’s contact with her father and appropriated the lost mother’s possessions after his death. Jealous of a stepdaughter’s closeness with her father, unwilling to accept a child of the “other woman” in her new family, or simply inexperienced at mothering, stepmothers may falter, give up, or turn on a motherless child. Entering a family where the previous mother has died puts a stepmother in the hot seat. A sanctified lost mother can pique her insecurities even more than a divorced mother’s presence will: a live woman, she can compete with; a saint, she knows she can’t be. Her frustration and anger may get displaced onto the stepdaughter, who represents the closest approximation of the dead mother in the home.

Among older children with limited dependence on the nuclear family, a difficult stepmother may be more an annoyance than a daily trauma, but for children who still live in the home, the consequences of poor replacement mothering can be longlasting and profound. The British psychiatrist John Birtchnell, in a study of 160 female psychiatric patients who lost their mothers before age eleven, found that 82 percent of those who had poor relationships with their mother replacements suffered from depression later in life. It seems that inadequate mothering
after
a mother dies or leaves, rather than the mother’s absence per se, is an important link between mother loss and a daughter’s later depression.

More than a dozen women have told me that they believe their lack of confidence, their low self-esteem, and their pervasive loneliness come not from losing their mothers but from growing up with a critical and demanding stepmother they felt they could never please. When explaining the hurt she still feels when thinking of her childhood,
a thirty-four-year-old woman explains, “Some of my worries and needs are because of my loss of a bond that a child is not meant to lose, but some of them are because of the sickness that followed in the form of a twisted ‘stepmonster.’ I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to separate the pain of losing one from the pain of acquiring the other.”

Yet all stepmother-stepdaughter relationships are not doomed to failure. Caroline, for example, says she deeply misses her stepmother, who died three years ago. This woman, whom Caroline refers to as her “second mother,” joined the family six months after Caroline’s birth mother died, when Caroline was eleven. “Mother Jean was thrilled to take over our family. She took on one teenager and three budding teenagers, and then a few years later had her own child, my half-sister,” says Caroline. “My second mother appreciated us, and left us alone to be ourselves. She didn’t mess with our selfhood, but we knew she was there for us when we needed her. We all loved her dearly and feel very fortunate to have had her. Losing her was no easier, maybe even harder, than losing my first mom.”

Caroline, who’s now fifty-three, had good replacement mothering as an adolescent and adult. Nevertheless, she has still longed for her birth mother’s support and encouragement as she has reached the feminine milestones of menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. Caroline, like other motherless daughters, found that even when a stepmother provides the essential triad of physical care, nurturing, and consistent emotional support, a daughter invariably still feels that one, final missed connection. “There’s a sense the birth mother holds secrets, that she’s the source of certain knowledge that no one else has access to,” Evelyn Bassoff explains. “Even if the motherless daughter gets all the information about menstruation, birth control, and childbirth, I’d imagine she’d still feels something missing, something her mother could have given her that other people can’t. It’s that sense of continuity from mother to daughter.” Finding a woman isn’t always enough when it’s
the
woman you feel you need.

 

What is it we’re looking for? What can’t another woman provide? Time and again in my interviews, I’ve heard motherless women describe what they miss most. Their mothers’ cooking, they say; when they bake a lemon-meringue pie, it just doesn’t taste the same. Or
their mothers’ companionship when shopping. They say they can’t bear to buy clothing alone.

Food, clothing, and the security that comes from the certainty of having both: these are basic survival needs, which a mother typically fills for a young child and gradually relinquishes full responsibility for as that child grows. Take food, for example. Over the years, the breast or bottle is replaced with spoonfuls of baby food, then with home-cooked dinners, heated leftovers, and money for school lunches with adolescent friends. At the most basic level, someone is paying attention to whether or not the daughter is eating three meals a day. When a daughter says she misses her mother’s cooking, she’s not just saying she longs for a slice of her pie. She’s saying she misses nurturing. Sustenance. Consistent and meticulous care.

These deep losses often surge to the forefront during a motherless adolescence, as a daughter begins experiencing dramatic physical and emotional changes. Even though an adolescent daughter may reject her mother as a caretaker and insist that she can manage alone, the mother still represents feminine wisdom and a female haven for her daughter’s bodily concerns. As a daughter experiences such female rites of passage as menstruation and loss of virginity and later, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause, she’s aware that her mother has experienced them first. She needs the support of someone who understands the intricacies of the female body when she feels alone inside of hers.

Roberta, thirty-two, says her mother’s death seventeen years ago left her without a sounding board for her female concerns. She’d previously gone to her mother with questions about masturbation and menstruation, but when she needed advice about physical development at sixteen, she felt she had nowhere to turn. Horrified by the thought of approaching her father and emotionally distanced from her older sister, she sat alone with fears that quickly turned into full-blown anxieties. “I was obsessed with being flat-chested, and I couldn’t physically use a tampon,” she says. “I was really scared I wasn’t feminine. I thought, ‘I don’t have any breasts, and I don’t have a big enough vagina to use a tampon. Where am I a woman?’ It’s not a superficial thing like cooking that makes you a woman, but ultimately your body that makes you one gender or the other. And I
was horrified by what was going on with mine. Without my mother there, these seemed like insurmountable issues. I spent at least five years freaking out.”

As Roberta sensed, a father is rarely a refuge for stress during a daughter’s adolescence—especially with her sudden realization that he’s a sexual being. Although fathers do pass on sexual attitudes and values to their daughters through commentary and example, they aren’t the preferred source for female information. A Widener University study of twenty-four intact families with adolescent girls revealed that half of the girls had gone to their mothers for sex information and none had gone to their fathers. In this study, conducted among upper- and upper-middle-class families, father-daughter discussions about sex and sexuality were most often impersonal and noninformational in nature, if they occurred at all.

Without a mother in the home, a daughter’s first menstruation often represents little more than an anticlimactic and disappointing day. Naomi Lowinsky refers to menstruation—along with birthing and nursing—as one of the feminine mysteries, the deep, essentially female experiences that bind mother and daughter. For two thousand years, until A.D. 396, the Greeks celebrated this mother-daughter connection in an annual sacred religious ceremony at Eleusis. The Eleusinian Mysteries, as they were called, were based on the myth of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who are separated when Pluto, the god of death, takes Persephone to the underworld as his bride. A grieving Demeter mourns inconsolably and halts the growth of grain on earth in revenge, until Pluto agrees to return Persephone to her mother for nine months of every year. The Mysteries, a rite so venerated that all participants had to undergo an elaborate purification process beforehand, commemorated Persephone’s return to her mother as a reunion of two lost selves, as well as celebrating the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. “In our culture today, it’s hard enough for a woman to feel a connection to the mysteries,” Dr. Lowinsky says. “Without a mother, a first menstruation is just a big sanitary event, or it’s ignored. At least if the mother is there, she represents some sort of feminine energy to lean back on, to help a girl feel the largeness of it and to be moved by it, to be able to celebrate it in a female way.

“Most mothers and daughters share a secret kind of understanding about these things,” she continues. “It may not be verbalized very much, but it’s just that they share the knowledge of what it is to be a woman. We know we bleed monthly, and that we have other shared experiences that just aren’t spoken about in a man’s world. And we have our little secret ways about doing things, even if it’s cooking dinner or getting dressed. If there’s no one to share this with, a girl carries the whole weight of the unacknowledged and unknown mysteries, which can feel scary if she doesn’t have anyone to guide her. A lot of that guidance in our culture is shared and unconscious, but still, at some level, the mother is thinking about the fact she has a daughter who’s menstruating and can have children. Somebody’s paying attention to the significance of the event, even if it’s not verbalized. If nobody’s paying attention to it, the girl falls into emotional neglect.”

My first period with my mother was no grand fête—when I told her, she slapped me across the face and then hugged me, just as her mother had once done to her, an Eastern European tradition that, she later explained, signified driving away the child and welcoming the arrival of the woman—but I’m grateful she was there. Even if she wasn’t bleeding on that day, menstruation was a female rite we both now shared, and the slap and the hug tied me to the generations of women in her family who’d bled before.

Helen, forty-nine, remembers her first menstruation as an attempt to reach out and connect with another woman. She was ten, with an older brother but no sisters, when her mother died. Three years later she was home alone when her period began. “I felt scared and excited, but so lonely,” she recalls. I went outside and saw a neighbor walking up the street. I felt a strong need to stop her and tell her what was happening to me, even though I really didn’t know her well, and this was too intimate a revelation for the level of our relationship. But at least I got to tell another woman about this milestone in my life. I felt a bittersweet mixture of loneliness, failure, and triumph.”

Her own mother, Helen imagines, would have turned the event into cause for mutual celebration. In much the same way, I imagine my mother would have alleviated all my marriage and childbearing concerns. Of course we idealize. Of course. And we romanticize,
too. It’s more comforting to focus on scant memories of a mother explaining reproduction or tampon use and dream of her lost potential than to doubt that she could have provided the support we feel we need. Giving mothers this kind of posthumous power allows us to remain their daughters. It gives us, in some small way, the kind of mother-daughter relationship we long for.

We soothe ourselves with these “would have’s,” when, in fact, many living mothers offer their daughters only minimal feminine support. An adult woman dissatisfied with her own gender identity can damage her daughter’s, encouraging feelings of inferiority, forcing the daughter into the same subordinate status she feels helpless to escape. Menstruation is hardly a festive event for the mother who equates a daughter’s fresh red blood with the aging of her own, and a daughter’s wedding is hardly a celebration for the mother who feels abandoned and bitter because her own marriage has failed.

But my mother? Oh, no. My mother would have grown in parallel fashion to me, never feeling envy, never feeling rage. She would have been the essential source for all things feminine, a font of information and support about marriage, childbirth, and aging. She would have stepped in to reaffirm my gender identity at every critical point. In my imagination, she is everything I needed and still need. And when I insist on thinking like this, it’s so easy to blame her absence for making me feel deficient at the level of behavior, and at the level of feminine identity, cheated and deprived.