Motherless Daughters (36 page)

Explains twenty-five-year-old Ronnie, whose mother died eight years ago, “I really feel like I’m crippled without a mother. Like I can never be quite as good as a woman who has one. Like I can never know the things that she knows, or feel confident about myself.” And although I understand these feelings because I have them, too, I look at Ronnie—a beautiful, successful woman who seems so confident, so in control—and think that if I saw her on the street or across a room, she’d be one of those women I’d admire, one I’d be certain holds the very knowledge I so often feel I lack.

We are so good at concealing our blind spots. And at compensating as best we can. Conventional femininity cannot be our guide. We are reinventing the feminine. And most of us have barely begun to appreciate the value, or the enormity, of this task.

They remember what she gave. What she
made. What she did.
What we were to each
other.
What she taught me. What I learned at
her breast. That she made things. That she
made words. That she fed me. Suckled me.
Clothed me. Cradled me. Washed me.
We
remember her labor.
She told us how she
almost died. How she was weary. How her
skin ached. What soreness she felt. What her
mother’s name was. How her mother made
things. What her mother told her. How she
was pushed away. How she was hated. How
her milk was sour. What she wore at her
wedding. Where she had dreamed of going.
What our first words were.
How she had
quarreled with her sister. How they fought
over a doll. How the other was prettier. How
she pushed me away. How she hated me. How
her milk was sour.
How we hated her. Her
body. We remember our fear of becoming her.
What we were to each other. What we learned.

—Susan Griffin,
Woman and Nature

 

 

 

 

 

I TOOK A TRIP to southern Florida about ten years ago to visit my mother’s best friend. There were some things I needed to know. Minor facts, mostly, and episodic detail, such as what my mother talked about at dinner parties and what made her laugh when her children were out of the room. But I had some larger questions, too, such as why she had chosen my father, and why the women’s movement seemed to have passed her by. Behind the mother had been a woman, and she was someone I never knew. Sandy had been there, throughout those years. I was hoping she could give me some clues.

We sat at her round breakfast table in Boca Raton one September afternoon, my tape recorder equidistant between us. The kitchen: an appropriate site for a talk with my mother’s childhood friend. Like my mother and her mother and her grandmother from Poland, I grew up in homes where the kitchen doubled as a social center, where daughters leaned against counters while mothers reproduced the recipes of their mothers, and where neighborhood women gathered for languorous gossip sessions while dinner slowly matured on the stove. I learned the family legends in my grandmother’s kitchen with its blue vinyl wraparound booth and bulbous white stove, and in my mother’s 1970s counterpart, with its avocado appliances and yellow wallpaper flowers the size of my hand, rooms where ancestral history hung suspended above the tables like after-dinner cigarette smoke. The smell of potato pancakes sputtering in golden oil or beef stew simmering in elbow-deep steel pots still signals the beginning of a story to me.

I live in a nine-room house now, with plenty of space to entertain. There’s a living room, a TV room, and an outdoor deck that offers a panoramic ocean view. Still, every time we throw a party, everyone swaps stories around the dining room table until late into the night. Story is the elixir of the roundtable, not the sofa or the chair. Maybe this is why in Sandy’s kitchen anecdotes about my mother spilled forth onto the vinyl placemats and why I, like a starving person, devoured every small detail.

 

Most of us know the facts about our mothers’ deaths. But how much do we know about their lives? Of the 154 motherless women surveyed, 30 percent said, “a great deal”; 44 percent, “some”; and 26 percent, “very little.”
¹⁰

Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, fathers, and friends act as the conduits who convey information about the lost mother to the daughter as she ages. The mother herself, however, was usually a daughter’s most valuable source. Daughters who spent the most time with their mothers are thus the ones who feel they know the most about them. More than half of the women who were twenty or older when their mothers died said they knew a lot about their lives, compared to only 2 percent of those who were younger than twelve at the time. Likewise, only 13 percent of the daughters left motherless at twenty or older said they knew very little about their mothers, while 53 percent of those who were twelve or younger said the same. Daughters who were adolescents fit right in between, with half of those who’d been ages twelve to nineteen reporting they had some information about their mothers’ lives. This may be because younger daughters ask fewer questions about their mothers’ pasts, or because mothers tend to share their stories slowly, meting them out as they deem appropriate for a daughter’s current developmental stage.

When a mother dies, she takes her stories with her, leaving a daughter to reconstruct them in whatever way she can. Rita, forty-three, who was fifteen when her mother died, did her fact-finding through the mail. Frustrated by how little she knew about her
mother, Rita created a thirty-six-page booklet titled “Questions I’ve Been Meaning to Ask” and sent copies to her parents’ surviving relatives and friends. She typed the 108 inquiries in one sitting, a flood of pent-up questions rushing onto her computer screen: “How did Louise feel about herself physically?” “Why did she divorce her first husband?” “What was her pregnancy and labor with Rita like?” In an introductory note she wrote, “Please don’t hesitate to tell the truth as you saw it. The whole purpose of this questionnaire is to gather facts and memories before they are forgotten. I appreciate your help.”

“I almost felt like an orphan trying to find out about the mother who gave her up,” Rita recalls. She mailed about a dozen questionnaires and waited for replies that she hoped would tell her about her mother’s childhood, first marriage, and involvement in the Communist Party in the 1950s, but she was disappointed by the feedback. Although a few of her respondents were forthcoming with their memories, most either didn’t remember or wouldn’t share the kind of detail she craved. “With some of the questions, I already had bits and pieces of an answer,” Rita says, “but it was important to me that I got it all. A lot of people wrote back asking, ‘Why do you need to know this? Why do you want to know this?’ They thought I was obsessed with the past, and that I had a problem. Including my brother. He had a hard time with me and my questions. I think he understands my need more now, because he and his wife just adopted a little boy and they’re helping him develop a family history book, but that’s definitely where he was at then.”

Rita’s critics raised a worthwhile question: Why would a daughter want to exhume her mother’s past? Why do Rita, and I, and virtually every other motherless woman I’ve ever met have the urgent need to scour history like scavengers on a beach, waving our questionnaires and tape recorders like metal detectors, hoping to uncover valuable nuggets buried beneath the sand?

“Part of it is that I’m curious by nature,” Rita says. “I like to know details about people. But I also feel like I missed out on getting to know my mother as a peer—an equal, as a human being, not just as my mother. And I wanted to know who she was. I felt like I had a vague notion of who she was, but the more I learned about who
I
was, the more I wanted to collect her stories and understand what kind of person she had been.”

Storytelling serves a vital function in a daughter’s development: It’s one way that she makes sense of her past and develops a static identity for the future. For the motherless child, an attempt to fit individual life experiences together to form a meaningful whole often elicits the reminder of a missing piece. “These kids feel something is missing, and history is a part of it,” Benjamin Garber explains. “It’s not all that’s missing, but at least if they can cognitively compose some kind of story for themselves, they have a sense of continuity and feel more complete.”

To do this, a daughter needs to collect not only the details of her mother’s life but also the facts about her own. The personal mythology a woman creates to define herself depends on her early memories and on the stories she’s told, and mothers typically are the chroniclers of a family’s narrative history. When she dies or leaves, many of the details are lost. My father awaited each of my “firsts” as anxiously as my mother, but she was the one who made the entries in my baby book, shared the news with friends, and later passed the details on to me. As the oldest child, I’m the only member of the family who remembers hearing my brother’s and sister’s first words, but no one can recall mine. I have no way of knowing how much of what I remember from my earliest childhood is real, how much is misperceived, how much could have been a dream. How can I be sure of my past if I have no living history, no one who remembers my first word, my first smile, my first step?

Without knowledge of her own experiences, and their relationship to her mothers’, a daughter is snipped from the female cord that connects the generations of women in her family, the feminine line of descent that Naomi Lowinsky calls the “Motherline.” A woman achieves her psychic connection to generations of feminine wisdom through hearing her mother’s and grandmothers’ narratives about women’s physical, psychological, and historical changes—bleeding, birthing, suckling, aging, and dying, Dr. Lowinsky says.

Motherline stories ground a motherless daughter in a gender, a family, and a feminine history. They transform the experiences of her female ancestors into maps she can refer to for encouragement or warning. And to make these connections, she needs to know her mother’s stories. “So many contemporary women will say, ‘Find out about my mother? Forget it! She doesn’t understand me. I’m mad at her. She’s horrible. The last person I want to be like is my mother,’” Lowinsky says. “These are women who get blocked in their search. The woman who’s lost her mother already knows she needs to find her in some way. But she can’t hear the stories from her mother’s lips, which makes getting them really hard. She has to go to other relatives. And she has to deal with her grief about this, too. If you’ve lost your mother and you start looking for your Motherline, you come right up against enormous amounts of grief and loss. You have to be ready to deal with those emotions.”

A daughter knows about her mother only as much as both of them want her to learn, and for me at seventeen, that wasn’t very much. Who knew we’d run out of time? When my mother told me stories of her childhood, I took only what I found immediately useful—
she almost drowned when she was seven, so I’d better learn
how to swim
—and promptly ignored the rest. She, in turn, chose to relay stories as they coincided with comparable milestones in my life. I can tell you about her first menstruation, her first date, and her Sweet Sixteen in great detail, but her wedding, her first pregnancy, and her child-raising philosophy are almost complete mysteries to me.

Like Rita, I knew my mother as a mother, never as a woman or a friend. My memories of her are bracketed by the dawn of my cognition, when I was roughly three and she was twenty-eight, and her death when she was forty-two. Fourteen years—that’s all I’m sure of, and even that is filtered through the perception of a child or a teen. I wasn’t mature enough at seventeen to see my mother as an autonomous woman, with dreams and disappointments that didn’t include me. I pushed away her attempts to coax me into adult confidences; they felt too premature. I didn’t want to hear her opinions about her marriage or sex life when I was in my teens—I’m not even sure I’d want to hear them now—and I alternated between shifting my weight uncomfortably and bolting from the room.

I was twenty-five before I wanted to learn about my mother as a young adult and a wife, a desire that led me to my mother’s longtime friends in Pennsylvania and Florida, and then around the neighborhood where I’d grown up, asking questions and gathering stories from women who’d known her well. Sandy told me about her as a sorority sister and young bride; another friend told me about the night she lost her virginity, a story that had elicited only an embarrassed, “On my wedding night, of course,” when I’d asked her about it at fourteen.

Twenty-five wasn’t an arbitrary year for my exploration—it coincided with two important thresholds in my life. First, I’d finally begun to mourn, and second, I was feeling almost uncontrollably jealous as I watched my female friends approach their mothers as quasi-equals for the first time. Their old parent-child power structures were still nominally in place, but my friends were beginning to assess their mothers’ strengths and weaknesses, decide which characteristics they’d want to adopt as their own, and determine how far they’d be willing to stray from what they’d learned in their mothers’ homes.