Motherless Daughters (45 page)

When Bridget set out to choose a nursery school for her son, she imagined how her mother would have approached the task: methodically, carefully, and with the knowledge gained from a graduate degree in preschool education. What Bridget didn’t take into account was that her mother was a homemaker, whereas she was a mom with a full-time job who also needed daily physical therapy appointments to correct a problem with her wrists. Nevertheless, she explains, “It really freaked me out that I was struggling to do something that my mother would have done so well. I felt I somehow wasn’t living up to her standards.”

To please her mother, Bridget chose an expensive private school for her son, but she made the decision hastily and without calculating the financial strain that the tuition would place on her marriage. Six months later, she and her husband reviewed their budget and realized they had to choose a less expensive school with more flexible hours for working parents. Now her son attends a well-respected program at a daycare center that Bridget had originally shunned because she believed her mother wouldn’t have approved. The truth is, her son is quite content at his school, and she and her husband are happier with its hours. As she now prepares to select her son’s elementary school—and to have her second child—Bridget says she plans to rely on her instincts and her own experience, rather than on the idealized memory of her mother.

Just as women fear reaching the age their mothers were when they died, they also view their children’s maturation with a certain apprehension. Watching a child go through various phases reactivates the same developmental struggles in a mother. She doesn’t simply project her past experiences onto her child; to some degree, she relives them.
As a motherless daughter sees her child, and especially her daughter, approach the age she was when her mother died, she reconnects with the fears and anxieties she felt at that time. With the memory of loss as her guide, she does a double identification with her child and her mother.
Will I die now
? she wonders.
How will my child cope without me
?

“Many motherless women develop a depression when their child gets close to the age they were when their mothers died,” Phyllis Klaus says. “I’ll see clients who talk about their child’s fifth year, and how that was a terrible time for them. They totally blocked it out. They became ill, or they became depressed. When I research their histories, it turns out that they were five when their mothers died. Their fear of ‘Will I repeat that history?’ gets replayed through their children.”

When children know the details of their mothers’ early loss, they often identify with the child she once was. Alice, who was twenty-four when her mother died, says both her daughters approached her when they reached their twenty-fourth years. They wanted to discuss her mortality and made a point of telling her how hard it would be for them to lose her at that age. A more dramatic example comes from thirty-eight-year-old Emily, who was fourteen when her mother committed suicide. She panicked as her daughter approached adolescence, aware she had no personal experience to refer to as the mother of a child older than fourteen. Her oldest daughter panicked at the same time. “The year she turned fourteen was horrendous,” Emily says. “She made a suicidal gesture, she acted out in every possible way, and she insisted that I let her go live with her father. As she left, I felt again that a part of me was dying, and in some ways I had to let our relationship die in my heart.” Although fourteen may have been a coincidental age, it seems possible that Emily’s daughter identified with her mother’s experience and insisted on leaving before her mother could leave her. As Emily watched her daughter’s struggle, she revisited her own fourteenth year, a time of confusion and lack of power. She felt helpless to stop her daughter, and once again, a mother-daughter separation occurred at the fourteen-year mark.

As discussed in a previous chapter, one of the most common outcomes that motherless women identify with their early loss is independence. Not surprisingly, this is one of the most common qualities they hope to instill in their children, especially in their daughters. Because they needed to develop self-reliance to survive, these women hope to save their children the pain of that adjustment. As fifty-three-year-old Gloria, the mother of two daughters who are now in their twenties, explains, “I tended to do relatively little of the ‘motherly chores’ such as making beds or packing lunches for our children when they were growing up. I wanted them to be independent both in lifestyle and thinking, so that if anything ever happened to me, they would get along well by themselves. Emotionally, I didn’t feel I had much ‘mothering’ to give out because I was so starved for it myself. When they were teenagers, I sometimes felt I was acting more like a father than a mother. But they seemed to turn out fine, in spite of all this. Sometimes, to my surprise, my daughters mother me, which I love dearly.”

Even though Gloria is married, she still raised her daughters to “get along well by themselves” if something should happen to her. Gloria felt alone at the age of thirteen when her mother died of cancer, despite the presence of her father and two older sisters. When she became a mother, she did a double identification with her mother and her children, and took what she thought were necessary steps to protect her daughters if she, like her mother, should die young.

Yvonne, thirty-seven, who was twelve when her mother died, says her identifications with both her mother and her daughter inspired her to raise her son and daughter quite differently, even though they’re less than two years apart in age. “I have been, in my opinion, an excellent mother. But I have done one strange thing with my daughter that I haven’t done with my son,” she explains. “Every year that passes, I consider a victory. There! She is one year older in case I die. When she passed the age I was when my mother died, I was very relieved. Now that she’s sixteen and super independent, I feel that I’m almost out of the woods. I know that this outlook of
mine is probably having an effect on my daughter, but I truly see the world this way. One day I’ll explain it to her, but my mortality isn’t something I can discuss with her now.”

Self-reliance is often a positive trait to instill in children, but as Yvonne suspects, the mother’s intent and approach can have longlasting effects on them. When a mother guides her children toward premature independence based more on her past experience
without
a mother rather than her present experience as one, she overlooks the dynamics of the current relationship. As she minimizes her importance in a son’s or daughter’s life because she loves them, because she wants to spare them from the pain of her childhood, she is, in effect, preparing them for an event that’s not likely to occur, and they grow up unconsciously expecting a trauma that never arrives. By deliberately retreating into the emotional background of their lives, she does exactly what she’s trying to avoid: she deprives her children of a fully engaged mother.

When the early mother-daughter relationship ends prematurely, the daughter’s evolving sense of herself suffers a devastating blow. This is especially true when a child loses a mother to suicide or physical abandonment, although it also occurs when the child knows the mother died of an illness she couldn’t prevent or cure. Daughters who were so young when their mothers died that they have no conscious memories of mother love, who were raised by women who never showed affection, or who were abused by the very person who was supposed to love them most suffer the deepest self-esteem injuries of all. Having never felt valued, accepted, or loved by their mothers, they may grow into women who have a hard time valuing themselves.

Women in this position may choose not to have children. They may doubt their ability to love and raise a child, or fear they’ll repeat the same parenting behaviors they received, with similar results. But many who do become parents find that when they feel that first rush of maternal love toward a child, the past breaks open in unexpected ways.

Shelly, a forty-year-old mother of two young daughters, was raised by a mother she describes as “not nurturing at all, very overbearing, a woman who showed her love by trying to make me be what she wanted me to be instead of giving me room to express myself” and a father who parented from the sidelines. As a long-awaited daughter in a family with two older sons, Shelly grew up feeling she was meant to mirror her mother’s image, and that she was never valued for being herself. She and her mother remained at odds until her mother’s death from cancer when Shelly was twenty-three. Shelly devoted the next ten years to building a career and dating several different men, none of whom gave her the emotional warmth or honest communication she craved.

When she was in her mid-thirties, she started seeing a therapist, and soon afterward she met the man who became her husband. At the age of thirty-seven, Shelly gave birth to their first daughter. One week into motherhood she had an experience that still makes her tear up when she talks about it.

“My daughter was colicky,” she recalls. “All she did was cry. And for the first couple of weeks I was depressed. I was like, ‘What have I done? This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. It’s horrible.’ I will never forget—she must have been a week old, and she was screaming. I’d finally talked to enough people about colic to know there wasn’t anything I could do. She was comfortable, she wasn’t hungry. I just needed to hold her. So I sat, and I was holding her, and obviously I didn’t know her yet, she was just a week old. I didn’t know anything about her, but I was feeling how much love I had for her, and how much I wanted to hold her and make her feel better. And all of a sudden,
boom,
I realized that my mother was this person once, with a week-old baby, and that she was a human being. She wasn’t mentally ill, or anything like that. And I realized she
must
have loved me, because this feeling wasn’t a feeling I chose to have. It was just there. And I just sobbed. I sat there rocking Sofie and crying, and thinking for the first time in my life, at the age of thirty-seven,
oh, I guess my mother must have loved me.
She couldn’t not have. It’s not really a choice.”

Her mother, Shelly realized, wasn’t just the controlling criticizer of her childhood. She’d been a woman, just a woman, who’d
expressed her love in damaging ways. And Shelly understood at that moment that she hadn’t been an unlovable child who’d gotten everything wrong. She’d been a child, like her own daughter, who’d gotten deserving of a mother’s love. As she cried in the rocking chair, Shelly was grieving for the child who’d never felt her mother’s love, for the mother who didn’t know how to express it, and for the relationship they’d both missed.

Thousands of children in America develop characteristics of motherless children, even though their mothers are still alive. Why? Because they’ve been raised by motherless daughters. When early loss is co-opted into a child’s emerging personality, the survival skills she develops at that time become the ones she applies to later tasks—including parenting. Because motherless daughters, like all other daughters, often reproduce the parenting behaviors they received, their children can end up profiting or suffering from the loss of a grandmother they never knew. And these children, in turn, are likely to parent
their
children in similar fashion. Forty-six-year-old Emma knows how this can happen. Four generations of women in her family, she says, are still feeling the effects of her maternal grandmother’s death more than seventy years ago.

Emma’s mother was only three when her mother died in childbirth. Or was she four? Emma can’t say for sure. Her mother doesn’t talk much about the loss, and Emma is uncertain about the details. She knows her mother bounced from home to home throughout her childhood, raised by relatives and friends, but that’s about all the information she has. When Emma recalls her childhood, discussion isn’t what comes to mind. Activity is.

“We were always encouraged to constantly do things, go places, and achieve,” she says. “It looked from the outside as if my siblings and I were superachievers. We were always very busy. My mother, too. She was a teacher, and she has volunteered everywhere. Everyone
thinks she’s wonderful. But I’ve since realized that being busy all the time was just her way to avoid her feelings.”

Emma’s mother lost her younger brother the year before her mother, and her father disappeared soon after his wife’s death. “She was three years old, and nobody was left,” Emma says. “I’ve always thought that was why she was so strong. She had to be.” The coping skills that insulated Emma’s mother during her teenage and young-adult years became the same ones she encouraged in her children: Don’t get sick. Don’t cry. Be strong.

When Emma was nine and the family’s house burned to the ground, her mother reacted without visible grief or loss. “It was the week before Christmas, and we lost everything, including our cats and dogs,” Emma remembers. “But it didn’t stop anything. We just went on. We treated it like it wasn’t a big deal, which I suppose is good, in a way. To my mother it probably wasn’t a big deal, if nobody died. But having to act like that as a child doesn’t prepare you to understand anything about yourself. It doesn’t allow you to be human. You have to act like a robot. And then you get to be an adult and you wonder, ‘Well, then, what
is
a big deal?’”

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Emma didn’t need to ask. Her mother always made that decision—and most other decisions—for her. As a motherless daughter who knew the cold necessity of independence, she encouraged it in her daughters, but as a mother who so badly wanted to give her children what she hadn’t received, she became overzealous and controlling in their daily lives. “You understand the contradiction,” Emma says. “She said one thing and did another. It was so important to her that my sister and I be able to take care of ourselves. That became the theme of our lives. But I also remember thinking that I wouldn’t know what to do or how to respond if my mother died, because she took care of everything for me. She chose what was important and what wasn’t. And I know I’ve done the same thing with my children, telling them, ‘That’s not worth being upset about’ before they have a chance to decide for themselves.”