Motherless Daughters (49 page)

To be a motherless daughter is to live with the awareness of a presence, but not its physicality. Something is missing, yes. But we must not forget that something has been given to us, too.

To be a motherless daughter is to be riddled with paradoxes and contradictions, to live with an eternally unresolved longing, but it is also to know the grit of survival, to hold an insight and maturity others did not obtain so young, and to understand the power of renewal and rebirth. “We gain so much, whether we like it or not at the time,” says Colleen Russell, who was fifteen when her mother died. “The strength comes from the adversity and the challenges. I wouldn’t have had the sensitivities I have if I hadn’t lost my mother. I know I would have taken more for granted. And I have different ideas about life and death than I think I’d otherwise have.”

In my late teens and twenties, I used to play a mental game with myself. I’d look around and weigh all the good things in my life against the possibility of having my mother back. During college, the choice was easy. Would I trade my education for the chance to have my mother back? Of course. My boyfriend? Yes, even him. In my twenties, the answers weren’t quite so clear. Would I give up my career as a journalist? Okay. My graduate degree in writing and the years I spent in Iowa? Well, all right. My apartment in New York, my first book contract, my core of faithful friends? Probably. Maybe. I didn’t know. And then I reached my early thirties, and I had to stop playing the game. It ended the day I looked around at my husband and my daughters, at the life we’d created together in California, and knew I would no longer be willing to make the trade.

Does this make me a selfish person, or one who has finally found a life that she loves, despite her early loss? I believe it’s the latter. Thirty-one-year-old Debby agrees. When Debby was a teenager, her younger sister and her mother were her two closest friends. But when Debby was twenty-two, her sister died in an accident, and one year later she lost her mother to cancer. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘If some things could have happened differently in your life, what would they be?’” she says. “And I’d have to say there isn’t anything I’d change. I’m sorry for different things that have happened, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way. The losses are so entwined in my life and so much a part of my personality and my maturing, and so much a part of the person I am today. And I like who I am today. It stinks that these things had to happen to me, but I can make the decision to let them be a plus or a minus.”

Adds forty-four-year-old Wendy, who was fifteen when her mother died and is now the married mother of a sixteen-year-old daughter, “It amazes me sometimes, how things have reframed themselves over time, and how if you work on your grief, you eventually do heal. So many things that used to be so painful to me because of my mother’s death have now become so rich and rewarding because of her death, if that makes sense.”

We have all learned something from mother loss—lessons that perhaps no child or adolescent should have to learn, but valuable lessons nonetheless. We have learned, if nothing else, how to take responsibility for ourselves. The next, and even more important, step is to move into the place where we can take consistently good emotional care of ourselves, too—not by excluding others from our lives, but by learning how to trust, respect, and value the children we were and the women we are. As twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her mother died, explains, “I think I’m a very strong person, and I know it’s because of my mother’s death and everything that happened afterward. Somehow, I managed to grow to love and respect myself and take pride in who I was, as that child who managed to take care of herself and survive. If my mother had lived, could I have had self-confidence and self-love? Well, I don’t know. I think it came from me having to be competent and realizing no one was going to take care of me but me. Sure, other people might come
and go and aid me, but I can take care of myself. That’s really important to me as a woman. We’re taught to be other-directed and to get affirmation externally, so I feel pretty powerful in that sense, because I feel that I get a lot of nurturing and love from myself.”

Forty-four-year-old Carla, who was twelve when her mother died and fifteen when she lost her father, adds, “Sometimes when life doesn’t go exactly as I wish, or when I meet with disappointments, I think, ‘Would someone else who’s gone through what you’ve gone through be able to do what you’ve been able to do as an adult?’ It’s my way of saying, ‘Carla, you’ve had to deal with a lot. And you’ve still done all right.’ That’s served as my barrier against great feelings of defeat. When life hasn’t gone exactly the way I would have wished, I think, ‘You’ve made a good life for yourself in spite of all you’ve been through, and that’s something to recognize and be proud of.’”

Margie and Carla have discovered how to give themselves the kind of comfort and praise they believe they lost when their mothers died. Over the years, they developed the kind of inner guidance and emotional security that motherless daughters so often say they lack. They did this by learning to encourage, praise, and comfort themselves. And this is the best kind of substitute mothering a woman can hope to receive.

 

I visited northern California for the first time in November 1992, when I was researching the first edition of this book. On an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon, Phyllis and Marshall Klaus offered to take me sightseeing. We had time for only one major attraction: They suggested either Sonoma Valley or Muir Woods. I remembered the postcards and photographs of the redwood forests, where branches grew higher than houses, and cars could drive through trees. I chose the woods.

I knew nothing about redwoods, except what my mother had told me about their size—which was pretty accurate in Muir Woods. I’d never seen trees so tall. As the Klauses and I shuffled through the ferns and sorrel, we reached a small, odd group of redwoods growing in a circle around a charred stump. The burned trunk stood maybe six feet high, but the trees surrounding it were young and healthy.
Park rangers call these clusters “the family circle.” The less botanically inclined call them the mother tree and her daughters.

This is why: In the redwood ecosystem, buds for future trees are contained in pods called burls, tough brown knobs that cling to the bark of the mother tree. When the mother tree is logged, blown over, or destroyed by fire—when, in other words, she dies—the trauma stimulates the burls’ growth hormones. The seeds release, and trees sprout around her, creating the circle of daughters. The daughter trees grow by absorbing the sunlight their mother cedes them when she dies. They receive the moisture and nutrients they need from their mother’s root system, which remains intact underground even after her leaves die. Although the daughters exist independently of their mother above ground, they continue to draw sustenance from her underneath.

For years, I searched for my mother in the air or the cosmos around me. I kept forgetting to look under my feet. The foundation she gave me in my first seventeen years was a solid one. If it hadn’t been, I don’t think I could have managed on my own after she died.

I’ve now been without a mother for much longer than I had one. Before long, my time as a mother of daughters will exceed the amount of time I spent as my mother’s daughter. This is how healing works. Years pass. Pain dulls. Lived experience begins to supplant memory. Details blur. But we never forget.

Three years ago, my husband and I took our daughters on a four-day road trip from Los Angeles to southern Oregon. In Humboldt County, California, we took a short detour off Highway 101 to drive the Avenue of the Giants through 51,000 acres of redwood groves. As my husband maneuvered us along the narrow ribbon of shady road, I sat in the back seat between my daughters and told them about the postcards my mother had brought home to New York, and how I hadn’t believed her when she said a car could drive through a tree. My older daughter, Maya, said she didn’t believe it, either. A few miles up the road, we came upon the Shrine Tree, and saw that my mother’s story had been true.

The photograph I have now shows our big white car emerging from a huge slit in a massive redwood trunk, my husband and Maya waving crazily from the front seats. As I took the photo from the
side of the road, I tried to imagine my mother standing alongside the same tree, her hand raised in the same playful wave she gave the camera in 1974. She could have been saying hello. She could have been saying goodbye. Or she could have just been saying, “Hey, you. Remember me?”

Always.

Time alters some things. It beautifully preserves others. The words that closed the first edition of
Motherless Daughters
are just as relevant today as they were in 1994:

Between September 1992 and October 1993, 154 motherless women participated in a mail questionnaire. These are the results of that survey: