by Peg Streep
In troubled marriages, fathers often emotionally vacate the premises long before they leave (and some of them don’t ever leave), and spend more time at work, out of the house, and attending to hobbies and sports outside of the familial circle. Extramarital affairs remove them even farther from the emotional center of the family and, of course, their daughters. The emotional pain inflicted on daughters by the lack of maternal love is compounded by the sense that their fathers have abandoned them and failed to protect them, leaving them alone and at their mothers’ mercy. Daughters report a great deal of emotional confusion when fathers are absent, and if their mothers end up abandoned by their fathers, they may actually align themselves with their mothers, creating another kind of inner conflict. The need for mother love rises to the surface, and loyalty to the mother in these circumstances sometimes outweighs the need for self-protection.
Parental divorce creates a special conundrum for daughters of unloving mothers, who usually end up living with their mothers; daughters of enmeshed mothers will find the going very rough as whatever slight boundaries once existed disappear under stress. An older daughter may be able to recognize that her father has left because he’s been treated the way she has, and that can lift the burden of feeling responsible for the failure of the maternal relationship and create an enduring alliance with the father, even if the time spent with him is scanty. Even though these fathers are physically absent from their daughters’ lives, they are nonetheless emotionally present and caring. When the daughters reach adulthood and begin to set boundaries with their mothers, their bonds to their fathers may remain strong.
The Rescuer: While few daughters report feeling totally protected by their fathers from their mothers’ treatment—there doesn’t seem to be a White Knight—many do feel that their fathers’ presence rescued or saved them in important ways. As Jackie, 61, put it, “I didn’t spend all that much time with my father—he spent a lot of time hiding behind his newspaper, avoiding the conflict, or puttering with some home improvement project that couldn’t be interrupted—but when I did, I was actually able to breathe. I could see myself, the good stuff, reflected in his face, and that gave me the courage not to quit on myself and fall into the trap of believing everything she said. It helped. It didn’t fix me up all spic and span, but he saved me nonetheless.”
Jackie is like many daughters of dismissive or combative mothers whose fathers’ encouragement of pursuits and acknowledgment of their talents and abilities acted to counterbalance their mothers’ focus on failures and shortcomings. Daughters of rejecting or emotionally distant mothers often find a safe haven in their fathers’ company and affection, even when it’s relatively limited in scope because of maternal gatekeeping. Many daughters—and I count myself in that number—received validation from their fathers that permitted them to begin to understand, even at a relatively young age, that they had done nothing to provoke or deserve their mothers’ treatment. In some families, especially if the unloved daughter is the eldest or the only child, the father can become a gateway to the outside world as he encourages her to try new things or persist in pursuits he considers valuable.
Unlike the Yes Man, the Appeaser, or the Absentee, the Rescuer tends to act more like a free agent, navigating between his love and loyalty to his wife and daughter. Many daughters with Rescuer fathers often end up walking in paternal footsteps when it comes to work and career. Others report that their fathers were the voice of encouragement when it came to cultivating an interest or talent such as music, a sport, or a creative endeavor. Studies show that while women build closeness by talking, men usually build bonds through shared activity, and that’s true, too, of the father-daughter relationship. This is what Jenny, 37, recounted: “My father never took my side when my mother picked on me or mocked me for not being popular like my brother. But he cheered me on quietly when it came to my schoolwork and then, when I started writing stories, he would read everything I wrote. I don’t think he said a word to my mother about them. I got a scholarship to a college writing program, and he drove me there alone. She had other things to do. He wasn’t a protector, and I was hurt in childhood but still, he helped me in his own small way.”
It’s important to realize that even having a Rescuer father isn’t a version of the “out of jail” card in a board game. Remember the point about the negative and positive experiences being processed and stored in the brain differently? Yes, the Rescuer helps, but the daughter is still left with a boatload of emotional baggage and a journey of healing ahead of her. I am living proof.
THE ONLY CHILD
The singleton faces some challenges that are unique and others that aren’t. The little world all children live in is even smaller when it’s made up of three people and, sometimes, just two. And it’s not just the mother myths that this daughter must contend with but those pertaining to children without siblings. Having been an only child for the first nine years of my life, I know firsthand what this feels like. In the 1950s—when the Baby Boomers came of age—10 percent of the population were onlies, a relative rarity in a sea of 3.6 siblings; today, 20 percent are singletons. But the myths of the only as bratty, spoiled, coddled, unsocialized, and somehow maimed still remain part of the cultural consciousness. After all, the so-called father of psychology, G. Stanley Hall, wrote that “being an only child is a disease in itself,” while Alfred Adler, in the next century, declared, “The only child has difficulties with every independent activity and sooner or later, they become useless in life.” The truth? Study after study has shown that singletons actually fare no worse, and sometimes better, than their siblinged counterparts.
So is the stereotype of the “lonely only” wrong? Well, again, it depends on how that only daughter is attached to her mother and father and whether the triangle that is the family is stable or not. And if it isn’t and her mother falls into any one of the eight toxic patterns, she is likely to have a very hard time of it, although recognition of the pattern may actually come earlier to her. Only children spend more time with adults than other children and are exposed to more adult conversations and activities than children with siblings; they are used to listening or even eavesdropping on what adults say. (This is all anecdotal, but I was one growing up and I am the mother of one and have interviewed many.) But recognizing the pattern for what it is doesn’t help the only child manage the negative emotions she feels, or soothe the pain of being unloved. Because outsiders are likely to believe that the singleton is more coddled than other children, this may impose a special kind of isolation, upping the ante on keeping the silence.
The spotlight shone on the only child is unwelcome when a mother is combative, enmeshed, or self-involved; there’s no one else to take the heat or provide a momentary respite.
While it seems counterintuitive, only children can also be scapegoated even in the absence of a herd. The scapegoated only child is sometimes blamed for something that has gone wrong in her mother’s life; it could be the thwarting of her ambitions or success (“If I hadn’t had you, I would have had a brilliant career in dance”), choices she made (“I’d have finished college if it weren’t for you”), the state of her health or looks (“I never was able to lose the weight I gained when I was pregnant with you”), or the failure of her marriage. The latter is the charge most frequently raised, especially if the daughter looks like her father, reminds her mother of him, or is sufficiently “disloyal” to want a relationship with him and his relatives. That was 35-year-old Jody’s story: “My dad left when I was six and remarried days after the divorce became final. My mother blamed me for his leaving. She said that if I hadn’t needed so much of her attention, he wouldn’t have felt neglected and cheated. I believed her for years and years and felt guilty and terrible. Even worse, she made me feel awful for loving my dad and wanting to see him. You have no idea how torn I was. I was saved by going away to college, where my unhappiness finally landed me in a therapist’s office. It was a lifesaver.”
The mythology pe
rtaining to only children assumes they aren’t capable of individuating and are to some degree enmeshed, and while that’s not true in a healthy family, it can be true in an unhealthy one, as Ariel Leve’s harrowing memoir, An Abbreviated Life , demonstrates. The only child of an extremely self-centered mother and a loving father who literally lived on the other side of the globe, Leve could only live her own life by cutting her mother off completely. Enmeshed, engulfed, manipulated, and gaslighted by turns, she appeared to have no other way to move forward.
THE COMPLICATED TRUTH ABOUT SIBLINGS
As an only child for the first nine years of my life, I had two major fantasies. The first involved a hospital mix-up on the day I was born and it included my “real” mother ringing the doorbell and coming to reclaim me. The second was of a wise, protective, loving older sister—think Jo in Little Women —who would be my best friend, tell me I wasn’t to blame for how our mother treated me, and would even run away with me if need be, just like Hansel and Gretel but with two girls.
My fantasies notwithstanding, the truth is that sibling relationships are complicated under the best of circumstances, even in loving families. Despite the mythology of all mothers treating and caring for each child equally, favoritism occurs in almost every family, as a large body of research and an acronym (PDT, for Parental Differential Treatment) attest. Because mothering isn’t biologically driven in our species but learned behavior, personality and other factors shape a woman’s ability to mother a specific child, which can result in differential treatment. Personality or “goodness of fit,” as it’s called, may make one child easier to raise than another.
Imagine a relatively introverted mother who needs quiet with a highly expressive, rambunctious child, and then imagine her with a calmer child who is much more like her. Which of the two will she feel closest to? Who will frustrate her less? How much more stress will she feel parenting one rather than the other? External factors such as the mother’s age and emotional maturity, the economic status of the family, the amount of stress the mother is under, and the stability of the marriage also shape how and why children are treated differentially. In a loving family, differential treatment can even be motivated by good intentions, such as a mother’s perception that one child needs more support and attention than another. So sibling rivalry, even with a loving mother, has a basis in reality.
Most importantly, research shows that the impact of a child’s perception of differential treatment (“Mom loves Timmy/Molly more than she loves me”) is greater than the impact of the love and attention she receives directly from her mother. For example, Judy Dunn and Robert Plomin demonstrated that observing differential treatment of a sister or brother had a greater effect on a child than the actual love received from a parent. (Again, this proves the psychological truism that “bad is stronger than good” or that negative experiences affect us more than positive ones.) Other studies show that children who are given more support and affection by their mothers—having the favored status—have greater self-esteem and better adjustment skills than their discounted siblings who are likely to be at a greater risk for depression. A study of young adult children confirmed these findings, along with diminished sibling relationships, when PDT was part of the family dynamic. Needless to say, the effect of differential treatment was greater when the favored sibling was the same gender.
The belief that having more than one child is beneficial to children and parents alike has pervaded thinking about family dynamics for so long that the term “sibling rivalry” passed into the popular lexicon as a relatively benign, if sometimes unpleasant, side effect of the larger family. That’s not always true since more recent studies show that sibling rivalry and competition can be highly destructive to the individual and that bullying, alas, is learned at home.
Keep in mind that these observations are drawn from healthy families in which the basic emotional needs of the children are , in fact, met. When you add an unloving mother into the mix, there are many variations on the theme, most decidedly not pretty. When a mother is unloving to or hypercritical of one child but not another, patterns of relationship emerge that vaguely resemble patterns in relatively healthy families but that differ in kind because they are cruel, deliberate, and conscious.
Some mothers actively orchestrate their children’s behavior by pitting them against each other or by co-opting the siblings so that the daughter becomes the odd girl out (called “triangulation” by Murray Bowen). Sometimes, the behavior is aimed at keeping the family’s attention on the mother or making sure that the mother’s vision of what’s happening becomes the family truth. One adult daughter, now estranged from her mother, recounted that when her brother confessed that he’d had coffee with his sister, their mother hung up the phone. She then sent him an email, demanding that he never do that again because “your sister always has been difficult and crazy, and it’s painful and insulting to me that you are taking her side. Do not ever contact her again if you want to stay in contact with me.” The controlling, combative, or self-absorbed mother will usually do what she can to make sure that sibling relationships are neither close nor intimate unless she is in control of them.
Thus, the lack of maternal love is often not the only emotional loss sustained; sibling relationships, a sense of belonging to a family, and connectedness are among the others, all of which affect the daughter’s sense of self in myriad ways. Annie, 49, was the only girl among six children, and she says she was the family’s punch line: “I was scapegoated from the beginning, the one bookish kid, the quiet one among braggarts. As an adult, I became the black sheep—the object of lies and made-up gossip. I am the successful one, married to a successful man, with a higher education and a professional career. My mother hated me, and the boys followed her lead. I suppose it makes them feel better about themselves.”
What follows are broad patterns; I have given some of them names, but all of them are drawn from psychological research on siblings, which is comparatively robust. Judging from literature—from the ancient Greeks forward and then on to Cain and Abel and into the present—the sibling bond has always been a source of great fascination for everyone. The ante is upped when a mother is unloving.
The Hansel and Gretel bond: Yes, as in the fairytale, and according to Stephen P. Bank and Michael D. Kahn, this is a bond that emerges from shared trauma—such as the absence of loving and supportive parents or the death of one or both parents. Hansel and Gretel pairs are mutual caretakers, protect each other, and actively work at saving each other; it’s a dyadic connection that is different in kind from that of an older sibling parenting a younger one. Only a few daughters I’ve interviewed report having such a close and symbiotic relationship, and then only when maternal treatment was consistent among and between siblings or there was an underlying cause such as a mother’s personality disorder or addiction. Even so, anecdotally at least, most daughters who report something approximating a Hansel and Gretel pair also note that these ties often don’t outlast childhood as the siblings come to understand the dynamics of the family differently, react to them differently, and be affected in different ways.
That was the case for Ceci, 43, only separated from her sister by 18 months: “My sister was my protector when we were small. My mother was very combative and verbally abusive, and had what I’d call ‘tantrums’ from an adult perspective. She’d lose it when things didn’t go exactly as she’d planned and take it out on us; our father would duck out, either literally by going out or ignoring Mom totally. But Jill’s way of dealing with our mother, as we got older, was to placate her. She felt sorry for her, and still does. I got angry and fought back and I resented Jill’s ‘poor Mom’ thing. She still does it, and that’s affected our ability to connect to each other. I’d call it a cordial relationship but nothing more. ”
Rivals to the max: In some families, the unloved daughter’s hardwired need for her mother’s love and attention creates an inevitable and toxic rivalry with a sibling who gets both. Daugh
ters report that when the rival is a brother, the blow delivered to the soul and self-esteem is not as great; the pain is intensified when one daughter is rejected and another embraced. That was certainly the case for Gayle, now 44, whose sister—just 22 months older—was the “good” child while she was the “bad” and “difficult” one. Her mother meted out affection and reward on the basis of achievement, and her sister, athletic and an A student, easily beat out Gayle who was dyslexic; their mother proclaimed Gayle an embarrassment, both inside and outside of the family. While Gayle was intensely jealous of her sister, her sister suffered, too, given the enormous pressure on her to succeed so that she could garner her mother’s love and attention. In this family, it was a rivalry in which there was no winner. At one point, both daughters were estranged from their mother, though Gayle’s sister now maintains a relationship with her. Not surprisingly, the two sisters have no relationship to speak of, exchanging pro forma phone calls on birthdays and holidays.
The favorite and the scapegoat: You can call the favorite the “trophy” or “golden” child, but the bottom line is that he or she can do no wrong while the unloved daughter can do nothing right. A terrible and agonizing clarity (which also often prompts self-blame) envelops the unloved daughter when she realizes her mother can love a child who isn’t her. One daughter, who was five when her sister was born, recalled the pain and shock she felt seeing her mother with her sister: “My mother would rock her, constantly singing, loving, kissing, and I had never once seen her act like that. I remember watching her interact so lovingly with my sister, and it was like watching a movie I had never seen. It remains that way to this day.”
Sometimes, the favorite is simply seen as an extension of the mother, as one daughter explained. “My younger sister was my mother’s clone. They liked the same things, looked alike, had the same priorities. My mother was horribly critical of me—calling me nerdy and dull, compared to my sister’s charm—and I always felt like an awkward and unwanted guest who couldn’t join in. My mother was never interested in me, and when I married and had children, she was equally distant. It was my sister’s kids and husband she adored. I speak to my sister twice a year, over the phone, for no more than five minutes.”
