Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  There’s nothing like the death of a parent to make an adolescent grow up fast. Her thoughts, responsibilities, and realizations mature tenfold overnight, but her body and environment constantly remind her that she’s not fully grown. It’s hard to be a real adult when you’re still taking a bus to school every day. “I felt so much older than people my age,” says Francine, thirty-two, who was thirteen when her mother suffered a massive heart attack that caused a permanent vegetative state, and seventeen when she moved out on her own. “Most of my friends now are still ten years older than me. I always wanted to hang out with people who were independent and on their own, like me. Yet at times I feel like a baby. My husband says sometimes I’m so mature and capable and other times I seem like I’m barely an adult. I had to grow up so fast, I wasn’t able to be a kid. One of the reasons I recently decided to work off hours and have three-day work weeks was to have time to be a kid. I’m glad that I finally feel safe enough to do that now.”

  So much of the last twenty-four years of my life has been about trying to figure out what feels right for my chronological age. I’ve often felt that when my mother died, I split into even thirds. A part of me immediately aged to forty-two and took over some of her concerns; another part of me got stuck at seventeen, hanging on to the image of my mother and the relationship we had then; and a third part, the one I’ve often felt I know the least about, developed along normal lines. For many years I wanted nothing more than the ability to spread my arms and grasp forty-two with one hand and seventeen with the other, and then to pull both ends in tight, until they met somewhere in between.

  Young Adults (The Twenties)

  If adolescence is all about forming an identity, the twenties are about taking that identity and putting it to use in the larger world. That’s why a woman who loses her mother at this time may well be the most overlooked and misunderstood daughter of all. She’s the one most likely to be living outside the home, already caring for herself or for a family of her own—which also makes her the most likely to feel frustrated and confused when the loss of a mother reduces her to an emotional puddle. And she’s the one who most often hears, “When you were twenty-three? Well, you really didn’t need a mother anymore,” as if a mother’s importance somehow diminishes to zero the moment her daughter emerges from adolescence.

  A departure for college, marriage, or a move out on one’s own all serve as developmental milestones, but the act of establishing a new home base doesn’t sever our emotional ties to the one left behind. Paradoxically, a successful launch depends on the young adult’s continuing to have a secure base—usually the nuclear family—to return to at times of stress. She’s in a revolving-door period of her life, trying things out and coming back home for encouragement or respite.

  “If a woman loses her mother during early adulthood, from nineteen to maybe twenty-three, the loss presents a conflict because it touches every base,” says Phyllis Klaus. “She’s at the point of really beginning to develop her own career and move out, and that’s when she needs encouragement. But instead, she may need to go back to the family house and be helpful. Also, because the level of intellectual understanding is so much greater, all the thoughts of ‘How will I manage all of the events coming up in my life without my mother?’ come up. So she loses not only her mother but also the encouragement and revalidation of the self she needs as well as the real sharing she would want to do with her mother at that time.”

  It’s not much different from the toddler who ventures forth in stages and repeatedly returns to the mother for security and reassurance, except that now the child is a woman, her journeys span several weeks or months, and her reconnections may be by e-mail or by telephone.

  “There’s an enormous yearning to be in relation to a home ground in your twenties and thirties,” says Naomi Lowinsky. “And mother is a reference point. You might be mad at her and not want to be like her, but your mother is the source. She’s the origin. You’re always kind of looking back at her to see where you are. If you’re twenty-five and you know your mother is full of bullshit, you know where you are. It’s very defining. But if you’re twenty-five and you’ve lost your mother, how do you know where you are? It’s really, really difficult to not know where you are at that age. You need to be in relation to something. Dad may be really important and helpful, but he’s not a woman. His is a different kind of help, a kind of attention that’s contrasexual.”

  For daughters of the post-World War II generations, the twenties are the period when a daughter’s experience begins to differ from her mother’s the most. A mother who married at twenty-three and gave birth to a daughter by twenty-five may watch that daughter postpone marriage and motherhood until her thirties. Today, a woman whose job opportunities were limited to teaching and sales may well have raised daughters who run companies or obtain advanced degrees. Many of us have had access to education, employment, health care (including cohabitation, birth control, and legal abortions) and marital options (including uncontested divorce) that women of previous generations could only imagine. Civil rights, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement—all have contributed to differentiating our experiences from our mothers’ and have allowed us to define our own identities by the distance between us and them.

  As cultural and social beings, mothers and daughters are rarely produced by the same mold. But because of their powerful early bond and their shared femaleness, differences between the generations can make both sides uneasy. Mothers and adult daughters can be paralyzed by assumptions, unable to communicate much beyond nitpicking and complaint. A mother wants a daughter to become what she once was—or what she never got to be—and expects her daughter to want the same. A daughter is defensive about the choices she’s made, believing that her mother can’t possibly understand them, or her.

  As a daughter matures, and especially as she becomes a mother herself, her vision of her mother typically evolves. Like the child who first realizes her mother can’t solve all her problems, the young adult begins to see her mother more clearly as a multidimensional woman with human limitations, one with both strengths and weaknesses. And though the daughter retains some of her earlier desires for the perfect mother, she also becomes more willing to loosen her expectations. The mother, in turn, begins to accept her daughter as an autonomous individual, one with the ability to make and implement decisions for herself. Both sides give and take, push and pull, ideally arriving at an ideological compromise based, if not on understanding, then at least on mutual respect.

  From the moment a girl first leaves her mother’s side, she is always trying to get back to the mother of her earliest memories. The attention and affection that her mother once provided become the ideal for which a daughter continues to search; departure was a necessity, but reunion is perpetually the goal. Although the mother’s place in her adult daughter’s life is hardly the site she occupied two decades before, an adult reconciliation can lead to a second bonding for a mother and daughter. After the adolescent girl completes her individuation from the family, she often comes full circle to reunite with her mother as a tentative partner in a woman-to-woman camaraderie.

  The twenties are the years most women pinpoint as the time they first realized their mothers had qualities—empathy, wisdom, experience—they would value in a friend. To lose a mother at this time, just at the point when one seems to have found her again, feels like a cruel trick. Thirty-five-year-old Christine, who had a particularly tumultuous adolescence, had just begun to enjoy a close relationship with her mother when death broke their bond.

  I was eighteen when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and twenty-three when she died. I was living out of state at the time. We had a fairly good relationship because I wasn’t around her all the time. She missed me, I missed her, and we wrote a lot. She did come to visit me once, and that was a lot of fun. When she died, it was harder for me than for my sisters, I think, because I’d been so far away. I felt very guilty about that, and my sisters also
laid a bunch of guilt on me as well. That was hard, too. My mom did say to me, “Go out there and have a good time. Do whatever you feel you need to do.” My sisters didn’t understand that. They were always upset that I moved away and didn’t come back for eight years. I think my mom was surprised, too, but I think she actually was glad that I was out traveling and doing things.

  I was very fortunate that we had established a relationship before she died. But I thought, “Gee, that’s not fair. We just became friends, really.” When I was a little kid, my father was a waiter, and we used to go into the bar and drink kiddy cocktails. When I got older, I could go in and have a real drink with my dad. It was the same thing with my mother. I was able to actually be an adult with her and talk about adult things. We didn’t carry all the other crap from the past to that point. I had my life, she had her life, and we had some fun.

  The desire to reunite with one’s mother is a developmental impulse that arises whether the mother is alive or not. A daughter who, during childhood or adolescence, lost her mother, reaches her twenties and feels ready to reconnect—but with whom? With what? In my early and midtwenties, I felt the need for a strong female figure in my life for the first time. Those years were characterized by what felt like a desperate search for someone to guide me, but the person I wanted to connect with most was missing, and my efforts to replace her always seemed to fall short. Twenty-nine-year-old Karen, who lost her mother nine years ago, expressed my sentiments exactly when she said, “It’s almost a rite of passage in a woman’s life to be able to come back to her mother and be friends, to meet on an equal ground. But when she’s not there, you can’t do that. I felt kind of like I was in limbo, waiting for something to fill that void, some way I could have that coming back. And I can’t. But it’s kind of haunting, because the need doesn’t go away.” When a mother dies too young, something inside her daughter always feels incomplete. There’s a missing piece she continues to look for, an emptiness she keeps trying to fill.

  The loss of the mother as an adult friend is what therapists call a “secondary loss,” which may not be apparent at the moment of actual separation but reveals itself to us over time. Twentysomething daughters often leap ahead to imagine the secondary losses—no one to help plan a wedding, no one to consult about child rearing, no grandmother for the kids—they envision as long-term effects of mother loss. This is a scenario ripe for idealization. The mother who bandaged an eight-year-old’s knee probably would not, if she had lived, have been able to fix an eighteen-year-old daughter’s heart-break, or stop the pain of a twenty-six-year-old daughter’s labor, yet at such moments that is the mother we long for, the only one we can remember, and the one we desperately want.

  Would my mother, who quit her job in 1964 at the age of twenty-five to raise me, have given me the advice I sought in 1988 to solve a problem at the corporate level? Would she, a virgin at her wedding, have been a supportive listener when I had a pregnancy scare at eighteen? Or would she have been horrified by my standards of sexual morality, which seem to differ so dramatically from hers? When I try to piece together a more mature version of the mother I knew, the one who taught me to use tampons and spoke freely of her own methods of birth control, I come up with a question mark every time. My mother, as a woman in her sixties, is mostly a mystery to me. In my mind, she’s an eternal forty-two, and as her daughter, I never get past seventeen.

  There’s a sad beauty to this, that my mother will remain forever young. I’ll never have to watch her grow old or have to worry about her care during old age. But this also means I will pass my mother and grow beyond her very soon. Back in my twenties, I’d already felt this starting to begin. Although we came of age in different eras, my adolescence and hers were fundamentally the same: we loved our parents but disagreed with them, took final exams in public high schools, went off to college, and fell in love. But she married at twenty-one, and the choices I made then—to support myself, to go on for a graduate degree, and to delay marriage and motherhood until my thirties—are the ones that firmly separated my adult experience from hers.

  Well, this is nothing unusual: Most of my friends whose mothers are still alive can say exactly the same thing. Daughters frequently surpass their mothers. That’s just fact. But many of my achievements have been tinged with bittersweet, because they are things my mother once hoped to accomplish but never got the time to do. I’ve visited a dozen foreign countries. I went to my brother’s wedding. I saw the first day of a new century. In two more years, I’ll turn forty-three.

  The Later Years

  I’ve been consistently surprised by the number of women who have contacted me over the years to be interviewed about mother loss, even though they had been in their thirties, forties, or beyond when their mothers died. Because I was so much younger when I lost my mother, I naively assumed a woman past the age of twenty-five or thirty would accept the death of a mother in her sixties or seventies as part of the natural course of events. She wouldn’t feel as if something vital had been ripped from her prematurely.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. I remember an afternoon not long after I’d moved to New York to write the first edition of this book. I was shopping for a couch in a furniture store on Broadway, and as the final purchase was being rung up, the saleswoman, Sonia, and I began to talk. One conversation led to another, and then I was telling her about my work. When I explained I was writing about young women who had lost their mothers, she pushed aside the paperwork and grasped my arm above the elbow. Blinking back tears, she asked, “Do you want to interview me? My mother died just a few years ago. I wasn’t a child—I’m forty-two now. But let me tell you, it isn’t easy at any age.” And one of my friends in her mid-forties is now shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles and Phoenix every other week to help her ailing mother, who is in the midst of chemotherapy, get her final affairs in order. Her experience is just as frightening and heartwrenching as any young woman’s I’ve ever seen. Even harder, in some ways, because not only must this friend come to terms with full knowledge of her mother’s illness and its likely outcome, but the tremendous amount of caretaking responsibility she’s taken on as an only child greatly complicates the emotional and practical tasks she has to juggle back in Los Angeles as a grieving daughter, a mother, and a wife.

  Elizabeth Nager and Brian DeVries, two researchers at San Francisco State University studying the relatively new phenomenon of online memorials created by adult daughters for their deceased mothers, acknowledge that the death of a parent during one’s middle age is a common and expected event. Between the ages of forty and sixty, more than 50 percent of American women will experience the death of one or both parents. Still, Nager and De Vries say, mother loss during adulthood “represents myriad emotions and psychological experiences. A parent’s death represents the loss of the history and memories that shaped and remain part of that relationship. A parent’s death signals a different sense of time and self as the buffer between life and death dissipates. The death severs, or forever alters, the attachment bond that was established in childhood.”

  Middle-aged daughters continue to miss and long for their mothers long after a loss, even when the death was expected and accepted. Several studies on adults who have recently lost mothers reveal that:• Three months after the loss, 80 percent say they still miss their mothers very much.

  • 74 percent said losing a mother was one of the hardest things they had ever dealt with.

  • 67 percent continued to experience emotional reactions, including sadness and crying, for one to five years after the death.

  • 86 percent reported a shift in their priorities after a mother’s death. Sixty-six percent reported making changes in their professional lives one to five years after the loss.

  • 40 percent reported they grew closer to their siblings. Twenty-five percent said they were experiencing more sibling conflict than before. This was usually in families when siblings were perceived to be unhelpful as a parent was dying, or
where sibling relationships had been strained from the start.

  • 36 percent developed a closer relationship with their fathers after their mothers died. But 18 percent say their father-daughter relationships became more conflicted or distant.

  • 75 percent saw it as a blessing that their mothers died when they did.

  • 72 percent did not feel it was unfair that their mothers had died.

  • 80 percent believe they will be with their mothers again some day.

  Women who were younger—closer to forty rather than sixty—had a harder time accepting the loss, as did those who’d had positive mother-daughter relationships. Daughters who were still very emotionally dependent on their mothers also had difficulty adjusting. I have also met numerous women at seminars and lectures who devoted years of their lives to caring for ill mothers, sometimes to the exclusion of marrying or having children of their own. To these daughters, the eventual death of the mother requires a reorganization not just of daily living habits and responsibilities, but also a relinquishing of one’s identity as caregiver.

  The tensions an older adult daughter experiences when her mother dies are no less or no more important that those of theyoung adult, but they are different. Because an adult daughter is likely to occupy more roles—lover, wife, mother, grandmother, co-worker—her relationship with her mother is usually less central to her identity and also less central to her mental health. Yet her mother may occupy more roles in her life, too: maternal grandmother to her children, mother-in-law to her husband, and adult confidante. These are also valid losses in a daughter’s life, and ones that must be grieved.