by Hope Edelman
Like many other daughters of distant fathers, Ronnie developed a strong sense of independence. While the daughter of a helpless father develops a hypercompetent physical self-reliance that encourages her to take responsibility for those around her, the daughter of a distant father becomes more emotionally independent. As an adult, she’s wary of depending on others; feeling physically abandoned by one parent and emotionally abandoned by the other, she selects only a handful of people to whom she’ll get close. “Very removed, very cold: That’s how people sometimes describe me,” Ronnie admits, with a hint of sadness—or is it resignation?—in her voice. “I really need to be with the right person before I feel that I can open up. I’m so afraid of abandonment.”
A distant father’s incapacity to give his daughter emotional support after her mother dies arises not from his inability to care about her, but his inability to show his concern. We’re often told that our fathers did the best they could and that by understanding their limits and lowering our expectations we can heal some of our past father-daughter wounds. And this is all true. But such advice doesn’t erase the memory of inadequate emotional support; it doesn’t magically turn “the best they could do” into “good enough.” Daughters of distant fathers either must learn to parent themselves or find nurturing from other sources. “When my father got into therapy a few years ago,” Ronnie says, “he decided he wanted to redo all those years I spent alone, and be the father to me that he never was. I had to tell him, ‘It’s too late. I’m already grown up.’” Like many other daughters of distant fathers, Ronnie has become so highly proficient at taking care of herself that she’s reluctant to let anyone else—especially someone who let her down before—try.
The Heroic Father
Samantha’s father held a full-time job, headed a household, and attended to his five children’s emotional and physical needs. He was a “heroic father,” and his daughter credits him with the security and emotional strength she feels today.
Her family had always been close, says Samantha, now thirty-two. After her mother’s death when Samantha was fourteen, her father continued and even deepened his relationship with his four daughters and one son when he became their only parent.
When my mother was alive, my father was always very available, from the moment he walked in the door after work. We greeted him with the day’s events, and then after he changed his clothes, we would sit down for dinner. We talked and talked and talked, and then he’d help us with homework or go outside with us and play ball. So when my mother died, he was working with a solid foundation to begin with, and then he did the even harder job of keeping that going. He saw it as a lifelong commitment to her. It wasn’t the case in my family that we lost both parents. We still had one, and he doubled his energy to make the family work and keep us all happy.
Throughout my adolescence, I always felt secure, because that’s how my father always made us feel. Like, “Everything will be okay, this is a loving environment, a trusting environment, and this is what you’re functioning from.” He never said that outright, but that was the underlying feeling I had, and that’s how I’ve always gone through life. I think that’s why I now feel so secure within myself. It’s not that I don’t have things to learn, or ways in which to grow, but I feel very healthy in terms of psychologically dealing with each day.
The heroic father typically shared child-rearing and household tasks when his wife was present and had warm, loving relationships with his children before their mother died. After her death, he mourns appropriately, providing his children with a safe forum for expressing their feelings, and reallocates roles fairly, taking on what he can and delegating the rest. Most daughters who describe their fathers as heroic come from families with several children, where siblings could offer additional support when a father felt overburdened or overwhelmed. This is an important characteristic of the heroic-father family. When a daughter can split her needs between her father and other reliable family members, when she doesn’t have to place unrealistically high expectations on him, his chances of disappointing her decrease.
The heroic father isn’t perfect and is still prone to bouts of depression or doubt, but he’s clearly a parent in control. Despite his own grief, he manages to maintain a safe, supportive environment that absorbs some of the shock of a daughter’s loss and helps her continue developing confidence and self-esteem. For these reasons, his death is likely to be a major blow to her. Unlike daughters of helpless or distant fathers, who must either withdraw some of their dependency needs or face disappointment, the daughter of a heroic father has a dad she can depend on. Even as an adult, she typically continues to rely on him for emotional support. Although her response to his death is free of the intense resentment and guilt that often plague other daughters, the loss leaves her feeling truly alone for the first time—a state that daughters of other fathers say they felt soon after their mothers died.
The only time that thirty-two-year-old Kim begins to cry during our two-hour interview is when she speaks of her father’s death from cancer seven years ago. After her mother died when she was two, Kim lived with her older sister and brother, and a father she describes as “awesome, generous, great.” Even though her father remarried three times, Kim says she never felt displaced or overlooked.
My dad. We were very close. See? The tears only come when I talk about my dad. He was great. I mean, I was the last kid, and he had basically been through everything by then. He was quiet and patient, a good role model. I was into some crazy stuff when I was a teenager, experimenting with drugs, sex, you know what I’m saying? But I never did anything that I knew would seriously harm me. Like I got myself on the [birth control] pill immediately, and there were certain drugs I definitely wouldn’t take. I was a pretty sensible kid, and I thank my father for that. It was nothing he even said to me, like, “Don’t you come home pregnant,” or anything like that. He was just a model person. A good citizen. Like he would never cheat on his taxes. He trusted me, and I trusted him. Everybody loved him. When he died, we all said, “It shouldn’t have been him.”
Kim credits her heroic father, who was the only consistent parent of her childhood, with helping her achieve the emotional stability she says is central to her happy marriage today.
Like Kim, Kristen, twenty-two, praises her heroic father and her heroic stepfather, who both helped her mourn her mother’s death five years ago and gave her an emotional foundation she knows she can rely on today. Even so, she acknowledges that the heroic father has his limits. When she recently developed a gynecological condition that required immediate attention and she needed financial and emotional support, she appealed to both fathers for help. “As soon as I found a physician, they both were like, ‘So it’s taken care of? Good!’ They didn’t want to talk about it anymore. They just wanted to make sure I was okay.” Her voice and her eyes drop slightly as she says, “As wonderful as the two of them are, they never 100 percent understand.”
Despite all his assets, the heroic father can’t fully replace an attentive, nurturing mother. In his quest to try, he runs the risk of devoting too much time and energy to his children, which can cause parent-child conflict when he begins dating or pursuing interests beyond the home.
Daddy’s Other Girl
Let’s imagine a best-case father-daughter scenario after a mother’s death: Parent and child mourn together, and the family slowly adjusts to its new configuration. The daughter still misses her mother but feels secure enough to trust her father to fill most of her needs. She’s his little girl, and he’s her perfect dad. The seasons change once, maybe twice. And then one night the doorbell rings, and the father walks into the den and says, “Kids? I’d like you to meet Marjorie (or Angie, or Sandy, or Sue).”
Corinne, thirty-five, still remembers every detail of that moment twenty-four years ago. She refused to acknowledge her father’s girlfriend when they started dating eight months after her mother’s death, when Corinne was eleven.
She walke
d into the house, and I turned around and walked the other way. My father had sat my older brother and me down one night and asked us for permission to date, and I thought, “He’s got to be kidding. Date? My father?” I guess because I didn’t say anything, he figured I was fine with it. The minute that woman walked through the door, I didn’t want a thing to do with her. He was furious at me, and we fought about it all the time. He only dated her for about six months, until she broke it off. I was so cruel to her, I think I might have been part of the reason why she left him. I know my father understood why I acted like such an obnoxious brat, but I also know it took him a long time to forgive me for it.
A father’s entry into the dating sphere requires a significant reordering of a daughter’s psyche. No longer does she have Dad to herself; he’s now a commodity to be shared. When a daughter has to make room for a new adult woman before she’s ready, the father-daughter relationship suffers. Among the women surveyed for this book, those whose fathers remarried quickly were most likely to have long-term father-daughter problems. Seventy-six percent of the women who described their current father-daughter relationships as “poor” had fathers who’d remarried within one year of a mother’s death, compared to only 9 percent of those who said their relationship is now “excellent.”
Twenty-six-year-old Audrey remembers the shock she felt at fourteen, when her father announced his upcoming marriage only six months after her mother had committed suicide. An only child, Audrey had been accustomed to receiving both of her parents’ undivided attention, and after her mother’s death she secretly expected her father to devote twice as much time to her.
“I went through an enormous rebellion against him at fifteen,” she says. “It was like, Father with another woman? And she had two kids. I thought, ‘Who is this person in my father’s life with all her tagalongs, and what makes her think she can become a part of my life, too?’ I gave her a really hard time until after I left for college. Now, I think of her as my father’s wife, and as long as she doesn’t try to be my mother, we can get along fine. She’s the one who tries to keep the family together, which I kind of appreciate. But my relationship with my father is still a mess. I needed him to help me through those first months after my mother died, and he was off wining and dining all the divorced women in our town. I’m still trying to work through my anger about that. In the meantime, it’s hard for me to even have lunch with him.”
Audrey says that much of her resentment comes from her father’s resistance toward speaking about her mother after the suicide. As an only child, Audrey had taken care of her mother through her bouts of depression, and felt betrayed and abandoned after her death. She needed validation for those feelings, but her father refused to talk about the loss. His solution to his grief was to date and remarry quickly. Like many other motherless daughters, Audrey perceived her father’s behavior as a betrayal of her mother and felt as if she were the only one left honoring the original connection to her.
Naomi Lowinsky refers to the Cinderella story as an illustration of this conflict. In the version by the seventeenth-century French writer Charles Perrault, Cinderella asks her father to bring her a tree branch from town, which she then plants at her mother’s grave. When the tree grows, it speaks to Cinderella in her mother’s voice. “So the daughter is maintaining the connection with her true mother, even though her father has abandoned it by marrying a total witch,” Dr. Lowinsky explains. “That’s a very, very heavy burden for a little girl to be carrying. You can see how she’d get very mad at her dad about it, and maybe project the archetypal Bad Father onto him, because it feels like by remarrying he’s abandoning not only her, but also her mother.”
Older daughters usually have greater compassion for a widowed father. Less egocentric than younger children, they can understand his need for companionship beyond the family. Even so, a union with another woman usually is difficult for them to accept at first, especially when it occurs before they’ve had time to mourn their mothers.
Cecile and Beth, who were twenty-nine and twenty-six respectively when their mother died after a two-year illness, displaced the frustration and rage they felt after the loss onto their father when, five weeks after the funeral, he told them he’d met another woman. “I immediately went from grief to anger and hate,” Beth, now twenty-eight, recalls. “I was mean and miserable. I was almost possessed.”
“She was,” Cecile agrees, nodding her head. “But I think she had a right to be. My dad really didn’t deal with the death. He started going out every single night, and then he got together with this woman. She’s great today, but he just shoved her down our throats, and we resented it. We said, ‘We just lost our mother. Granted, you say you grieved for two years as she was dying, but now it’s time to grieve after, and you’re not giving us that opportunity.’”
The sisters felt abandoned by their father at a time when they needed to rely on the close-knit family they’d always known. They both recognized their dilemma: They wanted their father to be happy, but they felt their mother deserved more respect. And they decided to side with her.
“It wasn’t so much that he was dating,” Cecile explains, “but that he was forcing us to accept it before we were ready to. Three months after my mother died, he said he loved this woman and planned to marry her. I mean, three months.”
Beth rolls her eyes when she recalls the turmoil of the next few months, as the sisters acted out of anger and fear that their father would abandon them in favor of his new wife-to-be. “We were just mean,” she says. “I said things to my dad that I would never think I’d say to anyone, like, ‘Let me out of this car. I never want to see you again. I hate you.’ And he’d cry, but in his own way, he had to go on with his life, and he did.”
When their father restated his plan to remarry, the sisters suggested a compromise: They asked him to wait for at least one calendar year after their mother’s death. He agreed, and their relationship slowly started to improve. When the sisters realized that their father was willing to prioritize in favor of his original family, they began to regain their trust and respect for him. The year gave them time to adjust to their mother’s absence, and to the idea of another woman living in their father’s house. They also saw that he didn’t intend to abandon his daughters.
“His priorities were very well defined,” Cecile says. “He put Beth and me before everyone else. To this day, he still does it. He has distinctly separated his life with us from his life with his wife. She’s turned out to be a great friend to us, and her two kids are really nice. Once we stopped feeling threatened, we warmed up to the idea like you’d normally expect. It’s just when it was being pushed down our throats that we objected.”
Beth laughs a little as she says, “I don’t even remember when I started liking my father again. Today, I wish the circumstances of his remarriage had been different, but he’s really happy. He treats his new wife as well as he treated my mother, but only to an extent. I can see the difference.” And that, the sisters agree, shows the respect for their mother and their original family that they believe is deserved.
The Incest Taboo
There was a period of a month or so after my mother died when my father started drinking. That was not the norm in my house at all, and it was very scary to me. I remember feeling sexually afraid of him. I don’t know that there was reason to be, other than he was a drunk man in the house. But I remember blocking the door to my bedroom one night when he was drunk. When I was five years old, I’d been molested by a drunk man in the hallway to our building, so maybe I was making that connection. I don’t know if there’s anything else. I’m waiting, like Oprah Winfrey and her guests, for the memories to come.
—Rita, forty-three, who was fifteen and the only daughter in her family when her mother died.
In a two-parent family, a mother’s presence and a father’s conscience ideally suppress a father’s sexual impulses toward his daughter. Although some degree of father-daughter attraction is normal, as Victo
ria Secunda explains in Women and Their Fathers, the incest taboo is so deeply ingrained in most men that they can barely imagine an attraction for their daughters, let alone talk about it. These sexual feelings are unconscious in most men, yet they nevertheless cause fathers to withdraw slightly from preadolescent daughters. Daughters typically experience this withdrawal as a rejection, which adds to their overall adolescent sense of awkwardness and isolation.
A mother is both a sexual partner and a source of maternal protection in the home, and in most families she represents a symbolic barrier between father and daughter. When she is absent from the family, father and daughter lose that natural buffer. As a daughter’s sexuality emerges, she becomes increasingly aware of her father as a man with needs, and, if a stepmother or girlfriend is not present, acknowledges him as an adult sleeping alone. Believing that her father’s conscience may be all that keeps him away from her bedroom door, a daughter may fear the potential for sexual abuse. Especially when parent-child boundaries relax to a degree where a daughter takes over most of her mother’s roles, confusion on either side of the father-daughter pair often leads to active avoidance or rejection.
