Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  Thirty-one-year-old Connie, who was seven when her mother died, remembers climbing into bed with her twelve-year-old sister the night they heard the news. “I was scared, and she hugged me while I cried,” Connie recalls. “Ever since then, she’s been the only one I feel safe enough to go to when I want to talk about our mom.”

  In a 2002 study of two quartets of sisters, the psychologist Russell Hurd, Ph.D., found that sibling relationships can act as a protective factor in families that experience early parent loss. In both families he studied, the girls had been between the ages of three and ten when their fathers died. Both their mothers had been preoccupied with grief, and the girls had no opportunity to discuss the loss and its impact on them. They banded together for emotional support, however, and as adults they were less likely than other daughters who had effectively lost both parents to suffer from depression later in life. “It appears that children working together and supporting each other, even being rivals with one another and learning how to resolve their conflicts together, can develop skills that carry them on to healthy mourning and non-depressed adulthoods,” Hurd explains.

  Forty-six-year-old Claudia learned the value of close sibling relationships during an unpredictable childhood. “We moved eight times before I finished high school,” she explains. “The houses changed, the neighbors changed, the friends changed, my father was pretty absent because his affairs changed, and my mother did the best she could until she killed herself when I was fourteen.” The only constant in her childhood were her two sisters, one older and one younger, and her younger brother. After their mother’s death, the four children became de facto parents to each other, the older two raising the younger ones. They remain close as adults. Even though they now live in separate parts of the country, they come together for a family reunion with their children at least once a year.

  Today, Claudia tries to encourage close ties between her son and daughter through discussion and modeling. “I want my kids to know in their hearts that they need to always be there for each other,” she explains. “My siblings are what saved my life. I recently flew to the Midwest to take care of my younger sister’s kids, and last April I left home for a while to help my older sister as they dealt with her husband’s stage three cancer. Each time, I told my kids how important it is to me to be there for my siblings.”

  But far more common, I’ve found, are families in which siblings split apart after a mother’s death. Daughters in these families frequently describe their mothers as “the glue that held the family together,” or “the sun around which the separate planets revolved,” implying that the loss of this central figure caused the whole system to collapse. And although this may be true, these families were probably never tightly bound from the beginning.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Leslie, who was sixteen when her mother died of cancer, remembers interacting very little with her two older brothers when she was a child, and she has limited contact with them today. “Maybe we were already more distant than we knew because my mom was there to rally us, but it became very evident after she died that we really weren’t a family,” she explains in a tone of muted but obvious regret. “We basically flung ourselves to separate ends of the earth.”

  Thirty-one-year-old Victoria, who was eight and the youngest of three children when her mother died, is even more succinct: “My family is like the Bahamas,” she says. “Same name, but not connected.”

  In her bestselling memoir Blackbird, Jennifer Lauck recreates a scene with her older brother, B.J., that took place the day of their mother’s death. When B.J. heard the news he ran out of the house. Jennifer found him in a neighborhood park a few hours later, but the siblings, who had a history of bickering and rivalry, found little comfort in each other that day. Their encounter in the park illustrates how a difficult sibling relationship can further isolate children after a mother dies:“Just go away,” B.J. says.

  “Daddy wants you home,” I say.

  B.J. drops his head, chin to his chest, and his eyes are darker with the shadows of his eyebrows. I don’t know if he’s mad or sad or what, but I walk so B.J. and me are toe to toe. I don’t know what to do, what to say, and I reach out to touch his arm.

  B.J. holds his head up and back, eyes down on me.

  “She’s not your mother,” B.J. whispers.

  I drop my arm, hand on my leg, and his words sting down my neck.

  “She is too,” I say.

  “Just go away,” B.J. says.

  B.J. drops his skateboard on the sidewalk and rides away. I stand there, my arms at my sides, and my head hurts between my eyes.

  I walk to the middle of the park and stand at the edge of the pond. . . . The wind blows around my legs, around my head, and pieces of hair get into my mouth and my eyes.

  Without Momma there is no purpose and it’s like being lost, like being on the edge of the world and you don’t have anywhere else to go.

  Yet even siblings who fight bitterly occasionally can come together in a moment of crisis to offer each other support. The actress Roma Downey, who was ten when her mother died of heart failure in her native Ireland, remembers the ride she and her older brother took home from the hospital that day.

  We were with my mother’s best friend and had to take a taxi. She got in the front with the driver and my brother and I were in the back, each looking out of an opposite window. We were of an age where a certain sibling rivalry would have been tight. We couldn’t look at each other without being mean and childish toward each other. In our immediate grief we were isolated from each other, and my mother’s friend said to the taxi driver . . . she was crying and he said, “Are you okay?” and she said, “No, I just lost my best friend” and he said, “Who is it?” He said, “Oh, I knew her. She was very funny.” And she said, “Yeah, that’s her two children in the back.” And he said, “Oh, I’m really sorry kids, so sorry to hear of it.” And it sort of hung in the air. And I remember feeling—not looking, but feeling—on the seat of the car and there, sure enough, to meet me was my brother’s little hand. And we just held hands together.

  Sibling fragmentation often finds its origin in the dynamics of a mother’s family of birth, which may serve as her subconscious guide for the family she creates. A mother who was chronically jealous of her older sister, for example, may have inadvertently inspired a similar resentment between her two daughters by favoring the younger one. Or she may identify with the child who has characteristics—height, weight, personality, birth order—similar to her own. Because a manipulative mother is often the source of frustration between siblings, her death may provide them with their first opportunity to assess each other as equals and repair their childhood breaks. Such a rosy resolution is difficult to achieve after decades of accumulated grievances, however, and in some families the chance may arrive too late. The mother may have departed, but her influence continues to live on in her children’s angry phone calls and disputes.

  Siblings will often direct their anger or confusion toward each other after a mother’s death, especially when older children in a family feel overwhelmed by new responsibilities and younger ones feel overlooked or lost. Thirty-one-year-old Joy displaced her anger onto her older sister as their mother slowly died of cancer. “I was going to the hospital every day,” she says, “It was really difficult dealing with my father, and driving back and forth to the hospital every day for three weeks. My sister visited the hospital only twice during that whole time, and once she came in with a friend who barely knew my mother. I was furious. That’s how I coped with the pain of losing my mother—by becoming angry with my sister.”

  Joy had always been the responsible daughter, the one who stayed at home and out of trouble while her sister battled a drug problem and had two children outside of marriage. Nevertheless, Joy had always believed that her mother loved her sister more. During her mother’s hospital stay, she was determined to become the perfect daughter and earn the praise she’d always hoped for. After her mother died, she comfor
ted herself with the knowledge that she—and not her sister—had eased her mother’s final days.

  Siblings often flaunt their good deeds, engaging each other in frustrating, circular disputes comparing one sister’s sacrifice to another’s. I lost more than you did! I’m hurting more than you are! I was the better daughter at the end!

  Therese Rando calls this kind of infighting “competition among mourners.” As rivalrous as these siblings may seem, they’re really more interested in earning attention and recognition for their pain than they are in staging a victory. “It’s a way a person tries to make herself feel special at a time when she’s feeling so deprived,” Dr. Rando explains. “She’s trying to give herself something she can hang on to when she feels overcome by what she’s lost. A different kind of competition develops when adult siblings want to be less involved in the family. That’s when you hear, ‘I don’t want to take care of Dad. You take care of Dad,’ or ‘I took Dad last Christmas. You take him this Christmas.’”

  Victoria says her older sister Meg, who returned home at twenty-six to care for the family after their mother died, still insists on viewing herself as the family martyr more than twenty years after the loss. Meg’s preoccupation with her sacrifice damaged the sisters’ relationship during Victoria’s childhood and makes it difficult for them to be friends today. Victoria makes no attempt to hide her bitterness when she speaks about Meg’s attitude after their mother died.

  “I ruined her entire life,” Victoria says. “She told me that all the time. ‘I had to stay home and take care of you, you know. You ruined my life.’” Angry and resentful about her new responsibility after their mother’s death, Meg had unleashed her frustration on eight-year-old Victoria, who grew up with enormous guilt for being such a burden on the older sister she’d previously adored. She still feels the need to compensate for the inconvenience she caused, and she spends long hours on the telephone listening to Meg’s problems. “When my shrink said, ‘You know, you don’t have to listen to your sister’s complaints if you don’t want to,’ I told her, ‘You don’t understand. I have to take care of my sister, because I ruined her life,’” Victoria recalls. “And my shrink said, ‘Just stop it.’” Today, Victoria is trying to separate herself from Meg, who now expects her younger sister to care for her.

  Victoria and Meg: sisters who might have avoided the powerful resentment they feel toward each other in the present if one had not been expected to raise the other in the past. Their story raises a much larger question: What happens when one sibling becomes an ersatz mother to another?

  Minimothers and Their Instant Kids

  After a death in the family, the heaviest expectations usually fall on the oldest or most parentified child. Sons are usually expected to head the family and take over financial and structural matters. Daughters typically are expected to care for the younger siblings, surviving parent, and aging grandparents.

  Although taking on the role of mother usually forces a daughter to assume an identity that’s inconsistent with her developmental stage, several studies suggest that caring for younger siblings can help a daughter gain self-confidence, develop a resilience toward later stress, and work through feelings of loss. When the psychologist Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues interviewed thirty young mothers who’d experienced the loss of an attachment figure during childhood, they found that those who had been most successful in resolving the loss shared two characteristics: They enjoyed a strong sense of family solidarity, with mutual comforting, expression of feelings, and sharing of grief; and they had the opportunity to take responsibility for other family members during the mourning period.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Robin says that caring for her younger sister and brother helped her feel responsible and competent, but also gave her responsibilities too excessive for a sixteen-year-old to manage with ease. When her mother died, Robin became a full-time mother substitute for her thirteen-year-old sister and eight-year-old brother for the next two years, until their father remarried.

  I felt the most responsibility for my brother, but I didn’t know how to manage him. He was a very difficult kid. He would put up power struggles. He’d want me to take him to the toy store, and if I said I couldn’t he’d throw a holy fit. I’d feel so guilty I’d give in to him. When my father was about to remarry, I remember thinking, ‘Thank God this woman is moving in.’ She latched on to my brother just as much as he latched on to her. That really helped me a lot. At that point, I was able to let go of him and say, ‘Okay. He’s my brother now. I abdicate responsibility for him.’ The only reason I didn’t feel guilty for attending a college across the country was because my stepmother moved in a month after I left.

  Certainly, there were enormous problems and battles after my father remarried, especially between my stepmother and sister. My sister would call me all the time at college, in tears. My roommates would say, ‘It’s your sister on the phone again. She’s crying again.’ I was a big support to her, and still am. I’m always the first one she calls. She definitely relies very heavily on me.

  Caring for her younger siblings helped Robin identify with her mother, and indirectly mother herself after the loss. Today, she is well aware of how to care for herself, and often gives herself the same advice she still freely offers to her siblings when they ask her for help.

  Thirty-two-year-old Kathleen also coped with her loss by voluntarily “becoming” her mother. The second of four children, Kathleen was the only daughter in her family. Raised to be a nurturer for her three brothers, she took this role to heart when, at eighteen, she gained custody of her thirteen-year-old brother and then raised him by herself.

  Tall, gentle, and thoughtful, Kathleen looks and acts mature beyond her years. She was sixteen when her mother died of cancer. Her father died of alcoholism the following year. When her youngest brother, Paul, lonely and miserable in a foster home, called her at college one night, she became determined to bring him to her university town. As soon as she reached legal age, Kathleen went to family court and became his guardian. “A lot of people said, ‘You’re so young. How can you take on a teenage brother?’ but I realized helping him was doing something for me,” she recalls. “I didn’t have a place to go home to except a dorm room. I was just kind of out there. So by having Paul come live with me, I created a home for myself, too.” Kathleen and Paul found a sympathetic dean at her school who arranged for them to live in housing for married students, and they remained together until he began college four years later and joined their oldest brother on the West Coast. But when Kathleen divorced two years ago, both brothers moved back to the small New England town where she owns a house. “I don’t know if it’s me they’re drawn to, or if it’s what I represent,” she says. “I think, somehow, I’m home to them.” She and Paul are roommates again, their oldest brother lives down the road, and the third brother occasionally visits from California.

  Approximately 140,000 children in the United States are currently being raised by siblings, a number that’s been rising steadily over the past twenty years as foster-care homes have become scarcer. The phenomenon has also been brought to public attention by the 1990s Fox television drama “Party of Five,” about five siblings who lose both parents in an auto accident, and Dave Eggers’s bestselling book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in which he writes of raising his younger brother after both their parents die.

  When an older sibling becomes full- or part-time caretaker for a younger one, her natural family position is altered. She’s more than a sister but not quite a mother. Motherless mothers who cared for younger siblings say they frequently felt inadequate in one or both roles. Who am I? they wondered. Mother? Sister? Neither? Both? “After I left for college, my sister really felt that she had to become my brother’s mother,” Robin says. “But she never felt that she succeeded. And how could she? She admitted this to him not long ago, and I think he gave her a great gift when he said, ‘Melinda, you’re my sister. I never expected you to be my mother.’�
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  Although sisters can fill some of the gap after a mother dies or leaves, I’ve found little evidence that a sister can become an adequate surrogate mother. As Russell Hurd has pointed out, a sibling can’t reproduce the richness or complexity of adult caregiving and support. Of all the women who said they found mother substitutes after their mothers died, only 13 percent cited a sister—roughly the same percentage who named “teacher” or “friend.” Most often, a sister will assume physical care for another sibling. Emotionally, however, she’s rarely mature enough to meet the demands of a dependent child when she’s still one herself. Leading by example can be tricky when you are only a few years ahead of your charge.

  “There are real problems when a sister has to become her siblings’ mother,” Evelyn Bassoff says. “She can’t do it very well. But she tries, and it sets her up for failure, which leads to guilt. Oftentimes, in cases where she can’t control the children, she resorts to corporal punishment, which also sets her up for guilt. It’s not like Wendy and the Lost Boys.”

  Siblings are generational peers, sharing the same lateral plane in the family hierarchy. They grow up prepared to care for each other reciprocally, not in the type of one-sided and intensely emotionally invested relationship that a parent-child dyad represents. Because a mother-child relationship is one of unequal power, when a sister takes on the mother’s role and assumes more power than sibling relationships normally allow, the whole system gets thrown out of sync.

  Sisters and brothers are no longer traveling on staggered but parallel paths; one has veered off in another direction entirely. Years later, this sister may find it impossible to rejoin the siblings she left behind.

  Thirty-five-year-old Denise, who became a minimother to her two younger sisters after her mother died when she was twelve, explains that her feelings toward them took on a substantially maternal hue. “To this day, I don’t have a sisterly relationship with my sisters,” she says. “I have a motherly relationship with them. I would lay down on railroad tracks for them. I feel great love for them, but they would never tell me their innermost secrets. And I’d never tell them mine.” When Denise’s mother died and she took over the maternal role, her sisters began to view her as their protector and superior, instead of as their ally. In adulthood, when a six- or seven-year age difference between siblings normally shrinks in significance, these three sisters are still relating to each other according to the role reassignments that developed twenty-three years ago.