by Hope Edelman
I don’t remember my relationship with my mother ever being close. Certainly, we did stuff, like she took me to get my ears pierced, and she got me a kitten while my dad was away on a business trip. I don’t know how much of our distance was our relationship per se and how much was my age. I was a pretty snotty teenager. I was going through that phase where everything she did was embarrassing. Mom wasn’t the person I talked to. I talked with my sister, mostly.
—A thirty-one-year-old woman who was
fourteen when her mother died
Three daughters speaking about three different mothers? Not quite. Those are the Lawrence sisters—Caitlin, Brenda, and Kelly—describing the same mother who died of cancer seventeen years ago.
As this example illustrates, sibling perceptions of mothers—and of mother loss—usually stop at a point short of mutual agreement. The death of a mother won’t affect her children uniformly for several reasons, including their different developmental stages; birth orders; previous encounters with illness, death, or loss; individual circumstances surrounding this death; and personal relationships with both parents. Even when children are raised side by side, as often happens with those close in age, their experiences of mother loss may appear similar in some respects yet differ wildly in others, at times sounding like a tabloid story of twins raised by different mothers.
Sometimes, this isn’t far from the truth. Siblings who are in late adolescence or early adulthood when a mother dies grew up mostly under her influence, and usually with two parents, while their younger brothers or sisters may spend most of their formative years with a single father or in a stepfamily. Eva, forty-five, says that until her most recent visit with her family, she always thought her thirty-eight-year-old brother’s personality had been shaped by forces outside the family. “I’ve always seen Andrew as an organized, conservative kid,” she explains. “I know I have that potential, and I’ve seen it in my middle brother, too, though we’re much more relaxed. Andrew is the youngest, but he’s the most successful of us three. He works hard and plays hard. He’s very pragmatic. Last time I saw him with our stepmother, I realized it wasn’t the Vietnam War that made Andrew conservative. It was the difference in our mothers. My stepmother is extraordinarily pragmatic. She’s more obviously a result of the Depression, and less relaxed than my mother was.” This realization helped Eva pinpoint the source of a major difference between Andrew and herself, and relieved the pressure she felt each time she compared herself to him and felt guilty for choosing a more alternative lifestyle.
Even when siblings grow up with the same parents, their experiences of mother loss can vary dramatically. Caitlin, Brenda, and Kelly, for example, were all living at home when their mother was first diagnosed with cancer. But within two years, Caitlin had begun college, Brenda was in a boarding school eight hundred miles from home, and Kelly was the only child living with her parents. That was the year their mother began a rigorous radiation treatment program, and thirteen-year-old Kelly was the only daughter home to witness its effects. She vividly recalls making trips to the supermarket with her mother, who was so sick from the treatments that she would vomit first in the bread aisle, and again in the parking lot outside. Because Kelly was the only sister who experienced the fear and helplessness of those moments, it’s no surprise that she’s the daughter who speaks of breast cancer and illness with the most fear today.
Caitlin, Brenda, and Kelly say they can depend on each other’s memories to fill the blank spots in their own. But in other families, especially when siblings are distant to begin with, divergent memories and differing perceptions may only widen the rifts. Because a daughter often views early loss as the central, organizing event of her life and interprets the rest of her experiences in relation to it, her memories of her mother and her loss become fundamental building blocks of her identity. She’ll perceive a sibling who challenges her perception of the past as a threat to herself. A sibling with such a strong emotional interest in preserving her memories will defend her version of past events long after it no longer coincides with verifiable fact.
“My brother, sister, and I have very different opinions about the two years when our parents died,” Therese Rando says. “Certainly, people are very divergent in the way they perceive things, and there’s no greater divergence than when the three of us look back on that period of time. My sister remembers things that I’d stake my life she’s totally wrong on. She’ll say, ‘Don’t you remember when Uncle Bob and Aunt Rhea came up every weekend for so long?’ My brother and I both know, no way did they come up every weekend. They came up like once—twice at the most. I have external validation for that. But my sister is absolutely sure they came up every weekend. You’d think the three of us weren’t in the same place, but we were.”
When sibling recollections diverge this dramatically, the salient issue is not whose memory is right and whose is wrong, but who remembers what, and why. Dr. Rando believes that her sister may need to believe her aunt and uncle visited because it offers her a memory of protection at a time when the three early orphans were feeling vulnerable and abandoned. To relinquish the memory would mean having to acknowledge the pain of being left parentless and alone so young.
Caroline, fifty-three, says her long-time resistance to her sister’s contrary memories of their childhood stemmed both from her arrogance as an older sibling and from her own difficulties with mourning. Caroline, who was eleven and the second of four children when her mother died, describes herself as “the sister with the airtight memory, the one who can still tell you what food each neighbor brought to the funeral.” So when she and her younger sister Linda started collaborating on a book about their childhood, Caroline insisted that her sister’s memories weren’t correct each time they didn’t coincide with hers. But Caroline had begun the book as part of her mourning process, and as her healing progressed, she found herself more willing to accept and integrate her sister’s memories with her own.
It’s helped me to let go of the belief that I know everything. Now I realize I know what I’ve experienced, but I don’t know about anyone else, even someone as close as my sister, because her life was entirely different than mine. We were together for much of our young life, but she experienced a totally different time with our mother. I was usually out playing with my brother, doing stuff, having adventures, and Linda was at home with Mother, learning to cook and speak Norwegian. I understand now that no matter how much alike we are today, she has different memories and different grieving needs, because she lost something different than I.
As Caroline became more willing to see her sister as a separate person, she realized she could mourn with Linda without arguing or disagreeing. Two months before I met with Caroline, the two sisters had taken a day trip into the mountains to grieve together for their mother and their first stepmother, who died three years ago.
The Olympic Peninsula is the farthest point northwest in the contiguous United States, and Hurricane Ridge is one of the tallest areas there. It has a spectacular view. Linda and I drove through some clouds and saw the view, and just burst into tears and laughter at the same time. It was so body thrilling. We couldn’t contain all the feelings. We had planned to go up there and grieve for our mothers, and we did. We sang the songs from both of their funerals, and we called out their names. In our world, we mostly see men’s names written everywhere. We don’t always get to honor our mothers, whether they birthed us or not, and Linda and I were able to honor ours together.
Chapter Seven
Looking for Love Intimate Relationships
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow, As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe.
—Walt Whitman, “Vocalism”
MY FRIEND HEIDI SENT ME those lines on a postcard more than ten years ago. I still remember how each word was measured out in her neat calligraphy. Heidi and I met in the eighth grade, which gave us ample time to watch adult pattern
s develop and repeat. She counseled me through the dissolution of my first adult romance, and my second, and my third. By then, she knew my weaknesses. So on the back of the postcard, mailed from Boston the day after we’d discussed my most recent love affair, she gently warned me about following a false prophet who lured me with words I wanted to hear, and she signed the card, “Be careful with your heart, sweet you.”
This was not mere cautionary verse. Heidi had seen me, many times, give my heart away blindly, and too soon.
I won’t recount and relive every romance I had before the one that ultimately turned into a marriage. The details are messy, and they start to repeat themselves before long. I had several good relationships and a few long-term ones that started slowly, plateaued for a while, and ultimately ended when two people grew apart or found they couldn’t withstand change. But in between I had plenty of romances that ended before they really began. This is how I’ve always seen it: Once is an event, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a behavior. Everyone has her patterns. This was mine.
We would meet at a party or at a softball game or on a train. He would take my phone number, and call the next day. Then he started bringing presents, cooking dinners, asking to see me every night. I reveled in the attention, thinking, I am adored. I am loved. He wanted to know about every detail of my day. He told all his friends about me. “You’re are everything I’ve ever dreamed of,” he said. “I will make your life complete.” He would start planning for the future. That was week one.
Week two, I would start feeling the first shiver of unease. Should relationships begin so fast? I would muse to a close girlfriend, and ignore her wise response. If he felt this way, I would tell myself, it must be real; it must be true. We would spend our first night together, and he’d call in sick to work the next day. We would make crazy promises to each other on street corners, make love at midnight and again at dawn. I would know, even as I lay beneath him, that I was letting sex masquerade as love, but inside the parentheses of the moment I could make them one and the same. In the half-light of early morning with adorations whispered in my ear, I could convince myself that when two bodies merge together in an act designed to produce a third, if only his could sink far enough into mine, we could create a perfect whole: me.
The momentum would continue for a month, maybe a little more. And then the abrupt revelation—there was another woman, or some such obstacle or preoccupation, but couldn’t we still be friends? I was stunned, every time. Loss, again. Another week of crying, another month of swearing off men, and another series of hours spent sitting on a therapist’s couch, reviewing the warning signs that had been there all along.
Oh, I knew about the dangers of such high-speed romance. I’d heard the advice, read some of the books, and seen a half-dozen of the talk shows on TV. I’d learned that a man who steamrolls a woman so quickly has some other agenda in mind, and that genuine intimacy takes time, and so on. But when the need for affection is so great, desire always eclipses fact. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés points out, the unmothered woman will almost consistently override her intuition when she thinks she can find love. When someone offered me instant intimacy, my impulse was always to grab it, no questions asked, pushing aside all I’d read or learned, afraid that such attention might not arrive again.
It wasn’t exactly an optimal way to conduct relationships. For one thing, it was exhausting, and for another, I’d wind up naming children with someone before I’d seen him interact with anyone under four feet tall. I’m not ruling out the possibility of love at first sight; I’m just acknowledging that the operative emotion here was more a form of narcissistic need. When a motherless woman attaches to a romantic partner so quickly and completely, her attraction often derives not from mutual affection but from the one-sided hope of what he can give to her.
To some extent, the motherless woman is anywoman; looking for wholeness through relationships is a search we all—motherless or not—pursue. When I ask Andrea Campbell whether such a quest isn’t hopelessly misguided, she laughs and says, “To call this kind of search misguided is to say the whole human race is misguided. Even if our parents did live, they didn’t fulfill us in the ways we needed to be fulfilled. The most wonderful, perfect mother can’t do it. And so we’re all wounded in a way, all looking for someone out there to heal us.” But the motherless daughter, she explains, feels a deprivation deeper than that of most other daughters.
In an ideal situation, a daughter’s emotional foundation begins with her family and then, as she matures, expands to include her partner, friends, and self. The motherless daughter—especially one without an available and supportive surviving parent—begins from a point one step back. She first has to establish or reestablish a secure emotional base. As John Bowlby observed when he analyzed data from a 1987 British study of women who lost mothers before their eleventh birthday, a girl without a secure emotional base “may become desperate to find a boyfriend who will care for her and that, combined with her negative self-image, makes her all too likely to settle for some totally unsuitable young man. . . . Having married him, the effects of her previous adverse experiences are apt to lead her either to make unduly heavy demands on him and/or to treat him badly.”
Although Bowlby’s analysis describes the plight of some motherless daughters, theirs isn’t the only possible outcome. Attachment theorists generally divide individuals into three groups: those who form secure attachments with others as adults; those who are anxious or ambivalent about their social and romantic relationships; and those who avoid becoming close to others. Secure adults typically divide their emotional needs between several sources, including themselves; they can comfortably give and receive care. Anxious-ambivalent adults usually look to a partner to meet most of their needs; they give care in a self-sacrificing, compulsive manner and often attempt to find security and love through sexual contact. Avoidant adults rely almost exclusively on themselves; they’re unable or unwilling to give or receive care and are most likely to maintain emotional distance from others or become promiscuous.
Attachment patterns are believed to start forming in infancy, with their roots in a mother’s level of responsiveness to her infant’s signals. Mothers who warmly and quickly attend to an infant’s cries of distress, for example, are more likely to raise securely attached children than mothers who go through the motions mechanically, or without an emotional connection, and mothers who respond late, incompletely, or not at all. Most psychologists now agree that the kind of relationship an infant develops with his mother serves as a blueprint for the quality of relationships he’ll later have as an adult.
Even when an infant is raised by a loving mother and develops a secure bond with her, however, specific life events can disrupt his sense of security. These include a chronic, severe illness in the child or one of the parents; experience in foster care; mental illness in a parent; the dissolution of the family after parental death, separation, or divorce; and physical or sexual abuse of the child. A 1999 study of eighty-six children from birth to eighteen years found that those who’d experienced one or more adverse events during childhood, even if they’d received sensitive care as infants, were far more likely than other young adults to be insecure in their attachments and preoccupied with past relationships. The eighteen-year-olds who were securely attached to others had experienced few or no adverse events during childhood—a finding that points to the deleterious effect a parent’s mental illness, a parent’s death, and stress in the family subsequent can have on a child.
Studies that compare motherless daughters with other adults are even more illuminating. In a population of nonbereaved persons, roughly 55 percent of individuals will show evidence of secure adult attachment, 25 percent will be avoidant, and about 20 percent are anxious-ambivalent. When the psychologist Bette Glickfield conducted a study with eighty-three adults who had lost parents during childhood and adolescence, however, she found that 46 percent of her subjects placed into the secure category, with 17
percent judged as avoidant and 37 percent anxious-ambivalent. The significantly higher percentage of anxious-ambivalent adults in her study, she says, suggests that early parent loss makes a child more vulnerable to feelings of abandonment and worthlessness, which makes her fear and desire relationships as an adult.
A 2001 study at Johnson State College in Vermont had similar findings: When thirty married motherless women were compared to a control group, the motherless women reported significantly more anxiety and avoidance in their relationships with husbands than the other women did, even though two-thirds of them described their relationships with their deceased mothers in positive terms. Taken together, these findings suggest that motherless women may be afraid of losing their spouses, and may be preparing themselves for what they perceive to be another inevitable loss by emotionally distancing themselves from their partners. At the same time, they feel highly anxious about the possibility that such a loss could occur.
The Anxious-Ambivalent Daughter
Carol, thirty-six, describes her past six years as a series of rapid-fire romances that all began with the promise of immediate affection but never lasted more than two or three months each. Virtually all of the men she dated became unwitting participants in her attempt to find the emotional security she had lost at the age of seventeen, when her mother died.
Carol says she was never particularly close with her mother, whose Scandinavian stoicism discouraged any emotional displays, but she did draw security from her close-knit family. After her mother died, however, this system began to disintegrate. Within two years, both of Carol’s surviving grandparents also died, reducing an extended family of six that had once spent all holidays and vacations together to only three: her father, herself, and an older sister who lived in another state. Since then, Carol has approached all of her romantic relationships, including a seven-year marriage in her twenties, with expectations too large for one person to fill.
