Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  My relationships always begin with a strong sense of attraction and a feeling of hope—like, This is it; I’m not alone anymore. I’m looking for some kind of connection, a family feeling. I’ll be out on a first date and I’ll start wondering if I can be with him in the long term instead of getting to know him as a person. I put very high expectations on anyone I date.

  On one level, I’m really terrified of trusting someone, because I’m afraid he’ll leave. I have an inner belief that whoever I love will leave, or die. So I usually choose men who won’t get too close, but who then can’t give me appropriate affection and genuine caring because they’re all absorbed in their own stuff. I’ll try to get something from them they can’t possibly give me, and when they can’t meet my demands, I get angry and withdraw.

  Because I’ve been repeating this pattern so much, I’ve been getting much faster at seeing who can genuinely give to me and who can’t. I’m trying to learn the process of getting to know someone slowly and seeing if he’s appropriate for me or not. For quite a while I thought I should take what I could get. Like, “Love is here, I’ve got to take it,” instead of asking, “Is this the right one for me?”

  Carol’s deep need for nurturing extends back beyond her mother’s actual death to the years spent with a mother who showed little affection or emotion. Her repeated attempts to pull affection from men too distant to satisfy her desire closely resemble a daughter’s efforts to extract attention from an unavailable mother. Motherless daughters who grew up with emotionally distant fathers after their mothers died are likely to respond the same way. A 1990 study of 118 undergraduates ages seventeen to twenty-four at the University of Southern California found that those who recalled their parents as cold or inconsistent caregivers were more likely to worry about being abandoned or unloved, exhibit an obsessive and overly dependent love style, and suffer from low self-worth and social confidence than those who perceived their mothers and fathers as warm and responsive during their childhoods. During adulthood, the daughters of distant parents often formed relationships characterized by jealousy, fear of abandonment, and an obsessive preoccupation with finding and maintaining intimate bonds. As Maxine Harris also found in her interviews, many men and women who received little or no affection or emotional warmth after the death of a parent embarked on an almost desperate search for an all-powerful love they believed would save them.

  The continual repetition of loss that Carol has tolerated in her adult relationships also indicates that her mother’s death has influenced her attachment patterns. Rather than retreating into self-protection like an avoidant daughter, she has remained willing to travel the same route over and over again, hoping each time that she can rewrite the past with a happy ending. This time he will give me everything I need. This time he won’t leave. In spite of her hypersensitivity to abandonment, an anxious-ambivalent lover often refuses to acknowledge a departure when it begins. As the psychologist Martha Wolfenstein pointed out in the 1969 article “Loss, Rage, and Repetition,” a motherless daughter frequently denies or ignores the warning signs of a troubled relationship, insisting that this time she can be special and worthwhile enough to prevent a loved one from leaving. Clinging to a dead relationship or pleading for a last-minute change of heart is less an adult’s attempt at reconciliation than a child’s cry for the parent to remain. But because the daughter’s behaviors do not change, neither does their outcome. What usually happens is just what she set out to prevent—she reactivates a cycle of loss.

  “If the initial loss is never grieved, if there isn’t a working through and a reconciliation, then you’re going to have that repetition compulsion,” Evelyn Bassoff explains. “Going through an active grief process, mourning the loss of the mother, and finding peace with it makes the repetition of that kind of relationship less compelling.” In other words, when a daughter lets go of her lost mother, she also relinquishes the need to prevent other loved ones from separating from her.

  When a woman looks to a partner to mother her, she sees the relationship through the eyes of a child. She instantaneously regresses, expecting to get what she wants, when she wants it, and she’ll stamp her feet and cry or silently sulk when she doesn’t win. And what she usually wants is constant affection and praise.

  An inordinate “attachment hunger” typically develops in a daughter who feels she was ignored or overlooked during childhood. A daughter who can’t evoke an emotional response in a parent or parent figure begins to feel unreal and to doubt her own existence. As an adult, she then needs constant expressions of affection from a partner to assure her that she’s worthwhile and significant to others. But when her self-esteem and self-worth are completely dependent on this attention, she is unable to tolerate even the smallest deviation or complication in a romance. “She gets angrier quicker,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “More frustrated. Insulted. And so it’s harder for her as an adult to remain resilient and to maintain the tie. A narcissistic injury occurs with parent loss that makes her feel less important or not good enough. She carries that vulnerability right into adult relationships, and it makes for a difficult habit to break.” She perceives every sideways glance as an indication of her deficiency; only round-the-clock affection makes her feel totally secure. “Exactly,” says a twenty-three-year-old woman whose mother committed suicide when she was five. “And then the minute he stops paying total attention to me because he has to be normal—like, God forbid, go to work—I think, ‘God, he hates me. He’s not ever coming back.’” This daughter sees romance as a two-petaled daisy: Either he loves me or he loves me not.

  Anxious lovers, who often bond with partners quickly and approach adult relationships with a child’s expectations, have enormous difficulty withdrawing emotionally when a romance comes to an end. Letting go of a lover is an especially heartbreaking process for the woman who experiences the event as the loss of her mother again and perceives even temporary separations as deep, personal rejections. Blinded by an early experience that keeps her emotionally tied to her childhood, she believes—as a child believes—that she has the power to control others, and therefore interprets all failures and losses as her fault.

  Once a relationship has begun, survivors of early loss tend to remain overwhelmingly faithful to it. Maxine Harris’s interviewees had very low rates of divorce, reflecting the notion that relationships are too precious to relinquish willingly. But this kind of loyalty can go either way, explain Mary Ann and James Emswiler, founders and directors of the New England Center for Loss & Transition and the authors of Guiding Your Child Through Grief. “To the extent that it encourages someone to work hard on the knots in a relationship, it helps,” they write. “To the extent that it persuades someone to stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship, it hurts.”

  Even though Amanda, thirty-three, has been in a stable marriage for ten years, she still lives with the intermittent fear that she’s “not good enough” for someone to stay with in the long term. She was three when her mother abandoned her, and six when her father married a chronically depressed woman who had little interest in another woman’s child. During high school, Amanda looked for comfort and affection through sex, moving from one boy to the next until she fell in love for the first time at seventeen. “When that boy broke up with me, you would have thought my world had ended,” she explains. “Nobody could believe how hard or how long I cried. I just couldn’t get a grip. I had a really strong feeling that ‘this person doesn’t like me,’ and that would get me somewhere deep inside. I suffered for a long time from a lack of self-esteem, and I still get bouts of it every once in a while. My husband is an entertainer, so sometimes he’ll be working with a very attractive, have-it-together woman, and I get the big, green monster worse than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

  Amanda has begun to explore her feelings about mother loss in an attempt to overcome the childhood fears she has carried into adulthood. She is acknowledging that her anxieties have little to do with her husband’s behaviors, whic
h indicate only his devotion to her. For Amanda, these are important steps toward righting the wrongs of her childhood. As she is learning, a daughter who keeps her mourning at a distance stunts her emotional growth. As an adult, she responds to situations she perceives as threats to the self the same way she responded to her mother’s departure when she was a child. If a young daughter, for example, withdrew into silence because she had no outlet for her rage and grief, she may sit home alone seething silently twenty years later when her husband spends a Saturday night out with his male friends. “Nothing,” she says, when he asks her what’s wrong, because “nothing” was all she allowed herself to feel the last time someone she loved walked out the door.

  The Avoidant Daughter

  Twenty-five-year-old Juliet and twenty-four-year-old Irene were strangers when they first met. But as they began to share their stories of loss with a group of motherless women, they discovered that they understood each other well. After the deaths of their mothers, Juliet and Irene developed coping skills that insulated them from further loss, but have also isolated them from romantic love.

  Juliet, who grew up in an alcoholic family, lost her mother when she was seventeen. As an adolescent, she withdrew into self-reliance, insisting she could manage alone, and she grew into a relentlessly self-protective adult. “My thing was always, ‘I’m good, I’m okay, and I don’t need anything,’” she explains. “I had to depend on myself to survive. Now I find myself a person who’s unable to trust anyone else. I’ve never been in a relationship with a man. I’ve had a string of one-night stands. It’s like I say, ‘I’m so fine. I’m so taken care of. I don’t need you. Please keep your distance, because I’m in control.’ But it’s such a sad place to sit, because when I’m really upset and lonely, I want to be the kind of person who can ask for help if she needs it. And yet I feel totally incapable of intimacy. I’ve always needed to be so completely capable. I feel like I’m just starting to chip my way out of this block.”

  Irene, who lost her mother five years ago, turns to Juliet and says, “I’m so glad you just said that, because I’ve had the exact same problem. My mother was so dear to me that I’m afraid of losing someone else. I don’t ever want to go through that again. I don’t want to depend on anyone anymore, because I feel that if I don’t depend and I don’t love, then I won’t have to go through the pain of loss again. I just keep my distance from people so I won’t get hurt.”

  Intimacy doesn’t come easy for women who see it as an inevitable path to loss. Imagine the paralysis that results when you desperately want someone to love you, yet even more passionately fear the consequences of loving back. Daughters are often raised to define themselves through their relationships, but the avoidant daughter defines herself through independence alone. Taking care of herself has been her method of survival, especially when her surviving parent is unreliable or emotionally withdrawn. “Self-reliance is perhaps the strongest of the barriers that individuals erect to keep themselves at a distance from others,” Maxine Harris explains. “As long as the individual remains supremely confident, she does not need the help or assistance of anyone.” Maintaining this self-reliance in adult relationships then acts as a surefire method for insulating oneself from future loss.

  When a daughter fears loss so much that she believes it inevitable, she avoids forming relationships that might lead to the deep intimacy she craves. This daughter either dodges romance, chooses aloof partners, or extracts herself each time a relationship shows the first sign of long-term commitment. She refuses to make promises or respond to demands, afraid that such actions will lead to an intimacy that’ll be snatched from her again. She may become proficient at abruptly ending relationships before she has to make an emotional investment, an act that also allows her to exercise the control she didn’t have when her mother died. As a serial deserter, careful to leave lovers before they can leave her, she is not only sidestepping intimacy but also is looking for vindication for being left without warning once before. It’s as if she’s telling her mother, “See? I can leave you, too.”

  The psychiatrist Benjamin Garber recalls a client—let’s call her Virginia—whose fear of loss and distrust of close relationships destroyed every chance she had to find acceptance and love. Fourteen when her mother died, Virginia started dating a few years later, but with an attitude so cavalier and cynical that she consistently sabotaged every relationship she began. “Every time she got involved with a boy, she’d say to me outright, ‘It’s not going to last,’” Dr. Garber remembers. “She always felt she had to be involved in a kind of cautious way. There was a constant uneasiness to her approach, a looking over her shoulder. She worried about it, she talked about it, and, of course, sometimes she did things to make the loss happen. The way she kept her distance automatically gave boys the impression she couldn’t care less, and she went through a series of boyfriends. This was a very attractive, bright girl, but she couldn’t sustain a relationship.”

  Virginia’s behavior was a smokescreen for her fear of abandonment, an anxiety so pervasive it extended to her relationship with Dr. Garber. As a psychiatrist, he hoped his client would begin to view their relationship as a secure base from which she could venture forth and return, eventually developing the self-confidence and self-esteem to form other relationships without expecting them to end. “We’d had a good rapport, and the treatment was quite successful in other ways,” Dr. Garber recalls. “It allowed her to go on to college and do well in school. But each time she came home from college, she would ask if I was willing to see her. I’d told her before she left for school that my door was always open to her, but she called on several different occasions and each time needed reassurance over the phone that I indeed wanted to see her. She just couldn’t believe that I’d want her to come back.” Dr. Garber believes that Virginia saw the act of leaving for school as an abandonment she had inflicted on him, and she felt guilty about hurting him as her mother’s death had hurt her. She also feared depending on him to any real degree, afraid that if she did, he, too, would leave her emotionally bereft. Shortly after the phone calls he mentioned, Virginia stopped calling Dr. Garber at all.

  The avoidant daughter will feel safe enough to accept love from others only when she is certain she has created a secure base for herself. Ivy, forty-one, says she deliberately avoided marriage and motherhood until her midthirties for this reason. She was eight when her mother died of kidney failure, and despite the presence of a twenty-four-year-old sister who became her surrogate mother, Ivy felt she was a burden to her family. She became determined to achieve self-reliance as quickly as she could. Although she had several relationships with men during college and throughout her twenties, refusing to depend on others—or let others depend on her—became her compulsion during early adulthood. “I felt an obligation to take care of myself,” she explains. “As I grew older, being able to support myself emotionally and take care of myself financially became primary. Only when I felt I’d achieved that did I give myself permission to find a stable love, almost as if I had to make sure my life would have stability or foundation before I took a chance on allowing myself to be dependent on someone else again.” She was willing to risk loss only after she felt certain that the departure of another loved one wouldn’t destroy her emotional equilibrium again.

  The Secure Daughter

  Many motherless daughters can and do go on to have stable, committed relationships. Forty-six percent of the adults who lost parents during childhood in Bette Glickfield’s study showed evidence of secure attachments, and the majority of women interviewed for this book report that they’re currently involved in committed relationships. Of the 154 motherless women surveyed, 49 percent are married, compared to 32 percent who are single (including those with live-in lovers) and 16 percent who are currently separated or divorced. 8

  When loss—along with its accompanying fears—is such a determining event of a woman’s life, what helps her form warm, loving relationships as an adult? Bette Glick
field found the presence of a consistent, supportive, and emotionally attentive caregiver after a parent’s death to be the only reliable predictor of a daughter’s later attachment style. Those who had a surviving parent they felt they could depend on became adults who felt they could depend on others, and did. Other research indicates that good experiences at school, such as social relationships, athletic success, or scholastic achievement, lead to an increased feeling of self-efficacy, which bolsters a daughter’s self-esteem and makes her less likely to choose a marriage partner exclusively based on her overwhelming, subconscious need.

  Choosing an emotionally stable partner also appears to increase a daughter’s feelings of security in her relationships. When she believes she can depend on her mate, she can release some of her anxiety about abandonment. Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D., a psychologist and lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and the coauthor of When Partners Become Parents, found in her ten-year study of ninety-six couples from 1979 to 1989 that women from high-conflict families of origin (ones involving, for example, alcoholism, abuse, or loss) who married men from low-conflict families were much more likely to have secure partnerships and ease with child rearing than those who married men from troubled backgrounds.

  “There’s something about a man being from a more nurturing, less conflicted family that brings him to a marriage and a new family with more tools at his disposal to be a nurturant partner, and parent as well,” Dr. Cowan explains. “Even when a woman comes from a family where she didn’t have very good models of how to be nurturing, her partner’s ability to nurture can make a difference to her. It seems to provide a relationship in which she can feel cared for without the conflict from her childhood that’s so scary, or rejecting it would keep her from getting connected to him. In other words, something about the nature of the relationship with her husband makes up for or buffers some of what we expect would be the negative effects of having grown up in a difficult family. And when we look at her with her children when they’re small, she appears as warm and responsive to the kids as women who come from more secure backgrounds.” These women may have achieved what psychologists call an “earned-secure” attachment status, meaning that with outside influence, and over time, their pattern changed from an insecure state to one more stable and trusting.