by Hope Edelman
What is it we’re looking for? What can’t another woman provide? Time and again in my interviews, I’ve heard motherless women describe what they miss most. Their mothers’ cooking, they say; when they bake a lemon-meringue pie, it just doesn’t taste the same. Or their mothers’ companionship when shopping. They say they can’t bear to buy clothing alone.
Food, clothing, and the security that comes from the certainty of having both: these are basic survival needs, which a mother typically fills for a young child and gradually relinquishes full responsibility for as that child grows. Take food, for example. Over the years, the breast or bottle is replaced with spoonfuls of baby food, then with home-cooked dinners, heated leftovers, and money for school lunches with adolescent friends. At the most basic level, someone is paying attention to whether or not the daughter is eating three meals a day. When a daughter says she misses her mother’s cooking, she’s not just saying she longs for a slice of her pie. She’s saying she misses nurturing. Sustenance. Consistent and meticulous care.
These deep losses often surge to the forefront during a motherless adolescence, as a daughter begins experiencing dramatic physical and emotional changes. Even though an adolescent daughter may reject her mother as a caretaker and insist that she can manage alone, the mother still represents feminine wisdom and a female haven for her daughter’s bodily concerns. As a daughter experiences such female rites of passage as menstruation and loss of virginity and later, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause, she’s aware that her mother has experienced them first. She needs the support of someone who understands the intricacies of the female body when she feels alone inside of hers.
Roberta, thirty-two, says her mother’s death seventeen years ago left her without a sounding board for her female concerns. She’d previously gone to her mother with questions about masturbation and menstruation, but when she needed advice about physical development at sixteen, she felt she had nowhere to turn. Horrified by the thought of approaching her father and emotionally distanced from her older sister, she sat alone with fears that quickly turned into full-blown anxieties. “I was obsessed with being flat-chested, and I couldn’t physically use a tampon,” she says. “I was really scared I wasn’t feminine. I thought, ‘I don’t have any breasts, and I don’t have a big enough vagina to use a tampon. Where am I a woman?’ It’s not a superficial thing like cooking that makes you a woman, but ultimately your body that makes you one gender or the other. And I was horrified by what was going on with mine. Without my mother there, these seemed like insurmountable issues. I spent at least five years freaking out.”
As Roberta sensed, a father is rarely a refuge for stress during a daughter’s adolescence—especially with her sudden realization that he’s a sexual being. Although fathers do pass on sexual attitudes and values to their daughters through commentary and example, they aren’t the preferred source for female information. A Widener University study of twenty-four intact families with adolescent girls revealed that half of the girls had gone to their mothers for sex information and none had gone to their fathers. In this study, conducted among upper- and upper-middle-class families, father-daughter discussions about sex and sexuality were most often impersonal and noninformational in nature, if they occurred at all.
Without a mother in the home, a daughter’s first menstruation often represents little more than an anticlimactic and disappointing day. Naomi Lowinsky refers to menstruation—along with birthing and nursing—as one of the feminine mysteries, the deep, essentially female experiences that bind mother and daughter. For two thousand years, until A.D. 396, the Greeks celebrated this mother-daughter connection in an annual sacred religious ceremony at Eleusis. The Eleusinian Mysteries, as they were called, were based on the myth of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who are separated when Pluto, the god of death, takes Persephone to the underworld as his bride. A grieving Demeter mourns inconsolably and halts the growth of grain on earth in revenge, until Pluto agrees to return Persephone to her mother for nine months of every year. The Mysteries, a rite so venerated that all participants had to undergo an elaborate purification process beforehand, commemorated Persephone’s return to her mother as a reunion of two lost selves, as well as celebrating the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. “In our culture today, it’s hard enough for a woman to feel a connection to the mysteries,” Dr. Lowinsky says. “Without a mother, a first menstruation is just a big sanitary event, or it’s ignored. At least if the mother is there, she represents some sort of feminine energy to lean back on, to help a girl feel the largeness of it and to be moved by it, to be able to celebrate it in a female way.
“Most mothers and daughters share a secret kind of understanding about these things,” she continues. “It may not be verbalized very much, but it’s just that they share the knowledge of what it is to be a woman. We know we bleed monthly, and that we have other shared experiences that just aren’t spoken about in a man’s world. And we have our little secret ways about doing things, even if it’s cooking dinner or getting dressed. If there’s no one to share this with, a girl carries the whole weight of the unacknowledged and unknown mysteries, which can feel scary if she doesn’t have anyone to guide her. A lot of that guidance in our culture is shared and unconscious, but still, at some level, the mother is thinking about the fact she has a daughter who’s menstruating and can have children. Somebody’s paying attention to the significance of the event, even if it’s not verbalized. If nobody’s paying attention to it, the girl falls into emotional neglect.”
My first period with my mother was no grand fête—when I told her, she slapped me across the face and then hugged me, just as her mother had once done to her, an Eastern European tradition that, she later explained, signified driving away the child and welcoming the arrival of the woman—but I’m grateful she was there. Even if she wasn’t bleeding on that day, menstruation was a female rite we both now shared, and the slap and the hug tied me to the generations of women in her family who’d bled before.
Helen, forty-nine, remembers her first menstruation as an attempt to reach out and connect with another woman. She was ten, with an older brother but no sisters, when her mother died. Three years later she was home alone when her period began. “I felt scared and excited, but so lonely,” she recalls. I went outside and saw a neighbor walking up the street. I felt a strong need to stop her and tell her what was happening to me, even though I really didn’t know her well, and this was too intimate a revelation for the level of our relationship. But at least I got to tell another woman about this milestone in my life. I felt a bittersweet mixture of loneliness, failure, and triumph.”
Her own mother, Helen imagines, would have turned the event into cause for mutual celebration. In much the same way, I imagine my mother would have alleviated all my marriage and childbearing concerns. Of course we idealize. Of course. And we romanticize, too. It’s more comforting to focus on scant memories of a mother explaining reproduction or tampon use and dream of her lost potential than to doubt that she could have provided the support we feel we need. Giving mothers this kind of posthumous power allows us to remain their daughters. It gives us, in some small way, the kind of mother-daughter relationship we long for.
We soothe ourselves with these “would have’s,” when, in fact, many living mothers offer their daughters only minimal feminine support. An adult woman dissatisfied with her own gender identity can damage her daughter’s, encouraging feelings of inferiority, forcing the daughter into the same subordinate status she feels helpless to escape. Menstruation is hardly a festive event for the mother who equates a daughter’s fresh red blood with the aging of her own, and a daughter’s wedding is hardly a celebration for the mother who feels abandoned and bitter because her own marriage has failed.
But my mother? Oh, no. My mother would have grown in parallel fashion to me, never feeling envy, never feeling rage. She would have been the essential source for all things feminine, a font of information and support
about marriage, childbirth, and aging. She would have stepped in to reaffirm my gender identity at every critical point. In my imagination, she is everything I needed and still need. And when I insist on thinking like this, it’s so easy to blame her absence for making me feel deficient at the level of behavior, and at the level of feminine identity, cheated and deprived.
Explains twenty-five-year-old Ronnie, whose mother died eight years ago, “I really feel like I’m crippled without a mother. Like I can never be quite as good as a woman who has one. Like I can never know the things that she knows, or feel confident about myself.” And although I understand these feelings because I have them, too, I look at Ronnie—a beautiful, successful woman who seems so confident, so in control—and think that if I saw her on the street or across a room, she’d be one of those women I’d admire, one I’d be certain holds the very knowledge I so often feel I lack.
We are so good at concealing our blind spots. And at compensating as best we can. Conventional femininity cannot be our guide. We are reinventing the feminine. And most of us have barely begun to appreciate the value, or the enormity, of this task.
III
Growth
They remember what she gave. What she
made. What she did. What we were to each
other. What she taught me. What I learned at
her breast. That she made things. That she
made words. That she fed me. Suckled me.
Clothed me. Cradled me. Washed me. We
remember her labor. She told us how she
almost died. How she was weary. How her
skin ached. What soreness she felt. What her
mother’s name was. How her mother made
things. What her mother told her. How she
was pushed away. How she was hated. How
her milk was sour. What she wore at her
wedding. Where she had dreamed of going.
What our first words were. How she had
quarreled with her sister. How they fought
over a doll. How the other was prettier. How
she pushed me away. How she hated me. How
her milk was sour. How we hated her. Her
body. We remember our fear of becoming her.
What we were to each other. What we learned.
—Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature
Chapter Nine
Who She Was, Who I Am Developing an Independent Identity
I TOOK A TRIP to southern Florida about ten years ago to visit my mother’s best friend. There were some things I needed to know. Minor facts, mostly, and episodic detail, such as what my mother talked about at dinner parties and what made her laugh when her children were out of the room. But I had some larger questions, too, such as why she had chosen my father, and why the women’s movement seemed to have passed her by. Behind the mother had been a woman, and she was someone I never knew. Sandy had been there, throughout those years. I was hoping she could give me some clues.
We sat at her round breakfast table in Boca Raton one September afternoon, my tape recorder equidistant between us. The kitchen: an appropriate site for a talk with my mother’s childhood friend. Like my mother and her mother and her grandmother from Poland, I grew up in homes where the kitchen doubled as a social center, where daughters leaned against counters while mothers reproduced the recipes of their mothers, and where neighborhood women gathered for languorous gossip sessions while dinner slowly matured on the stove. I learned the family legends in my grandmother’s kitchen with its blue vinyl wraparound booth and bulbous white stove, and in my mother’s 1970s counterpart, with its avocado appliances and yellow wallpaper flowers the size of my hand, rooms where ancestral history hung suspended above the tables like after-dinner cigarette smoke. The smell of potato pancakes sputtering in golden oil or beef stew simmering in elbow-deep steel pots still signals the beginning of a story to me.
I live in a nine-room house now, with plenty of space to entertain. There’s a living room, a TV room, and an outdoor deck that offers a panoramic ocean view. Still, every time we throw a party, everyone swaps stories around the dining room table until late into the night. Story is the elixir of the roundtable, not the sofa or the chair. Maybe this is why in Sandy’s kitchen anecdotes about my mother spilled forth onto the vinyl placemats and why I, like a starving person, devoured every small detail.
Most of us know the facts about our mothers’ deaths. But how much do we know about their lives? Of the 154 motherless women surveyed, 30 percent said, “a great deal”; 44 percent, “some”; and 26 percent, “very little.”10
Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, fathers, and friends act as the conduits who convey information about the lost mother to the daughter as she ages. The mother herself, however, was usually a daughter’s most valuable source. Daughters who spent the most time with their mothers are thus the ones who feel they know the most about them. More than half of the women who were twenty or older when their mothers died said they knew a lot about their lives, compared to only 2 percent of those who were younger than twelve at the time. Likewise, only 13 percent of the daughters left motherless at twenty or older said they knew very little about their mothers, while 53 percent of those who were twelve or younger said the same. Daughters who were adolescents fit right in between, with half of those who’d been ages twelve to nineteen reporting they had some information about their mothers’ lives. This may be because younger daughters ask fewer questions about their mothers’ pasts, or because mothers tend to share their stories slowly, meting them out as they deem appropriate for a daughter’s current developmental stage.
When a mother dies, she takes her stories with her, leaving a daughter to reconstruct them in whatever way she can. Rita, forty-three, who was fifteen when her mother died, did her fact-finding through the mail. Frustrated by how little she knew about her mother, Rita created a thirty-six-page booklet titled “Questions I’ve Been Meaning to Ask” and sent copies to her parents’ surviving relatives and friends. She typed the 108 inquiries in one sitting, a flood of pent-up questions rushing onto her computer screen: “How did Louise feel about herself physically?” “Why did she divorce her first husband?” “What was her pregnancy and labor with Rita like?” In an introductory note she wrote, “Please don’t hesitate to tell the truth as you saw it. The whole purpose of this questionnaire is to gather facts and memories before they are forgotten. I appreciate your help.”
“I almost felt like an orphan trying to find out about the mother who gave her up,” Rita recalls. She mailed about a dozen questionnaires and waited for replies that she hoped would tell her about her mother’s childhood, first marriage, and involvement in the Communist Party in the 1950s, but she was disappointed by the feedback. Although a few of her respondents were forthcoming with their memories, most either didn’t remember or wouldn’t share the kind of detail she craved. “With some of the questions, I already had bits and pieces of an answer,” Rita says, “but it was important to me that I got it all. A lot of people wrote back asking, ‘Why do you need to know this? Why do you want to know this?’ They thought I was obsessed with the past, and that I had a problem. Including my brother. He had a hard time with me and my questions. I think he understands my need more now, because he and his wife just adopted a little boy and they’re helping him develop a family history book, but that’s definitely where he was at then.”
Rita’s critics raised a worthwhile question: Why would a daughter want to exhume her mother’s past? Why do Rita, and I, and virtually every other motherless woman I’ve ever met have the urgent need to scour history like scavengers on a beach, waving our questionnaires and tape recorders like metal detectors, hoping to uncover valuable nuggets buried beneath the sand?
“Part of it is that I’m curious by nature,” Rita says. “I like to know details about people. But I also feel like I missed out on getting to know my mother as a peer—an equal, as a human being, not just as my mother. And I wanted to know who she was. I felt
like I had a vague notion of who she was, but the more I learned about who I was, the more I wanted to collect her stories and understand what kind of person she had been.”
Storytelling serves a vital function in a daughter’s development: It’s one way that she makes sense of her past and develops a static identity for the future. For the motherless child, an attempt to fit individual life experiences together to form a meaningful whole often elicits the reminder of a missing piece. “These kids feel something is missing, and history is a part of it,” Benjamin Garber explains. “It’s not all that’s missing, but at least if they can cognitively compose some kind of story for themselves, they have a sense of continuity and feel more complete.”
To do this, a daughter needs to collect not only the details of her mother’s life but also the facts about her own. The personal mythology a woman creates to define herself depends on her early memories and on the stories she’s told, and mothers typically are the chroniclers of a family’s narrative history. When she dies or leaves, many of the details are lost. My father awaited each of my “firsts” as anxiously as my mother, but she was the one who made the entries in my baby book, shared the news with friends, and later passed the details on to me. As the oldest child, I’m the only member of the family who remembers hearing my brother’s and sister’s first words, but no one can recall mine. I have no way of knowing how much of what I remember from my earliest childhood is real, how much is misperceived, how much could have been a dream. How can I be sure of my past if I have no living history, no one who remembers my first word, my first smile, my first step?
