Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  Without knowledge of her own experiences, and their relationship to her mothers’, a daughter is snipped from the female cord that connects the generations of women in her family, the feminine line of descent that Naomi Lowinsky calls the “Motherline.” A woman achieves her psychic connection to generations of feminine wisdom through hearing her mother’s and grandmothers’ narratives about women’s physical, psychological, and historical changes—bleeding, birthing, suckling, aging, and dying, Dr. Lowinsky says.

  When a woman today comes to understand her life story as a story from the Motherline, she gains female authority in a number of ways. First, her Motherline grounds her in her feminine nature as she struggles with the many options now open to women. Second, she reclaims carnal knowledge of her own body, its blood mysteries and their power. Third, as she makes the journey back to her female roots, she will encounter ancestors who struggled with similar difficulties in different historical times. This provides her with a life-cycle perspective that softens her immediate situation. It reminds her that all things change in time: Babies grow into school-age children; every recent generation has had different ideas about what’s good for children; no child is raised in perfect circumstances. Fourth, she uncovers her connection to the archetypal mother and to the wisdom of the ancient worldview, which holds that body and soul are one and all life is interconnected. And, finally, she reclaims her female perspective, from which to consider how men are similar and how they are different.

  Motherline stories ground a motherless daughter in a gender, a family, and a feminine history. They transform the experiences of her female ancestors into maps she can refer to for encouragement or warning. And to make these connections, she needs to know her mother’s stories. “So many contemporary women will say, ‘Find out about my mother? Forget it! She doesn’t understand me. I’m mad at her. She’s horrible. The last person I want to be like is my mother,’” Lowinsky says. “These are women who get blocked in their search. The woman who’s lost her mother already knows she needs to find her in some way. But she can’t hear the stories from her mother’s lips, which makes getting them really hard. She has to go to other relatives. And she has to deal with her grief about this, too. If you’ve lost your mother and you start looking for your Motherline, you come right up against enormous amounts of grief and loss. You have to be ready to deal with those emotions.”

  A daughter knows about her mother only as much as both of them want her to learn, and for me at seventeen, that wasn’t very much. Who knew we’d run out of time? When my mother told me stories of her childhood, I took only what I found immediately useful—she almost drowned when she was seven, so I’d better learn how to swim—and promptly ignored the rest. She, in turn, chose to relay stories as they coincided with comparable milestones in my life. I can tell you about her first menstruation, her first date, and her Sweet Sixteen in great detail, but her wedding, her first pregnancy, and her child-raising philosophy are almost complete mysteries to me.

  Like Rita, I knew my mother as a mother, never as a woman or a friend. My memories of her are bracketed by the dawn of my cognition, when I was roughly three and she was twenty-eight, and her death when she was forty-two. Fourteen years—that’s all I’m sure of, and even that is filtered through the perception of a child or a teen. I wasn’t mature enough at seventeen to see my mother as an autonomous woman, with dreams and disappointments that didn’t include me. I pushed away her attempts to coax me into adult confidences; they felt too premature. I didn’t want to hear her opinions about her marriage or sex life when I was in my teens—I’m not even sure I’d want to hear them now—and I alternated between shifting my weight uncomfortably and bolting from the room.

  I was twenty-five before I wanted to learn about my mother as a young adult and a wife, a desire that led me to my mother’s longtime friends in Pennsylvania and Florida, and then around the neighborhood where I’d grown up, asking questions and gathering stories from women who’d known her well. Sandy told me about her as a sorority sister and young bride; another friend told me about the night she lost her virginity, a story that had elicited only an embarrassed, “On my wedding night, of course,” when I’d asked her about it at fourteen.

  Twenty-five wasn’t an arbitrary year for my exploration—it coincided with two important thresholds in my life. First, I’d finally begun to mourn, and second, I was feeling almost uncontrollably jealous as I watched my female friends approach their mothers as quasi-equals for the first time. Their old parent-child power structures were still nominally in place, but my friends were beginning to assess their mothers’ strengths and weaknesses, decide which characteristics they’d want to adopt as their own, and determine how far they’d be willing to stray from what they’d learned in their mothers’ homes.

  Whether she’s a corporate vice-president or a homemaker, a single parent or a wife, the mother is the primary female image a daughter internalizes and refers to for comparison throughout her life, the mile marker against which the daughter measures her own travels. A twenty-year-old daughter with a forty-five-year-old mother mentally compares herself with two versions of her mother: the twenty-year-old she has pieced together in imagination from her mother’s stories, and the forty-five-year-old she sees. When the daughter herself turns forty-five, she then compares herself to the forty-five-year-old mother she remembers, and also to the seventy-year-old one she knows.

  But a mother who dies young is a woman interrupted, and her daughter’s image of her freezes at that point. When I try to identify the similarities and differences between my mother and myself, I’m working with limited material. On the one hand, I’m comparing myself to a forty-one-year-old Marcia I knew only from a seventeen-year-old’s point of view; on the other, I’m comparing myself to a woman who never ages. When I turned seventeen, she was forty-two. Now I’m forty-one and she’s still forty-two. My mother will remain older and more experienced than me for only one more year. And I wonder, what then?

  Twenty-nine-year-old Karen also is concerned about losing her mother as a psychological guide. Even though she won’t reach her mother’s age for more than thirty years, Karen is starting to pass her in other ways.

  During Karen’s childhood, her domineering mother frequently asserted her own superiority. After her mother’s death nine years ago, Karen continued to perceive herself as the weak daughter of a powerful mother. But as she gets ready to complete her college degree, Karen is beginning to reconceive herself as intelligent and worthwhile, and now she wonders what place a mother who tried to convince her otherwise can occupy in her life.

  Knowing that I will be more educated than she was is very difficult for me to accept. To excel somewhere beyond where my mother excelled ruins my mythic mother image. She won’t always be older than me, she won’t always be smarter than me, or better than me. Someday she’s not going to be the great and powerful Oz. Someday she’s going to be the little woman behind the curtain. I think she’s getting there already. And that’s very hard.

  It’s as if you’re an athlete and you’re competing to be the best. As long as you’re not in the top spot, you always have somebody to strive against. But once you’re the best in the world, you don’t have anyone to compare yourself with anymore. I always compare myself to my mother to measure my progress. Well, once I’ve gone beyond what she achieved in areas she was concerned about—she very much wanted to finish her college degree and didn’t because she had kids—I lose that protector image. What do you do once you’re beyond those archetypal images in your head? Then who do you try to be like?

  In a way, for me it’s like the idea of existing without a God. If you don’t have somebody who’s monitoring your good deeds and your bad deeds, who’ll praise you with heaven or punish you with hell, you grow up in a different way. You have to monitor your own ethics because then the universe is random. There isn’t that arbiter of your behavior out there, and hey, then you’re on your own.

  Karen is right: Without a
living mother to refer to for comparison, a daughter invents much of her identity alone. In theory, she’s free to make her own decisions and learn from her own mistakes. In practice, however, she is frightened by the solitude this entails. Hoping to find a guide, she seeks out as much information as she can find about her mother’s life. This generally happens during a woman’s twenties, when the developmental urge to return to the mother seizes hold of her. A daughter’s need for a woman-to-woman reunion doesn’t disappear just because her mother is no longer alive. By collecting information to re-create the mother as she was—not only as a parent, but also as a woman—the daughter tries to mature her image of her mother by imagining what their relationship might have evolved into and giving herself the closest approximation to a reunion she can have. She also searches for similarities between her mother and herself in an effort to secure her place in the Motherline.

  Until Margie, now twenty-five, began gathering information about her mother, she remembered her only as the solemn, depressed woman who committed suicide eighteen years ago. She hadn’t wanted to identify with this mother in any way. But in her early twenties, Margie felt she needed to connect with a woman in her family, and she asked her maternal grandparents for the first time to tell her stories about her mother as a young woman.

  I had always thought my mother had been shy and withdrawn, kind of introverted and quiet, but then I found out from my grandparents she hadn’t been like that at all. She was very open and extroverted, very loving and giving, a real life-of-the-party kind of person. That’s why her depression was even more dramatic, because it changed her so much. I see myself more as an extrovert, like she really was, than as the kind of introvert I remember her being. My mother was also musical, articulate, and good in school. Those are other things I can identify with, and think, “Yeah, I’m like that, too.” I didn’t just grow out of a flower like Thumbelina. I do have some kind of biological connection to someone. It’s not just that I look like her and might be prone to depression, but that I have these other, positive qualities that are related to her, too.

  Instead of fearing a maternal connection because of its association with depression and death, Margie is reestablishing a bond with a mother she’s still getting to know. But she’s only completed half of her journey. Rediscovering the mother is a two-step process, first requiring the resurrection of her as a woman and then, through imagination, aging her to the point where she might be today. And that’s the harder part. To have a sense of how my mother and I might have related now and to compare myself to both mothers—the forty-one-year-old I knew and the sixty-seven-year-old she would be today—I have to fast-forward her in my mind. I have to theorize how the cultural forces of the 1980s and 1990s might have shaped her, to imagine what she might have become if she hadn’t been slowed down by cancer, to envision all the places she might have gone to, if she hadn’t died.

  I thought I knew what my mother wanted for me. I used to imagine the deathbed conversation we never had. She would hold my hand as she relayed her final wish. “I want you to grow up and be happy,” she would have said. “Go to college and find a good husband. Preferably a Jewish doctor, who’ll buy you a house on Long Island. But not Great Neck or the Five Towns. Go a little farther out, maybe Massapequa. Will you promise to do that for me?”

  You think I’m joking, but I’m not. My mother grew up in the sector of suburban, Jewish New York in the 1950s and 1960s that sent daughters to college to marry professionals and measured a woman’s success by the carat-count of her diamond ring. I’d like to think my mother would have developed more expansive dreams for her daughters if she had lived long enough to see us succeed in other areas—or at least as she watched the country’s economy turn dual-career marriages into a necessity—but I remember her prepping me only for a future that included a white dress, a long aisle, and one of those good men who were so hard to find. This was her vision of female success, and she wanted it all for me. She was appalled by my first boyfriend, a reformed juvenile delinquent who wore his hair down to his chin. Of course, I chose him partly because I knew how strongly she’d object. We were at that stage of mother-daughter rebellion. And we were still in it nearly a decade later, because I got stuck there when she died.

  Because certain elements of a daughter’s personality can arrest when a mother dies, she may grow into adulthood retaining characteristics of the developmental phase she was in at that time. The child then grows into a woman still dependent on the lost mother. The adolescent may continue to reject and rebel against her as an adult.

  That was how I operated for the first nine years after my mother’s death, and it was a handy way of keeping the mother-daughter relationship alive. Death didn’t silence my mother’s demands. Inside the confines of my head, she still tried to give me advice I didn’t want to hear, and I still refused to take it. I left New York at eighteen with no intention of living within a hundred miles of Long Island ever again, and I avoided pre-med students as if they were the eleventh plague. I remained determined not to live the life my mother had intended for me, and to assert my independence by creating one of my own design.

  Perhaps I wouldn’t have continued to rebel so forcefully if I hadn’t felt a simultaneous, subterranean pull toward precisely the future I was rejecting so vehemently. That was the part of my little drama I never discussed with anyone: the deep guilt I felt for straying from my mother’s preordained path, and a secret longing for the security that she had assured me such a future would supply. So at the same time that I was deliberately resisting my mother’s wishes, I was also taking steps to accommodate us both. When I was twenty-three, I pledged my future to my college boyfriend. He wasn’t Jewish and he wasn’t from New York, but he was about to begin law school, and that seemed like an acceptable compromise to me. As I edged him toward marriage, I believed my mother would have been proud, knowing I was about to become a wife.

  Only with my broken engagement and the hindsight of several years was I able to see that I wasn’t just trying to live the life I thought my mother wanted for me. No, I was also trying to live the one she never had. She never lived outside New York. She taught music for a few years before I was born, but she never turned it into a career. And she never married that doctor (or dentist or lawyer or CEO) and bought that big house, all of which her mother had once wished for her, too.

  I’ve yet to meet a daughter with a mother who would willingly sacrifice her own identity to satisfy her mother’s vicarious urges, but motherless daughters do this all the time—out of guilt, out of obligation, out of grief, out of love. We try to honor our mothers’ unfulfilled desires, as if we can somehow give them the years they never got to live. It’s as if we believe that by becoming the daughters our mothers always wanted us to be, or by living the lives they always wanted to live—by, in effect, becoming them—we can keep our mothers with us and prevent them from leaving us again.

  It’s challenging enough to run one life. It can be utter confusion trying to fulfill the dreams of two. Gayle, now thirty-two, has been struggling with this identity conflict for the past fourteen years. She and her mother were closely bound during her childhood and adolescence, and since her mother’s death from cancer when she was eighteen, Gayle has vacillated between the impulse to become her mother and the desire to remain her mother’s daughter—both to the exclusion of claiming an identity for herself.

  If my mother had stayed alive, I might have learned I could have my own life. But when she died, it was like I couldn’t. I wouldn’t allow myself to do things that she would have said no to, and since she wasn’t alive to ever say yes, the only guidelines I had to go on were what she’d allowed me to do or what she’d done herself in the past. It was perfectly fine for me to leave college, because my mother had dropped out, too. And I became involved with a man who wasn’t at all good for me, but who I know my mother would have adored.

  I was trying to repeat her life and then finish it out, I guess. I started not taking care of
myself physically or emotionally, and that’s what she had done. That’s how she got sick to the point she did, because she didn’t feel she was important enough to tell people how she felt or what was wrong with her. I have to go for some tests next week to see if I have a precancerous condition, or cancerous condition, though I prefer to say precancerous. Which also feels like I’m living out her life, because the lymphoma she had is hereditary. It would be very ironic if I wind up taking care of my mother that way.

  When her mother died, Gayle was just beginning a delayed and difficult psychological separation from her. Like every other adolescent girl, she had the confusing task of having to identify with the same person she was trying to separate from, and to somehow emerge from those years with an identity of her own. Her mother’s death arrested this process at a critical point, leaving her half bound to her mother and half committed to herself. Like many other motherless women, Gayle then remained caught between the fear of repeating her mother’s past (thus, the distance she put between herself and the word cancer) and her strong need to remain connected (which fueled her impulse to finish her mother’s life). Kept in check by a psychological maternal police that still tailored its punishment and praise for an eighteen-year-old, Gayle had entered her thirties nearly powerless against the influence of a mother long dead.