Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  Gayle is an example of a woman stuck between the competing forces of matrophobia and what I call matridentity. Matrophobia, as Adrienne Rich explains in Of Woman Born, is the daughter’s fear of becoming her mother. A daughter sees her mother’s weaknesses and feels helpless against the forces of heredity. At the same time that she chastises her mother for her mistakes, she prays she won’t make the same ones. (“Oh, my God!” that anguished woman on the T-shirt cries. “I’m turning into my mother!”) Matrophobia can be a source of intense psychological distress for the motherless daughter. To her, it often includes the additional fears of becoming the mother who lost control of her body or her mind, who abandoned her children too young, who lived an abbreviated life, who had too many dreams she never realized because she had too little time.

  It would be easier to separate ourselves from these fears and suppress matrophobia for good if not for its twin sister, who snares us with equivalent guile. Matridentity—the inevitability that a daughter will identify with some of her mother’s traits—makes it impossible for us to dissociate completely from someone when our bodies, mannerisms, and behaviors evoke memories of hers. Every time I catch myself saying, “That woman sure is a piece of work,” my little “Mom alert” sounds. It’s a phrase my mother always used. I’m not even particularly fond of it, but sometimes the words just appear. With seventeen years of shared experience and 50 percent of her genes, it’s bound to happen sometimes, I guess. And that makes me wonder how much of her I’ve internalized that I’m not aware of and, despite my conscious choices to differentiate, how similar to her I already am.

  “I wonder whether in this struggle to become myself I have become what she was as a girl,” writes Kim Chernin, in her memoir about mother-daughter identity, In My Mother’s House. The idea that my life might parallel my mother’s sounds like an impossibility to me. We are completely different people. She studied music; I work with words. She married a New Yorker and was the mother of three children at age thirty-two. I married an Israeli and gave birth to the first of two daughters at thirty-three. Yet the similarities are impossible to ignore. We’re both first-born daughters. We both had two daughters. Both of us made teaching our secondary pursuits. And when I tilt the lens in this direction, I can’t help but wonder: Aren’t my mother and I really, underneath it all, very much the same?

  In the spirit of narrative, here’s a folktale I’ve heard:

  A new bride is preparing her first meal, a roast. As her husband watches, she hacks off a chunk at one end before placing the meat in the pan.

  “Why do you do that?” he asks.

  Looking puzzled, she replies, “I don’t know. That’s how my mother always did it. Maybe it improves the flavor. I’ll have to ask her.”

  The next day, she visits her mother’s house. “Mother,” she says, “last night when I was cooking a roast I cut off one end before placing the meat in the pan. I did it because you always did it. Can you tell me why?”

  “I don’t know,” her mother says, looking puzzled. “That’s how my mother always did it. Maybe it makes the meat more tender. I’ll have to ask her.”

  The next day, she visits the grandmother’s house. “Mother,” she says, “last night when my daughter was cooking a roast, she cut off one end before placing the meat in the pan. She did it because I always did it. I did it because you always did it. Can you tell me why?”

  The grandmother laughs. “I did it because my mother always did it,” she says. “So one day I asked her why. She explained that when I was a child, we were so poor we had only one pan, and it was too small for a roast. She had to cut off the end to make it fit.”

  Three generations of women, using the mother’s example as guide. It’s a powerful subconscious model. Even if you don’t graduate from the same college she did, or have three children like her, or cook a roast for dinner every Tuesday, or cook anything at all, the mother looms large in your conscience, goading you to make decisions similar to hers.

  As mothers and daughters act as mirrors for one another, reflecting images of the self, the mother projects a younger version of herself onto her daughter. To some degree, the daughter internalizes that image and co-opts it into her identity. This isn’t always a conscious process, as Donna recently learned. She was surprised when, at twenty-five, she recognized that she was living a life that closely resembled her mother’s at the same age. Until then, her mother, an alcoholic who committed suicide when Donna was twenty-two, had provided her mostly with a model of how she didn’t want to be. Donna had spent most of her teens and twenties creating distance between the two of them, moving out of the family house at seventeen, putting herself through college, and starting a professional career—all experiences her mother never had. But when she discovered she’d been identifying with her mother all along, Donna became inspired to seek out her mother’s stories and look for other similarities between them.

  My mother came to New York from Germany when she was twenty-five years old, got a job here, and met my father in a laundry room. They got married the next year. Here I am, just moved to New York to start my life and hoping to meet the right man. It’s as if there are two overlays—the mother here and the daughter there, and if you lay one on top of the other, you see the steps she took are basically the same ones I’ve been taking. Whatever molding is going to happen in my life now might happen to me here, as it did to her thirty years ago. It’s really quite amazing.

  If I could travel back in time, I’d love to meet my mother when she was younger, to travel around with her and see what she thought. When I was on the plane to New York, I met a woman from Germany. She had my mother’s cheekbones and eyes and hair. Her accent and her mannerisms also reminded me so much of what my mother would have been like in her twenties. For the first time, I wondered what it would be like to get to know the person she was before she even moved to New York.

  Our conversation was interrupted by a phone call from Paul, a man Donna had met the previous month. He was at a New York airport, about to leave the country for three weeks, and he wanted to let her know how much he’d miss her while he was gone. Six months later, Donna called me to share some good news. She and Paul had gotten engaged, she said—wasn’t it an amazing analogy to her parents? She sounded less surprised than she had the last time we spoke. Despite Donna’s initial antipathy toward her maternal model, she’d accepted that she could identify with some aspects of her mother’s life while distancing herself from those she disliked or feared. She’d made choices that benefited her by using her mother’s example as a guide, something she’d never expected would occur.

  Every daughter’s experience is one of identifying with and differentiating from the mother, and both processes are equally important. As Naomi Lowinsky points out, identifying connects us to our origins, while differing allows us to find our own destinies and not blindly repeat our mothers’ lives. It’s when the daughter feels the pull either to reject all aspects of the mother or to become an identical version of her—matrophobia and matridentity taken to their extremes—that her ability to sort out the “me” from the “her” and develop her own identity is impaired.

  “I’ve seen one woman for a number of years who’s patterned her life so she becomes the opposite of her mother,” Therese Rando says. “Her mother was not a good mother. She alienated family members and taught her daughter to view herself negatively. So this woman is now trying not to alienate family members, to give her own children decent self-esteem, and to take care of herself and her body because her mother wound up dying of breast cancer that went undetected for too long. These are all positive choices, but my concern about this woman is that she’s so determined to be the opposite of her mother, she’s losing the freedom to do what she really wants. You can identify with your mother so much that it tells you everything you need to do, but you can also identify so much that it tells you everything you shouldn’t do. I’ve seen it go both ways. In both situations, if a woman doesn’t allow herself the fre
edom to make her own choices, I wouldn’t consider that healthy.”

  Carol, thirty-six, described a similar conflict to me. Carol never had a close relationship with her mother, but since her mother’s death nineteen years ago, she has felt compelled to adopt behaviors that have little to do with her own philosophy or desires. “I’m constantly finding things that I’ve embodied from my mother, ways to keep her with me,” she says. “My frugality with money is really hers. When I tell myself I can’t have seltzer and to just have water from the tap, it’s her voice I hear. She was a very good example of how to be practical and make a dollar go a long way. I’ve taken some of her characteristics and multiplied their importance to an extreme to hold on to her. Now, I’m trying to shed those extra layers and get down to what’s really right for me.”

  Detaching from a mother’s posthumous control can be a long, arduous, and painful journey, but it’s often a necessary step in a daughter’s mourning process. When, like Carol, a woman adopts a mother’s behavior as a substitute for her presence, letting go of that character trait means letting go of the mother a little bit more. But it also allows a daughter more opportunity to develop the characteristics that make her uniquely her.

  Sheila’s story illustrates this well. As we sit talking in her apartment, she shows me a few items that once belonged to her mother, who died when Sheila was fourteen. She gestures toward a rocking chair in the corner, shows me a sculpture on the wall, and displays some jewelry she wears. But the item Sheila values the most is her mother’s green plastic recipe box, which she retrieves from an adjacent room to show me. The cards inside explain, in her mother’s and grandmother’s handwriting, how to cook the food Sheila remembers from her childhood. “This box is like a female history to me,” she explains. “My mother continues to live through it, in a way.”

  As an early adolescent, Sheila was barely in the initial stages of individuation when her mother suddenly and unexpectedly died. Her identity formation process slowed to a crawl until her early twenties, when she discovered how to separate from her mother at a symbolic level and then return on her own terms. Sheila did it through her mother’s possessions: When I was in college, my apartment was like a shrine. I had all my mother’s things. My home had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her. I’d felt so robbed of her and our life together that I wanted to re-create it. So I had all her stuff with me, to a ridiculous and scary, obsessive degree—things that didn’t work, things I didn’t even like, but that I kept because they’d been hers. She’d had green tin kitchen canisters from the seventies shaped like apples that were the ugliest things ever. When I moved away from that city, they were one of the things I threw away. It was a time when I’d started some of the separating, and I was beginning to see how my mother and I were similar in some ways, but not others. Once I recognized that she was within me, and started to gain some awareness of who I was as an individual, I didn’t need to keep all of these external things around me. When I moved, I really went through the apartment and chose what I wanted to keep. The items I have now aren’t indiscriminate anymore. I kept the rocking chair she rocked me in when I was a baby, and I repainted it after I moved. That was an important moment for me. I’d just moved to a new city and was starting a new life. I sat down alone one night in my new kitchen and repainted my mother’s rocking chair a groovy shade of green.

  We have no way of knowing what shape our lives might have taken if our mothers hadn’t died. Might we, despite the loss, have arrived at the same place we occupy now? Some psychologists believe most of our individual identity forms within the first three years of life, and that personality structure remains basically intact from then on. Others see identity as more fluid and malleable, and self-concept as a process of continual evolution. Still others propose that identity is a life story that individuals begin constructing, consciously or unconsciously, during adolescence. A mother’s death or absence occupies a central place in this story—often as the event on which the whole narrative pivots—and a daughter’s identity thus becomes inextricably interwoven with the loss.

  Just as I am one-half my mother’s genes and one-half my father’s, since my mother’s death I have been one part my mother’s daughter and one part motherless daughter. Both have become integral parts of my identity by now. From seventeen years with my mother, I learned how to be compassionate, charitable, and nurturing, and how to mother my own daughters. From the twenty-four years since her death, I learned how to be independent, competent, and strong. Sheila and I sit at her table, her mother’s recipe box resting between us, and consider a question both of us have asked ourselves many times: Am I as I am—who I am, what I am, how I am—because my mother lived, or because my mother died? The answer, we agree, is both.

  Chapter Ten

  Mortal Lessons Life, Death, Sickness, Health

  FOR MORE THAN TEN YEARS NOW, I’ve kept my mother’s medical records in a folder labeled “Documents.” I can’t manage more specificity than that. More precise words are just reflectors, cleverly disguised. If they weren’t, I might be able to get through the twelfth page of her mastectomy records without having twenty-five years’ worth of emotion bounced back at me. There’s one sentence there that destabilizes me every time. A nurse scribbled it the day before the operation, in between my mother’s age and a mention of her capped teeth: “Previous anaesthesia Caudal & Epidural, scared of her teeth chattering after the anaesthetic.”

  This was a woman entering a hospital to have her left breast removed, who knew that cancer had already invaded her lymph nodes, who had three children under the age of eighteen and no idea of what the surgeon might find, and she was frightened that her teeth might chatter in the recovery room. That kills me.

  It kills me because it is so much like my mom. It is so much like her to worry in advance about scaring the patient in the next bed, or troubling my father, or losing her dignity in front of strangers. It is so much like her to remember every detail of her three childbirths, right down to the part where her jaw vibrated uncontrollably when she asked to hold a newborn daughter or son. I can imagine her telling that nurse about her last anesthetic trip, about how her body left her and how it first returned, of all places, inside her mouth. I can hear her use the word scared.

  In fifty-six pages of medical notes, this was the only emotion recorded. It may have been the only one she expressed. Still, it makes me wonder: Was she angry? Did she feel grief? Easier, I suppose, to focus on the known quantities, on the medical tasks that could be regulated and controlled. “I’m scared my teeth will chatter,” she told the nurse, perhaps a cryptic shorthand for, “I’m scared the cancer will be everywhere. I’m scared I won’t wake up alive.”

  Whenever I read the words my mother spoke as she readied herself for a morning underneath a surgeon’s knife, the safe distance between us collapses with startling speed. She is no longer the mythic mother of my imagination, or the tragic heroine of a plot gone horribly wrong. She is just a woman who found a lump in her breast and sat with it for too long. She is human and fallible and real. And when she shrinks to the level of a mortal, she becomes frighteningly similar to me.

  I once read in a magazine that a woman feels the first pinch of mortality when she looks over her shoulder into a mirror and sees her mother’s ass. What is the sensation then—a slap? a kick?—for the woman who turns around and sees much more than that? In the mirror, I find my mother’s hips and hands and eyes. When I speak, I hear her voice, occasionally shaping itself around the same sentences I swore I’d never utter as an adult. And from there it seems only a short journey to the afternoon in an examining room when a doctor accidentally touches my armpit, feels a swollen lymph node, and asks, with sudden concern, “What’s this?” Such things can happen. I know.

  Genetic roulette awarded me my own face, but I inherited my mother’s shape—small breasts, high waist, wide hips, slim ankles, big feet. She pointed out the similarities long before I understood that a body could feel like
anything but my own. When I was five and sitting at the piano bench, she took my right hand and turned it over between both of hers. “You have piano hands, just like mine,” she said, and she showed me how her long, thin fingers could span an octave on the ivory keys.

  When I reached five feet, four inches in the sixth grade and my legs showed no sign of slowing their growth, my mother became determined to deliver me from the adolescent shame she’d once felt as the tallest girl in her class. In her walk-in closet she taught me the tricks of illusion she relied on to mask her body’s perceived flaws: cinch dresses at the waist to keep them from clinging at the hips. Use shoulder pads to offset small breasts. Avoid white shoes.

  I wonder how it made her feel, to watch a first daughter’s body unfold to produce a paper-doll image of her own. Was it a personal triumph for her, a chance to relive thirteen with a mother who knew modern fashion tips? Did it spawn a barely suppressed envy, reminding her of years spent in awkward adolescent solitude as she watched me flee the house each afternoon to join my small tribe of close-knit friends? Or, in the months after the diagnosis of cancer in her left breast, did she ever look at mine and wonder whether a lump could grow inside me, too—if an ability to cultivate malevolent cells would be her final gift to me?

  Perhaps this thought plagued her, or perhaps she kept it forcefully at bay. I don’t know. Although cancer runs like toxic sap up and down both sides of my family tree, we never discussed the possibility that it might show up in me. My mother didn’t speculate about its future plans. Her father had survived colon cancer in his forties and had lived for another twenty years. This was our paradigm for serious illness; she may have trusted that the same sequence would repeat for her.