Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  Children who’ve been traumatized by death are robbed of its beauty and mystery, Andrea Campbell explains. Death is more an abrupt disruption than a cycle of completion and rebirth to the daughter who sees it happen to her mother during childhood or her teens, and she loses her psychic connection to the natural feminine cycle that gives structure to a woman’s life. “The female experience is one of being a cocreator and partaking in the mystery of life,” Dr. Campbell says. “That also means partaking in the mystery of death, and seeing it as a transition and a birth into another place. The young woman is the cocreator who brings forth life, and the crone is her initiator into death. And that passing of the wisdom should take place when a mother is in her cronehood, not her thirties or forties.”

  The real tragedy of my mother’s life is not that it ended, but that it ended so soon. Most of us who’ve lost our mothers are less afraid of dying than we are of dying young. This is the fear of the maiden, not the crone. It’s the reason why the motherless daughters who were most likely to report that they think about their mortality either all of the time or most of the time are the ones currently between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine.

  As I sit here writing, I am forty-one years old. I am the daughter of a woman whose cancer started growing when she was in her thirties, a mother of three who died absurdly young. I am also the mother of two daughters who are far too young to lose me. It does not escape me that I am the same age my mother was when her cancer was discovered. I think about it almost every day. I’m on a rigorous six-month screening schedule now, a mammogram every February and an ultrasound in the fall. The radiologist doesn’t need to send me little postcard reminders in the mail. I never forget. The gynecologist also checks me by hand every spring. It’s overkill, some physicians have told me. It doesn’t hurt to be cautious when you’re at high risk, others have said. I don’t listen to anything but my own intuition any more. As long as screening doesn’t hurt me, I say, bring it on. I can never be too sure.

  The high-risk label is an identification with my mother that I’d rather not have. But it’s been my front for differentiation, too. My mother had her first mammogram when she was forty-one, the one that found her lump. The only mammograms I’ve missed in fifteen years were when I was pregnant or breastfeeding. I eat an extremely low-fat diet. I practice yoga. I take fifteen supplements a day. Preventive medicine and early detection aren’t guarantees of anything, I know, but they’re the best I’ve got.

  “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” the author Susan Sontag writes in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” My mother’s illness gave me a temporary visa to that second kingdom, and I’ve spent as much time there as I wish. But should a lump ever appear that confirms my worst fear, or should I wake up one morning with any other disease that requires me to visit that place again, I would like to believe the choices that guide me through will be mine, and not ones dictated by my mother’s past. Like my mother and so many other women in her position, I hope I too would commit myself to “getting back to life.” But I also hope that—in sickness or in health—I can make the decisions my mother never made, the ones that might have saved her life. The best way I can separate my fate from my mother’s is to survive.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Daughter Becomes a Mother Extending the Line

  I WAS CERTAIN during my first pregnancy that I was carrying a boy. There was no logical reason for me to think this. I just knew I was having a son.

  A son. It was a strange yet wonderful idea. He would wear those cute little denim overalls and grow up to play shortstop in Little League. I would be one of those mothers who sat on the sidelines in blue folding lawn chairs, coolers of orange Gatorade handy, jumping up to cheer uninhibitedly every time he got a hit.

  I loved the way it sounded, the measured balance of both words. My son.

  My certainty about his gender was so unshakable that when, during my twenty-second week of pregnancy, the ultrasound radiologist announced that the image on the screen was female, I couldn’t find a way to make the news fit.

  “It’s not a boy?” I asked, incredulous, lifting myself up onto my elbows for a better look. “But I’m sure it’s a boy.” I looked over at my husband, who—ever trusting in my powers of prophecy—looked equally as confused as I. “It’s a girl?” I said. “That’s not possible.”

  The doctor swung the screen toward us and pointed at two small, parallel white lines hovering near the bottom. “Those look like labia to me,” she said.

  “You’re sure it’s not a boy?” I asked.

  She tried to contain her smile as she typed into the ultrasound keyboard. “You’d better hope it’s not a boy,” she said, “or he’s going to have some real problems.”

  A daughter. The image of that blue lawn chair dissolved into the fluorescent lights above me. It was replaced by the sound of a wooden bat cracking against a softball, then dully hitting the ground as a pair of flowered high-tops dug into the packed dirt and headed toward first base.

  That’s when I started to cry. Because only then did I understand how much I’d wanted a daughter, and how the fantasy son I’d created had been a protection for myself against the disappointment of not getting a girl.

  Over the next four months, I waged an endless battle between exhilaration and self-doubt. How will I know how to mother a daughter if I haven’t been mothered in so long? I wondered. Relax, I would tell myself. How hard can it be? And then I’d start worrying, Who will help me after the baby comes? My cousin volunteered to come from Australia for two weeks; that helped me stay calm. But I was still left with the big concern: What if I die young and have to leave a child, as my mother left me? From the moment I first learned I was pregnant that thought has surrounded me like a constant background hum.

  My daughter arrived in 1997, followed four years later by her sister. Now my weeks are ripe with the details and items of little-girl life: fairy princess costumes, Rapunzel puzzles, pink body glitter and butterfly barrettes, and every form of Hello Kitty paraphernalia imaginable. Five hours per day, five days per week I’m a writer and a teacher. The rest of the time I’m a confidante, cheerleader, referee, cook, personal shopper, and chauffeur to two very short, noisy people who bear a not-so-coincidental resemblance to my sister and myself more than thirty years ago.

  I once read somewhere that having a child is akin to having your blood circulate outside your own body. Sometimes I feel that it’s more than my blood they have: It’s fragments of my being, my essence, my very soul. And because of this, I have to keep reminding myself that my daughters are separate entities from me, that they’re individuals in their own rights, and not merely younger versions of myself. The temptation to mother them as I wish I’d been mothered, and to heal the child within me by doing so, is ever present. Parenting often doubles as self-parenting when a mother still longs to be mothered. Every day, I have to work hard to keep the distinctions clear.

  This phenomenon isn’t as problematic as it might sound. Every new mother naturally identifies with her child to some degree. While remaining adult and in the present, she simultaneously regresses psychologically to an earlier infant state which, according to the psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow, activates her earliest memories with a mother or mother-figure. When her baby smiles or cries, she then has an intuitive idea why and senses the appropriate response.

  At the same time, a new mother also identifies with her mother—or the mother she wishes she’d had—as she holds, feeds, and nurtures her baby. Our earliest memories of nursery care remain imprinted on our psyches, and we refer to them as models for our own maternal actions. In this manner, a woman unconsciously repeats the caregiving behaviors she received as a child, unless she has previously recognized them as harmful and taken conscious steps to change them in
some way.

  Every daughter splits her identifications between her mother and her child-self to form a third image of herself as a parent. The motherless daughter’s challenge is to resist overidentifying in either direction. As the psychiatrists Sol Altschul and Helen Beiser observed in their clients at the Barr-Harris Center in Chicago, women who suffer the early loss of a mother often become mothers who have confused identifications with their lost parent and their child, particularly with their daughters. A motherless woman who looks at her child and sees only herself projects an unnatural identity onto that child and may overprotect or smother in an attempt to repair herself. At the other extreme, the motherless woman who identifies strongly with her mother will fear dying young and may either emotionally detach from her children or avoid having them at all.

  Therese Rando counsels women to help them find a comfortable balance. “Identification can be healthy, as long as it’s appropriate to other things you’re doing and congruent with other roles you need to maintain,” says Dr. Rando. When a motherless daughter becomes a mother, she may need to build a new relationship with the mother she lost. “Her mother can still be seen as somebody who protected her as a child,” Dr. Rando explains, “but not as someone who’s protecting her now. These distinctions might not sound like much, but they’re profound. As a therapist, I have to say, ‘Your mother was like that once, but she’s not anymore.’ I don’t try to take the previous identification away, or say, ‘You have to let it go,’ but I try to find a way to work it in to a woman’s adult life and find a new, internal relationship with her mother that’s appropriate for her now. When my baby was born, and the nurse first brought her to me a few hours later, the very first thing I did was sing her a song my mother always sang to me. It was a beautiful connection to my mother. I feel even closer to my mother now, being a mother myself.”

  Fear and Desire

  A motherless daughter’s concern that she might leave a child motherless is often matched by an equally powerful drive to give a son or daughter the childhood—with the mother—she never had. Fear and desire are silent partners in the mother dance. It’s no surprise that the most common sentiment among the sixty-five motherless women ages eighteen to forty-five in my survey who don’t have children is, “I want to have a child one day, but I’m afraid.” Afraid of contracting a mother’s disease, afraid of knowing too little about childbirth or child rearing, afraid of never being as good a mother—or of being just as bad—as the one who died.

  Half of all motherless women surveyed said they either fear or once feared having children. These are women like twenty-seven-year-old Paula, who was fifteen when her mother died of a rare blood disease. When Paula, who’s African American, first met her husband, who’s Caucasian, the couple spent long afternoons naming future children. After marrying, however, they decided against raising an interracial child in the current social climate. Making this intellectual choice secretly relieved Paula, who says her real reason for avoiding pregnancy is much more emotionally charged:I’ve always had two fears. One is that I’ll fall down the stairs backwards and break my back. I don’t know why, but I’ve just always been afraid of that. The other is of dying during childbirth or soon after and leaving my husband to raise a baby. I go through this every now and then, thinking that I don’t want to leave him, and he’s not a U.S. citizen, and how could I do that? I keep having thoughts of having a child and then not being there, or of dying before my husband does and leaving a child motherless, and repeating the cycle all over again. When I sit down and think about it, I think, “What an irrational fear.” But who’s to know? Who’s to know what will happen?

  Paula’s anxiety about dying young comes from both her perceived vulnerability as a motherless daughter and from an overidentification with her mother. Her fear that an event as random as her mother’s disease could take her from her own child monopolizes her vision of motherhood. She’s put childbearing on hold, even though she admits she still longs for the type of mother-child connection she lost.

  Forty-three-year-old Darlene, on the other hand, endured three unsuccessful surgeries for endometriosis in her determined quest to have a baby. She was heartbroken each time she thought about remaining childless. “I had such a feeling of hopelessness and emptiness,” recalls Darlene, who was ten when her mother died. “I hadn’t had my mother in so long, and then I couldn’t be one. I so badly wanted to give something back to someone else.” When she and her husband adopted a baby boy, “the emptiness went away that very day,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d ever have a child, but with the adoption, all my dreams fell into place.”

  Watching one life end can inspire the powerful urge to nurture another—especially when a birth or adoption can create a bond similar to the one lost. As the psychotherapist Selma Fraiberg has observed, “The largest number of men and women who have known suffering find renewal and the healing of childhood pain in the experience of bringing a child into the world. In the simplest terms—we have heard it often from parents—the parent says, ‘I want something better for my child than I have had.’ And [she] brings something better to [her] child.” For the motherless daughter, this means giving a child a stable, loving home with a mother who lives long into that child’s adulthood.

  Motherless daughters often say they feel whole again when they have a child of their own. They say the type of intimacy they lost when their first mother-child bond broke returns when they reenter the relationship from the other side. And they say becoming a mother allows them to reconnect with their mothers, and in doing so regain a small part of the original mother-daughter relationship.

  Motherhood provided Mitzi, now fifty-seven, with the satisfaction of giving her daughters some very specific elements of the mother-daughter relationship that she lost at the age of twenty when her mother died.

  I don’t know much about my parents’ relationship, or my mother’s opinions about this or that. So I’ve always encouraged my daughters to feel free to ask me questions. If they want to understand why their father and I broke up or how I feel about anything, I believe it’s important for them to have that resource. And I want to be that resource, because it’s been very frustrating for me not to have that access. I also miss knowing how my mother felt about me, because I know how strongly I feel about my daughters. I mean, they’re human and they have their faults and their weaknesses, but I’m very proud of them and I would like to have known if my mother was proud of me. That information, I think, would have helped me understand more about myself and to know what influenced me.

  Motherhood allowed Mitzi to reenter the mother-daughter dyad as a mature, experienced participant with the insight to raise daughters who knew more about their mother than she knew about hers. Because Mitzi believes her identity formation suffered from her mother’s absence, she consciously took steps to aid her daughters’ processes.

  Ideally, a motherless mother remains in the position of parent—and, as Mitzi did, allows her child to be the child. But if the mother suffered a deprivation of parental love during childhood or adolescence that left her with an exaggerated need for love as an adult, she may expect her child to provide it, especially if her husband or partner is emotionally unavailable to her.

  When a woman bears a child to fill the empty space within herself, this “fulfillment baby” never has a shot at an identity of his or her own. The mother reads each of the child’s attempts to individuate as a betrayal, and each act of resistance as a threat to the secure base she spent nine months creating for herself. Fearing that the child will abandon her as her mother once did, she may try to exercise excessive control to suppress the child’s emerging autonomy. The child then grows up anxious, guilty, and phobic or, at very best, resentful toward the mother.

  “If a woman loses her mother very young and never mourns the loss, she often unconsciously tries to regain the closeness to her mother through the baby,” explains Phyllis Klaus. “When she has this extreme, nonaware aspect to her mothering, she c
an become an over-enmeshed mother, trying to get all the love and nurturing from the baby that she never got. And that’s not a good use of the baby. You don’t have a baby in order to give it what you didn’t get; you have a baby so you can fully give to it what it needs to grow.”

  The key phrase here is “never mourns the loss.” Women who lose a loved one prematurely and never reconcile their feelings of loneliness or abandonment may go on to form problematic attachments with their children. When Mary Ainsworth and her associates at the University of Virginia studied infant-mother attachment behaviors among thirty mothers who’d lost an attachment figure during childhood or adolescence, they found that 100 percent of the mothers whose mourning was judged as “unresolved”12 had children who seemed anxious and disorganized. Instead of seeking comfort from their mothers, these children acted as if the mothers were a source of stress. In comparison, only 10 percent of mothers whose mourning was judged “resolved” and 20 percent of mothers in a control group that had experienced no loss had children with similar attachment problems. From these findings, the researchers concluded that it is a mother’s unresolved early loss—and not early loss per se—that leads to troubled attachments with her own child.

  Andrea Campbell, who was ten when her mother died and twelve when her father committed suicide, never felt safe or secure enough as an adolescent to mourn. She married and gave birth while in her teens. “I had a daughter, and that daughter was so precious to me,” she explains. “Somehow I had my mother back by being a mother, and by giving my daughter that love. But I was really trying to heal myself, and when we unconsciously try to heal ourselves through another person, we instead inflict our wounds on that person. So even though I was a loving mother and I could give love because I’d been well nurtured for my first ten years, my deprivation still wounded my daughter.” After she mourned her mother as an adult, Dr. Campbell was better able to see how she’d viewed her daughter as a replacement figure, and the two have worked together since to change and heal their relationship.