Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  Gender Matters

  “I don’t care what sex my baby is, as long as it’s healthy,” nearly every pregnant woman says. It’s the maternally correct response, and it’s also usually true. But as Dr. Campbell acknowledges, a same-sex child offers a parent an additional vicarious potential that an opposite-sex child can’t, and in confidence, many motherless women will reveal their secret desires to give birth to girls. Three-quarters of the women interviewed for the book Motherless Mothers admitted they’d hoped for a daughter during their first pregnancies, usually because they saw this as a way to resurrect the mother-daughter relationship they’d lost. Others wanted to name a daughter for their mothers, or were hopeful a girl would physically resemble her and, in some small way, bring the mother back to life.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” says thirty-four-year-old Cecilia, who was twenty when her mother died and is now trying to get pregnant for the first time. “I want to have a daughter for that reason. I mean, I want to have any baby, a boy or a girl, but I told my husband, ‘We’ll keep trying for a daughter.’ Like if we had two boys, I would still want to keep trying for a girl. When you’re trying to get pregnant there’s this taboo that you shouldn’t say such things, but it’s how I truly feel.”

  A small, yet notable, minority of motherless daughters say they want a son, often because they’re worried they don’t have the emotional tools or the mother-daughter experience they need to raise a girl. “I was filled with dread by the thought of having a daughter,” admits fifty-one-year-old Adele, whose mother was institutionalized for Adele’s entire childhood and died when Adele was twenty. “I can’t relate to girls. I relate more to men. And we wanted a son anyway, but when we found out we were having a boy I was very relieved. If I’d had a daughter, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  Shari Lusskin, M.D., the director of reproductive psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, advises that women who have a strong preference for either gender do prenatal testing to find out their baby’s gender in advance. “I saw a woman in my office the other day who’s four months pregnant and said to me, ‘You know, I really want a girl. So I don’t want to find out the sex, because if it’s a boy I’m just going to be disappointed,’” Lusskin recalls. “I said to her, ‘Find out the sex. Please. Because then we have five months to get over any disappointment.’ It doesn’t get better in the delivery room.”

  To the woman who feels deprived of mother love, a daughter offers the most direct route to maternal reconnection. If, as Carl Jung proposed, every woman extends backward into her mother and forward into her daughter, then giving birth to a daughter ensures the immortality of her female line. A baby girl in the nursery also brings a woman’s lost mother back into the room. And because daughters are typically socialized as society’s nurturers, a mother sees in her daughter the potential to enjoy a close, empathetic female relationship again.

  As close as the mother-son bond may be, a son is less likely than a daughter to become the object of his mother’s self-projections. Mothers tend to view daughters as continuous with themselves and their sons as male opposites. Physiologically, a son is an imperfect mirror. He reflects back body parts his mother doesn’t possess, and can never represent a complete, gendered extension of her self. Socially, he moves through lands in which his mother has traditionally lacked power—street games, fraternities, war. “The amazement of sons is that they are of us, such intimates, and yet so other,” explains Naomi Lowinsky, who has one son and two daughters. For exactly this reason, a son can offer his motherless mother the opportunity for unexpected and extraordinary personal growth.

  Annie: Moving Beyond the Mother

  Annie leans back in her eleventh-floor office, her feet propped on a nearby chair. Her hands rest gently on her abdomen, poised to feel her first child’s impatient kicks. At thirty-seven, she has all she always hoped for: a successful career, a happy marriage, and a baby on the way. The baby part is important. Ever since she lost her mother to cancer when she was eight, Annie has been waiting to re-experience the mother-daughter bond.

  There’s only one small hitch: Annie is going to have a son.

  A son? That’s what she thought when she first heard the news. “It had never occurred to me that having a child was not synonymous with having a daughter,” she says. “I was so shocked at this little person being a boy. It was like a punch in the stomach. It really was. When I got the amnio results, I wanted to say, ‘What do you mean it’s a boy? There must be some mistake.’ Over the next few days, I really felt cheated. I felt robbed. My huge, sustaining fantasy had been taken away from me.”

  You see, for twenty-nine years Annie had been planning to recreate her childhood and give it the happy ending it deserved. As an only child, she had endured terrible loneliness after her mother’s death and had comforted herself with the fierce resolution to one day share with a daughter all that her mother had once shared with her—going to art classes, listening to music, reading, watching thunderstorms from the terrace—and then continue their relationship forward. When Annie and her husband decided to have only one child, she grew doubly determined to become the idealized mother she imagined her mother would have been. The script was already written, and Annie knew her part. All she needed was the little girl who would play her as a child.

  The amniocentesis results, Annie says, quickly destroyed her fantasy of a perfect reunion. But knowing the child inside her is a boy has guided her toward a more realistic vision of motherhood, she says. “The first thing that happened was that I got terrified, because I realized the responsibility of motherhood,” she recalls. “It was no longer a fairy tale. It became very present tense. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. This person is going to be Other.’ I don’t know that I would have let a daughter become separate from me. Because that girl was me. She was supposed to react exactly the way I reacted to everything. If she had come out a tomboy hating to read, I would have been so lost. I would have felt so betrayed.”

  Instead of rewriting her childhood, Annie decided to rewrite her script for motherhood. She began by listing her prejudices about boys—they’re aggressive, they’re uncommunicative, they’re little things with sticks who hit people—and worked to overcome them. She spoke with mothers of boys who told her how much sons love their mothers. And she reconsidered the activities she’d once imagined sharing with a daughter—going to art classes, listening to music, reading, watching thunderstorms from the terrace—and realized she could just as easily share them with a son.

  “The real reason I wanted a daughter was to create the insulated cocoon I still crave, that place where you belong uniquely,” she says. “What I didn’t realize was that a son could occupy that place, too.” She and her husband recently chose a name for the child, who she says is becoming more real to her every day. “I feel like there’s such a fresh start with this baby boy,” she explains. “Instead of looking at what I’m losing, which is the fallacious opportunity to complete my life, I can look at what I’ve got, which is an opportunity to be a mother.”

  At the same time that Annie identifies with her mother by becoming a mother, she is separating from her, too. Annie is an only child because her mother found a malignant breast lump during pregnancy and had to postpone treatment until after the birth. When Annie was born, her mother was told she had only six months to live. Even though she survived for another eight years, she died at the age of thirty-four, and the message Annie internalized was that pregnancy equals early death.

  The joy of completing her first trimester inevitably intermingled with that fear. “But at a certain point,” Annie says, “I made a very conscious choice not to be afraid. I’m going to be pregnant once, and I want to enjoy it. To do that meant having to give up that negative association and attachment to my mother. I’ve passed the point in pregnancy when my mother was diagnosed, and I was okay with it.

  “My husband was shocked last weekend when I told him I wanted to go to my mother’s grave,” she conti
nues. “I want to go there pregnant with this child and say, ‘I’m not doomed to what happened to you.’ Because her death was synonymous with my birth, this is even more powerful than passing her age. This is passing her death sentence.”

  Her healthy pregnancy and her revised vision of motherhood have helped Annie mourn another piece of her loss. By letting go of both the fantasy and the fear of repeating her mother’s history, she is coming closer to accepting the finality of her mother’s death. “For the first time, my past is really different from my mother’s,” Annie explains. “She had a daughter. I am having a son. It’s such a huge difference. This is the first time in my life I really feel like I’m moving beyond my mother. And I feel a tremendous sense of freedom.”

  Pregnancy and Birth

  “In the middle of my first pregnancy, I panicked because I felt that I didn’t have a support system,” says Bridget, thirty-six, who had her first child three years ago. “I didn’t like the doctor I was going to, so I found a midwife. She was in her sixties and very maternal. She was wonderful. But then when my son was born, it was as if my mother had died the year before. The loss felt fresh again. And it blew me away. It totally blew me away.”

  During pregnancy and childbirth, as the generational cycle prepares to begin again, the biological mother looms large in the consciousness of the mother-to-be. A husband can offer emotional support and a father a sense of family, but birthing is the business of women. How many men know the specific irregularities of a mother’s menstrual cycle, the duration of her labor, or the kind of painkillers she received? This is the verbal legacy that passes from mother to daughter, and which daughters rely on for comparison and guidance. When the mother-daughter relationship is going well, the daughter depends on her mother to help her build self-confidence, asking for stories about her birth and early childhood and seeking encouragement that she can handle motherhood’s demands.

  Mothers-in-law, older sisters, aunts, and close friends can help fill this void in a motherless woman’s life. But a pregnant woman without a strong maternal substitute, and especially one who hasn’t mourned her mother, often feels isolated and adrift. Pregnancy ranks high among the worst times in a woman’s life for her to feel alone. It’s a natural time of dependency—even the most independent woman can’t always manage the emotional and physical demands by herself—and an expectant mother has a strong need for security and support.

  “Even women who have terribly difficult relationships with their mothers and have mixed feelings about their mothers being present still want them around when the baby is born,” Naomi Lowinsky says. “You’re so opened up by pregnancy and birth. It’s a transformative experience, and it leaves you in pieces. A woman really needs to have a sense of mother at that time.”

  Pregnancy and the postpartum period can be bittersweet times for the motherless daughter, who feels closer to her mother as she becomes one but also feels an intense sadness as she confronts her loss again. As a milestone event in a woman’s life, childbirth—particularly with a first child—commonly triggers a new cycle of mourning for the lost mother, involving intense feelings of grief, sadness, anger, or despair. The woman mourns not only the loss of her mother’s advice and support but also the loss of a grandmother for her child. As a mother-to-be, she also looks at her mother through the eyes of a prospective mother. When she sees her as a woman with children, a woman very much like the woman she will soon be, she can understand more fully what her mother lost. Instead of mourning exclusively as a daughter, she mourns as a mother as well.

  For some motherless mothers, the birth of a first child unlocks blocked mourning and eases a woman toward a fuller acceptance of her loss. When Nancy Maguire, Ph.D., studied forty first-time mothers, twenty of whom had lost their mothers between the ages of six and twelve, she found that many of them experienced grief, depression, and parenting stress during the transition to motherhood. “A lot of women felt this was a good time for them to go into therapy,” she says, “because they were confronted with issues about loss and mourning. And it was an opportunity for them to overcome some of the issues around loss that might interfere with their relationship with their child, and to feel that they could become a better parent because of it.”

  When a woman hasn’t grieved her loss before pregnancy, she needs the safety to release any feelings that surface during that time without being made to feel overly needy or weak. An emotionally available spouse or partner can often give her the support she needs. But because husbands and lovers also feel anxious about parenthood both partners need to communicate their fears to avoid feeling overburdened by each other’s needs.

  A pregnant woman typically splits her dependency needs between her mother and her partner, whose importance as a member of her new family unit increases. A woman without an available mother or mother-figure, however, often shifts most of her needs onto her partner. Nearly every pregnant woman feels some anxiety about losing her partner and being left to parent a child alone, but this fear can become especially pronounced in a motherless woman. She knows all too well that people she loves can leave, and she remembers what happened to the last person she depended on to such a degree.

  At the same time, the lack of control a pregnant woman feels over her body and the gestation process can be disorienting and difficult—especially for those who became accustomed to taking charge of their own destinies at an early age. As the sociologist Susan Maushart describes pregnancy in The Mask of Motherhood, “Physically, it’s like taking the backseat in what used to be your own car. Someone—or is it something?—else is doing the driving. And what’s more, the route, at times stunningly beautiful, at times terrifying and precipitous, is at all times unfamiliar. . . . Some women make marvelous passengers in the journey of pregnancy: They sit back and wonder and delight at the passing strangeness. For others, the anxiety of having surrendered the wheel makes joy-riding impossible.”

  An expectant mother’s need to feel nurtured and supported peaks around the time of birth when, in the span of only minutes, she transforms from a laboring woman in need of assistance to a primary caretaker of a fully dependent infant. Even though few grandmothers actually assist in the births of their grandchildren and many are too physically or emotionally distant to share in the postpartum period, these are nevertheless times when motherless daughters deeply miss their mothers. They mourn the loss of advice and assistance, and often glamorize their mothers’ birthing experiences, forgetting that women of the previous generation frequently bore their children in a drug-induced “twilight sleep” while their partners paced outside in the hall.

  As birthing embraces more natural techniques, researchers have begun to notice that laboring women and new mothers benefit from the presence and assistance of a nurturing, experienced woman. In their studies of 1,500 pregnant women, Phyllis Klaus and Marshall Klaus, M.D., discovered that women who were aided during childbirth by trained, female labor companions required fewer cesarean births, needed less anesthesia, had more interest in their newborns, and interacted more with their babies than women who delivered without this assistance.

  The Klauses call these birthing companions doulas, the Greek term for an experienced woman who helps other women. A doula optimally meets with the prospective parents a few times during the third trimester of pregnancy, returns when the woman begins her labor, and remains with her throughout the labor and delivery. She holds the mother close when she needs physical reassurance, massages her back, and helps her breathe. “She never leaves the mother alone, and that is an essential aspect of this,” explains Phyllis Klaus. “She tells her, ‘I will never leave your side.’ Just that assurance is incredibly powerful for the pregnant woman. If she has lost her mother, or if her own mother is unable to be involved in the birth, the doula becomes a mothering figure to her. She helps the laboring woman allow her body to work for her, so the woman can become dependent and independent at the same time. She feels both nurtured and empowered. Women have told me afterward, �
��I never realized how much nurturing I needed until I had that experience. I’d put all my nurturing needs aside.’ Other women have told their doulas, ‘Your trust in me and your support at that time have made me realize I can do anything I want to in my life.’

  “We’ve noticed that the mother seems to internalize the doula’s nurturing behaviors,” she continues. “The labor period is a time when the mother is especially sensitive to environmental factors and open to learning and growth. When she’s held close in such an emotional way at this time, and feels nurtured, she becomes more able to give the same care to her child.” According to the Klauses, the women who received doula support had higher self-esteem and decreased incidence of postpartum depression six weeks after delivery than mothers who delivered without this support. The mothers who had doulas felt more confident and competent when caring for their newborns and also benefited from continued visits and advice from their doulas for as long as a year and a half after the birth.

  What does this mean for the motherless woman? Support, advice, and the assurance that she’s not alone. Unlike the woman who feels her support system is guaranteed, the motherless woman has to create her own, and she fears its failure—and, by extension, hers as a mother—more intensely than most new mothers do. Her childhood fears of being left alone and unprovided for are reactivated at precisely the time when she needs to calm those fears in her child. And often, they’re not unfounded. When asked, “Who helped you, other than a husband or spouse, after the birth of your first child?” 52 percent of motherless mothers surveyed answered, “No one.” When the same question was presented to a comparison group of women with mothers still alive, only 15 percent said they’d had to manage alone. More than half of the women in that second group cited their mothers as the person who helped them with newborn care.