by Hope Edelman
Is the disparity because motherless mothers truly have no one to turn to for help? Or because they’ve become so practiced at not asking for or expecting it? Because their needs often went unmet after their mothers died, many of these women grew up believing that “no one noticed,” which may have become internalized as “no one cares.”
“Women who have experienced early mother loss are more likely to be caretakers to other people in their lives,” Nancy Maguire explains. “And that part of their personality style would prohibit them from being able to ask for the support they need, and to feel justified in getting their own needs met.”
All new parents have periods of self-doubt, but a motherless mother often has the additional worry that if a real problem develops, she won’t have anyone to call. She flips through Dr. Spock books with the frenzy of a dozen hummingbirds. She puts 911 on her speed-dial—twice.
“The bottom drops out when you bring that first baby home from the hospital and you just don’t know what to do,” says Alice, who has two daughters and a grandson. The presence of a supportive, experienced woman during her first postpartum period helped her find the self-confidence she needed as a new mother.
Alice: Extending the Maternal Line
In 1957, Alice was somewhat of a double anomaly: She was giving birth to her first child at the age of thirty-six, and she knew virtually nothing about babies. She hadn’t worried much about the delivery, having grown up with a mother who frequently told her what a joyful experience it had been. Birthing was the easy part. Infant care was her challenge.
Dr. Spock’s advice had seemed straightforward enough when she was still pregnant. But as soon as she was alone with a screaming baby in the nursery, Alice was terrified by her lack of experience. She found herself longing for advice, guidance, and reassurance from her mother, who died just before Alice turned twenty-four.
“I’d never been around a baby before, and I worried about everything,” she recalls. “Should I let her cry? Pick her up? Why did she want orange juice for breakfast and milk for a snack instead of the other way around, as the book said it should be? Every book and pamphlet I had began with a description of bathing the baby, but she cried every time I tried to bathe her, and I didn’t know why.”
When her mother’s first cousin announced she’d be paying a visit, Alice began to worry. She looked forward to seeing the woman she’d grown up calling “Aunt” Elaine, but she was afraid an experienced mother would label her clumsy and inept. Necessity quickly overtook Alice’s pride, however, and when Elaine arrived, Alice shared her self-doubt and fears. Instead of affirming her incompetence, the older woman provided her with a much-needed infusion of relief.
“Elaine was wonderful,” Alice recalls. “She’d go and get the baby when she cried and sit holding her, gently rocking her and murmuring, ‘You win!’ When I confessed my problems with the bath she said, ‘Well, she’s not really very dirty. Why don’t you just use oil for now?’
“I told her how grateful I was, and she told me about her experience with her first baby. ‘Everyone criticized me,’ she said. ‘I was so busy that the house was a mess. Every time I sat down I saw the clutter and the dust balls under the furniture. And then your grandmother came over one day. She was not in the least critical. She said I was doing fine. Instead of standing there asking how she could help, she just went and got a mop. I’ll always remember that.’”
Just three days with a practical, nurturing, and experienced model for infant care helped calm Alice’s fears. Equally as important, Elaine’s visit helped her reconnect with her maternal line. Elaine and Alice’s mothers had raised their children side by side, and Alice’s grandmother had been their resource for advice and reassurance. “Having Elaine in my house reestablished the feeling of continuity in my life,” Alice explains. “I had that feeling of being back in the family, and that everything would be all right.”
In 1962, Alice gave birth again. She felt confident with the rudiments of childcare this time, yet she found herself missing her mother again. “My second daughter was a difficult child to bring up,” she explains. “And so was I. I really would have appreciated hearing my mother tell me I was doing okay, and assure me that my daughter would turn out all right.” Today, Alice smiles when she tells this part of her story. Not only did her second daughter grow up without major incident, but she also became a mother herself four years ago, and Alice was right there coaching in the birthing room as her grandson entered the world.
Just as Alice’s mother had told her daughter about the joy of childbirth, Alice told her daughter the same. Of all the women in her Lamaze class, Alice’s daughter was the only one who said she didn’t fear the pain. Her primary fear—just like her mother’s—was of bringing the baby home and not knowing how to care for it alone. This time Alice knew exactly what to do. “I kept telling my daughter, ‘You’ll be okay,’” she says. “I assured her she’d have help.” And she did—from her mother. Alice took great pride in giving her daughter the immediate maternal encouragement, assistance, and advice that had once taken several anxious months to reach her.
Raising Children
“I read every book there was on how to raise children,” remembers Sarah, who lost her mother at the age of one and went on to have two children. “I searched high and wide, because my daughter and I were having problems when she was young, and I couldn’t find anything on first daughters or firstborns. I had no model at all. But there were things I figured out based on common sense. I believed that we had to take responsibility for ourselves, and that there was such a thing as consequences, good and bad. And I didn’t believe in punishing, because I was never punished. My kids used to say, ‘Please shut up already and hit us,’ because I talked them to death, rationalizing everything. I think that was the way I finally accepted my mother’s death, by figuring out how to raise my children by myself.”
Although many motherless women spent childhood and adolescence watching their mothers raise their younger siblings, or even raising those siblings after her death, they still feel the loss of a living mother-model. Many of them say they learned how to parent on their own. Yet as individual as their approaches have been, studies with motherless mothers reveal they share common challenges, triumphs, and fears.
In the early 1990s, Donald Zall, D.S.W., a psychotherapist in Concord, Massachussetts, studied twenty-eight middle-class mothers whose own mothers had died when they were children or adolescents, and who now had at least one child between the ages of six months and fifteen years. Zall identified six distinct parenting traits the women shared. These were an overprotective parenting style; an increased determination to be a good mother; an emphasis on cherishing time with their children; a belief in the fragility of life; a fixation on the possibility that they, too, could die; and the impulse to prepare their children for a premature separation.
“The bereaved women saw the impact of their mother’s death burdening them with anxieties with which other mothers did not have to deal but which also provided them with an impetus to ‘be the best that they could be,’” he explains.
Zall, as well as other researchers, found that motherless mothers report higher levels of stress, sadness, and depression than other mothers do. They also think of themselves as less competent in the mothering role than other women, are more preoccupied with their roles as mothers, are more focused on how well they’re doing, and, not surprisingly, frequently report they “feel different” from other mothers.
Nonetheless, many of these studies found that the process of parenting—despite the deficits, real or perceived, in these women’s backgrounds—deepened and enriched their mourning processes. Raising children, and giving them emotionally engaged, involved, and loving mothers went far to undo much of the pain of the past. And this focus and determination on good parenting seems to have a positive effect on children, as well. Despite motherless mothers’ self-doubt and uncertainty about filling the maternal role, their children appear just as well-
adjusted as children raised by women whose mothers did not die. As Gina Mireault, Ph.D., the author of a 2002 study on this subject explains, the women she interviewed “were kind of hard on themselves [as mothers], but they seemed to be doing the good job they were afraid they weren’t doing.”
Interviews with motherless mothers also revealed the following shared parenting experiences:
The Mother on the Pedestal
When a daughter believes she was well mothered, she often tries to replicate specific parenting behaviors she remembers from her past. This allows her to identify positively with her mother, as well as to relive and perpetuate happy moments of her childhood. For many women, particularly those who’ve mourned their mothers, this approach can be both successful and fulfilling.
Daughters who have idealized the lost mother, however, create a standard for parenting that is difficult, and occasionally impossible, for them to achieve. When comparing themselves to the idealized Good Mother, these daughters often interpret their own “shortcomings” as evidence that they’re Bad Mothers. But mothers are perfect only in our minds. Trying to replicate their approaches exactly, without acknowledging their deficits, is often a daughter’s attempt to honor her mother after death, and she frequently overlooks the circumstances that make her experience as a mother unique.
When Bridget set out to choose a nursery school for her son, she imagined how her mother would have approached the task: methodically, carefully, and with the knowledge gained from a graduate degree in preschool education. What Bridget didn’t take into account was that her mother was a homemaker, whereas she was a mom with a full-time job who also needed daily physical therapy appointments to correct a problem with her wrists. Nevertheless, she explains, “It really freaked me out that I was struggling to do something that my mother would have done so well. I felt I somehow wasn’t living up to her standards.”
To please her mother, Bridget chose an expensive private school for her son, but she made the decision hastily and without calculating the financial strain that the tuition would place on her marriage. Six months later, she and her husband reviewed their budget and realized they had to choose a less expensive school with more flexible hours for working parents. Now her son attends a well-respected program at a daycare center that Bridget had originally shunned because she believed her mother wouldn’t have approved. The truth is, her son is quite content at his school, and she and her husband are happier with its hours. As she now prepares to select her son’s elementary school—and to have her second child—Bridget says she plans to rely on her instincts and her own experience, rather than on the idealized memory of her mother.
Another Magic Number
Just as women fear reaching the age their mothers were when they died, they also view their children’s maturation with a certain apprehension. Watching a child go through various phases reactivates the same developmental struggles in a mother. She doesn’t simply project her past experiences onto her child; to some degree, she relives them. As a motherless daughter sees her child, and especially her daughter, approach the age she was when her mother died, she reconnects with the fears and anxieties she felt at that time. With the memory of loss as her guide, she does a double identification with her child and her mother. Will I die now? she wonders. How will my child cope without me?
“Many motherless women develop a depression when their child gets close to the age they were when their mothers died,” Phyllis Klaus says. “I’ll see clients who talk about their child’s fifth year, and how that was a terrible time for them. They totally blocked it out. They became ill, or they became depressed. When I research their histories, it turns out that they were five when their mothers died. Their fear of ‘Will I repeat that history?’ gets replayed through their children.”
When children know the details of their mothers’ early loss, they often identify with the child she once was. Alice, who was twenty-four when her mother died, says both her daughters approached her when they reached their twenty-fourth years. They wanted to discuss her mortality and made a point of telling her how hard it would be for them to lose her at that age. A more dramatic example comes from thirty-eight-year-old Emily, who was fourteen when her mother committed suicide. She panicked as her daughter approached adolescence, aware she had no personal experience to refer to as the mother of a child older than fourteen. Her oldest daughter panicked at the same time. “The year she turned fourteen was horrendous,” Emily says. “She made a suicidal gesture, she acted out in every possible way, and she insisted that I let her go live with her father. As she left, I felt again that a part of me was dying, and in some ways I had to let our relationship die in my heart.” Although fourteen may have been a coincidental age, it seems possible that Emily’s daughter identified with her mother’s experience and insisted on leaving before her mother could leave her. As Emily watched her daughter’s struggle, she revisited her own fourteenth year, a time of confusion and lack of power. She felt helpless to stop her daughter, and once again, a mother-daughter separation occurred at the fourteen-year mark.
The Independence Factor
As discussed in a previous chapter, one of the most common outcomes that motherless women identify with their early loss is independence. Not surprisingly, this is one of the most common qualities they hope to instill in their children, especially in their daughters. Because they needed to develop self-reliance to survive, these women hope to save their children the pain of that adjustment. As fifty-three-year-old Gloria, the mother of two daughters who are now in their twenties, explains, “I tended to do relatively little of the ‘motherly chores’ such as making beds or packing lunches for our children when they were growing up. I wanted them to be independent both in lifestyle and thinking, so that if anything ever happened to me, they would get along well by themselves. Emotionally, I didn’t feel I had much ‘mothering’ to give out because I was so starved for it myself. When they were teenagers, I sometimes felt I was acting more like a father than a mother. But they seemed to turn out fine, in spite of all this. Sometimes, to my surprise, my daughters mother me, which I love dearly.”
Even though Gloria is married, she still raised her daughters to “get along well by themselves” if something should happen to her. Gloria felt alone at the age of thirteen when her mother died of cancer, despite the presence of her father and two older sisters. When she became a mother, she did a double identification with her mother and her children, and took what she thought were necessary steps to protect her daughters if she, like her mother, should die young.
Yvonne, thirty-seven, who was twelve when her mother died, says her identifications with both her mother and her daughter inspired her to raise her son and daughter quite differently, even though they’re less than two years apart in age. “I have been, in my opinion, an excellent mother. But I have done one strange thing with my daughter that I haven’t done with my son,” she explains. “Every year that passes, I consider a victory. There! She is one year older in case I die. When she passed the age I was when my mother died, I was very relieved. Now that she’s sixteen and super independent, I feel that I’m almost out of the woods. I know that this outlook of mine is probably having an effect on my daughter, but I truly see the world this way. One day I’ll explain it to her, but my mortality isn’t something I can discuss with her now.”
Self-reliance is often a positive trait to instill in children, but as Yvonne suspects, the mother’s intent and approach can have longlasting effects on them. When a mother guides her children toward premature independence based more on her past experience without a mother rather than her present experience as one, she overlooks the dynamics of the current relationship. As she minimizes her importance in a son’s or daughter’s life because she loves them, because she wants to spare them from the pain of her childhood, she is, in effect, preparing them for an event that’s not likely to occur, and they grow up unconsciously expecting a trauma that never arrives. By deliberately retreating into the emotional
background of their lives, she does exactly what she’s trying to avoid: she deprives her children of a fully engaged mother.
(Re)Discovering Maternal Love
When the early mother-daughter relationship ends prematurely, the daughter’s evolving sense of herself suffers a devastating blow. This is especially true when a child loses a mother to suicide or physical abandonment, although it also occurs when the child knows the mother died of an illness she couldn’t prevent or cure. Daughters who were so young when their mothers died that they have no conscious memories of mother love, who were raised by women who never showed affection, or who were abused by the very person who was supposed to love them most suffer the deepest self-esteem injuries of all. Having never felt valued, accepted, or loved by their mothers, they may grow into women who have a hard time valuing themselves.
Women in this position may choose not to have children. They may doubt their ability to love and raise a child, or fear they’ll repeat the same parenting behaviors they received, with similar results. But many who do become parents find that when they feel that first rush of maternal love toward a child, the past breaks open in unexpected ways.
Shelly, a forty-year-old mother of two young daughters, was raised by a mother she describes as “not nurturing at all, very overbearing, a woman who showed her love by trying to make me be what she wanted me to be instead of giving me room to express myself” and a father who parented from the sidelines. As a long-awaited daughter in a family with two older sons, Shelly grew up feeling she was meant to mirror her mother’s image, and that she was never valued for being herself. She and her mother remained at odds until her mother’s death from cancer when Shelly was twenty-three. Shelly devoted the next ten years to building a career and dating several different men, none of whom gave her the emotional warmth or honest communication she craved.
