by Hope Edelman
When she was in her mid-thirties, she started seeing a therapist, and soon afterward she met the man who became her husband. At the age of thirty-seven, Shelly gave birth to their first daughter. One week into motherhood she had an experience that still makes her tear up when she talks about it.
“My daughter was colicky,” she recalls. “All she did was cry. And for the first couple of weeks I was depressed. I was like, ‘What have I done? This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. It’s horrible.’ I will never forget—she must have been a week old, and she was screaming. I’d finally talked to enough people about colic to know there wasn’t anything I could do. She was comfortable, she wasn’t hungry. I just needed to hold her. So I sat, and I was holding her, and obviously I didn’t know her yet, she was just a week old. I didn’t know anything about her, but I was feeling how much love I had for her, and how much I wanted to hold her and make her feel better. And all of a sudden, boom, I realized that my mother was this person once, with a week-old baby, and that she was a human being. She wasn’t mentally ill, or anything like that. And I realized she must have loved me, because this feeling wasn’t a feeling I chose to have. It was just there. And I just sobbed. I sat there rocking Sofie and crying, and thinking for the first time in my life, at the age of thirty-seven, oh, I guess my mother must have loved me. She couldn’t not have. It’s not really a choice.”
Her mother, Shelly realized, wasn’t just the controlling criticizer of her childhood. She’d been a woman, just a woman, who’d expressed her love in damaging ways. And Shelly understood at that moment that she hadn’t been an unlovable child who’d gotten everything wrong. She’d been a child, like her own daughter, who’d gotten deserving of a mother’s love. As she cried in the rocking chair, Shelly was grieving for the child who’d never felt her mother’s love, for the mother who didn’t know how to express it, and for the relationship they’d both missed.
The Generational Effect
Thousands of children in America develop characteristics of motherless children, even though their mothers are still alive. Why? Because they’ve been raised by motherless daughters. When early loss is co-opted into a child’s emerging personality, the survival skills she develops at that time become the ones she applies to later tasks—including parenting. Because motherless daughters, like all other daughters, often reproduce the parenting behaviors they received, their children can end up profiting or suffering from the loss of a grandmother they never knew. And these children, in turn, are likely to parent their children in similar fashion. Forty-six-year-old Emma knows how this can happen. Four generations of women in her family, she says, are still feeling the effects of her maternal grandmother’s death more than seventy years ago.
Emma: Breaking the Chain
Emma’s mother was only three when her mother died in childbirth. Or was she four? Emma can’t say for sure. Her mother doesn’t talk much about the loss, and Emma is uncertain about the details. She knows her mother bounced from home to home throughout her childhood, raised by relatives and friends, but that’s about all the information she has. When Emma recalls her childhood, discussion isn’t what comes to mind. Activity is.
“We were always encouraged to constantly do things, go places, and achieve,” she says. “It looked from the outside as if my siblings and I were superachievers. We were always very busy. My mother, too. She was a teacher, and she has volunteered everywhere. Everyone thinks she’s wonderful. But I’ve since realized that being busy all the time was just her way to avoid her feelings.”
Emma’s mother lost her younger brother the year before her mother, and her father disappeared soon after his wife’s death. “She was three years old, and nobody was left,” Emma says. “I’ve always thought that was why she was so strong. She had to be.” The coping skills that insulated Emma’s mother during her teenage and young-adult years became the same ones she encouraged in her children: Don’t get sick. Don’t cry. Be strong.
When Emma was nine and the family’s house burned to the ground, her mother reacted without visible grief or loss. “It was the week before Christmas, and we lost everything, including our cats and dogs,” Emma remembers. “But it didn’t stop anything. We just went on. We treated it like it wasn’t a big deal, which I suppose is good, in a way. To my mother it probably wasn’t a big deal, if nobody died. But having to act like that as a child doesn’t prepare you to understand anything about yourself. It doesn’t allow you to be human. You have to act like a robot. And then you get to be an adult and you wonder, ‘Well, then, what is a big deal?’”
Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Emma didn’t need to ask. Her mother always made that decision—and most other decisions—for her. As a motherless daughter who knew the cold necessity of independence, she encouraged it in her daughters, but as a mother who so badly wanted to give her children what she hadn’t received, she became overzealous and controlling in their daily lives. “You understand the contradiction,” Emma says. “She said one thing and did another. It was so important to her that my sister and I be able to take care of ourselves. That became the theme of our lives. But I also remember thinking that I wouldn’t know what to do or how to respond if my mother died, because she took care of everything for me. She chose what was important and what wasn’t. And I know I’ve done the same thing with my children, telling them, ‘That’s not worth being upset about’ before they have a chance to decide for themselves.”
When Emma was a young mother with a daughter and son, she reproduced her mother’s parenting behaviors almost perfectly. She kept her children home with her and had few outside friends. She designed and implemented all their daily activities. She took for granted that her son would become independent but gave her daughter an extra push. And she maintained a cool emotional distance, trusting them to handle matters of the heart alone.
She thought it had all gone just fine, until one day a few years ago when she was visiting her daughter at home. As she watched her young granddaughter acting out, Emma recognized something was terribly wrong.
“I realized that the three of us just have an awful time together,” she explains. “Two of us are fine. My granddaughter and I are fine. My daughter and I are fine. But the minute the three of us get together, something triggers that little girl. She just turns into a brat. It’s horrible to watch. My daughter and I obviously do something that sets off this kid. I’m still not sure what it is, except that none of us seem to know how we’re supposed to be. There are pieces missing. And I can’t help but believe it comes from my mother not having anybody teach her first how to be a person, then a wife, and then a mother.”
Not long after that afternoon in her daughter’s home, Emma entered therapy to examine her relationships with both her mother and her daughter. It took almost three years for her to break through her idealized image of her mother. “One of the first things I said in therapy was that my mother was perfect,” she says. “Over time, I realized you could probably find fault with everything she did. And I became very angry with her. How could she have been the way she was? Why didn’t she know we needed more than just a rock that was never able to be anything but strong? That doesn’t allow a child to be the least bit weak.” With the help of her counselor, Emma is moving beyond blame and anger as she reevaluates her mother as a motherless child to understand some of her behaviors. “I’m at the point now where I can see my mother’s strength as something wonderful again,” she explains. “And I can also see that what went on wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t give me what she didn’t have. But that hasn’t made it any less painful for me, my daughter, or my granddaughter.”
Emma’s daughter recently joined her in therapy, where they’re working together to revise their mother-daughter relationship and model new parenting behaviors for her granddaughter. Emma has also been encouraging her mother, who’s now seventy-six, to join them. She doesn’t expect a turnaround, but she’s hopeful. As multiple generations of women in her family are learning, it’s
never too late for a daughter to reconsider the past, and to heal.
Chapter Twelve
The Female Phoenix Creativity, Achievement, and Success
FROM THE AGE OF THIRTEEN until her forty-fourth year, Virginia Woolf was obsessed by the memory of her mother. Julia Stephen, who died of rheumatic fever when her youngest daughter was thirteen, lived on as an “invisible presence” in Woolf’s life as she emerged first as a literary critic and then as a novelist. “Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary rush,” she explained in the essay “A Sketch of the Past.”
One thing burst into another. . . . I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.
I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of “explained” it? Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker? Perhaps one of these days I shall hit on the reason.
Ever since Freud described creativity as an attempt to compensate for childhood dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment, psychologists and artists have been theorizing about connections between early loss, creativity, and achievement. “When we talk about parent loss, we usually talk about the pathology and the pain,” Phyllis Klaus says. “But any kind of tragedy in life can be a springboard for creativity and growth, and for working that tragedy out in very healthy ways. What’s interesting is to look at what helps these people get to that point. Sometimes it’s their own ability to look inside and develop who they really want to be, to make life count and not waste it.”
Throughout history, early mother loss has acted as an impetus for a daughter’s later success. Just as tuberculosis was the artist’s disease, mother loss was her early tragedy. Dozens of eminent women throughout history lost their mothers during childhood or adolescence, including Dorothy Wordsworth (at birth); Harriet Beecher Stowe (age five); Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë (five, three, and one); George Eliot (sixteen); Jane Addams (two); Marie Curie (eleven); Gertrude Stein (fourteen); Eleanor Roosevelt (eight); Dorothy Parker (five); Margaret Mitchell (nineteen); and Marilyn Monroe, who spent her entire childhood in foster care and orphanages.
History books are also filled with men who lost their mothers young, including statesmen (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln), artists (Michelangelo, Ludwig van Beethoven), thinkers (Charles Darwin, Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant), and writers (Joseph Conrad, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe). When the psychologist Marvin Eisenstadt conducted a historical study of 573 famous individuals from Homer to John F. Kennedy, he found that the rate of mother loss among “eminent” or “historical geniuses” in the arts, the humanities, the sciences, and the military is as much as three times that of the general population, even after the mortality rates of earlier centuries are taken into account.
But other studies have revealed equally high rates of mother loss among juvenile delinquents and prisoners. It appears that children who lose parents generally respond in one of two ways: they develop a sense of fatalism, expecting and even encouraging future unfortunate events to occur, or they pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and find the determination and motivation to continue.
What guides one girl who loses her mother into brushes with the law and another into personal or creative success? With any motherless daughter, the age at the time of loss, the cause of a mother’s death, and the support systems available afterward all affect how she will cope. Two additional conditions also appear necessary: the drive to accomplish goals early and evidence of an already existing artistic or intellectual talent.
Veronika Denes-Raj, who has studied the relationship between early parent loss and perceptions of life expectancy, believes that an early confrontation with death inspires some children to adopt a more existential philosophy toward life, which in turn motivates them to succeed. “Freud said we can’t look at our own deaths,” Dr. Denes-Raj explains, “but existentialists believe you must be aware of your own limits to succeed. Only if you feel that life exists between two anchors—birth and death—can you accomplish what you want. Existentialists understand that life is not infinite. After a parent dies, they’ll look around and ask, ‘What’s left to do?’ and then try to do it.”
Because a mother’s death is as close as a daughter can get to experiencing her own, the loss teaches her that all life—and especially hers—has limits and can end quickly, without warning. Even though she typically sees the world as less controllable than other women do, she sets explicit goals for herself and becomes determined to achieve them before her time runs out. Explains Dr. Denes-Raj, “These people will say, ‘Okay, I may only live until the age of fifty-five or sixty, but I want to do X or Y. Therefore, I have to do it faster. And then if I live longer, I’ll do other things, too.’” Her mother may have died with dreams she never fulfilled, but this daughter is insistent that the same won’t happen to her. Death she can’t control, but personal action she can.
Anna Quindlen, the Newsweek columnist and best-selling author, was already planning to write for a living before her mother died of ovarian cancer when Quindlen was nineteen, but the experience, she says, made her determined to achieve even more in less time. “When I was a young reporter—because I got to be a reporter when I was nineteen, and I went to the New York Times when I was twenty-four—people would say to me, ‘Why are you in such a hurry? You’ve got the rest of your life,’” she recalls. “And there was a part of me that just thought, ‘Tell it to the Marines, buster. The whole rest of my life could be five years, ten years.’ I felt like everything was sort of speeded up.”
Like Quindlen, most other successful motherless daughters had a predisposition toward intellectual or artistic ability before their mothers died. Loss doesn’t give a daughter skills she didn’t possess. Instead, it acts as a trigger event that inspires a latent talent to emerge, or it provokes the spirit and will she needs to push her abilities beyond safe and predictable limits.
When early loss becomes a defining element of a daughter’s identity, it can consciously or unconsciously steer her specific career choices. A forty-one-year-old fiction writer who was eight when her mother died, for example, says she writes stories about mother-daughter relationships because stories allow her to mourn from a safe distance. A forty-nine-year-old attorney who was sixteen when her mother died now fights for women’s rights because she remembers how her mother strained against traditional gender limits during the 1950s. And a fifty-four-year-old professor of tumor biology, who watched her mother die of breast cancer in 1953 decided, at the age of thirteen, to devote her professional life to researching the disease:I remember on one of those days gawking around my mother’s bed as a skinny, awkward, barely pubertal girl, watching her lying peacefully unconscious after a morphine injection. I made myself the definitive promise: “Someday, when I grow up, I’m going to do something about this.” As subsequent years passed, this promise periodically resurfaced to influence which fork in a path I’d take. I chose biology over music in high school and college, because music would not help solve the problem of my mother’s death. I chose graduate school in genetics and microbiology rather than medical school, because physicians had not been effective in saving my mother’s life. More research needed to be done to give them the proper tools to work with. Today, I’m a university professor with a research program in breast cancer. I’m working on finding the cause, so the disease can be prevented and women will never have to die from it, as my mother did.
Today, we need only turn on the television, open the newspaper, or walk into a bookstore to find motherless women who’ve earned acclaim in spite of their early losses. Jane Fonda was fifteen and Roma Downey ten when their mothers died; country
singer Shania Twain was twenty-two; the actress Mariska Hargitay three; and the author Jacqueline Mitchard nineteen. Carol Burnett was raised by her grandmother, while her alcoholic mother lived in a separate apartment down the hall. Liza Minelli was twenty-three when Judy Garland overdosed. From the age of three onward, Maya Angelou lived mostly with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. And two of the most influential women in the American entertainment industry—Oprah Winfrey and Madonna—grew up without their mothers. Oprah was raised by her maternal grandmother for her first six years and her father for most of her teens, and Madonna was five when her mother died.
Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University and the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution, was 15 when she lost her mother. Olympic track-and-field star Jackie Joyner Kersee was eighteen. Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, grew up with an absentee mother. The actress Meg Ryan was fourteen when her parents divorced; she remained with her father. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author and presidential historian, was thirteen when she lost her mother; actress and comedian Janeane Garafolo was twenty; and Olympic gold-medal figure skater Oksana Baiul was orphaned at thirteen. Rosie O’Donnell, the comedian and former talk-show host whose acting career began with the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, was ten when her mother died. The first day she met Madonna on the movie set, she shared this bit of personal background with her and the two became fast friends.
