Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  This is a reactionary rage, often fueled by a sense of deprivation and a belief the world owes something to the daughter who lost her mother too young. But underneath it is usually a deep anger toward the mother herself. Even though she loved us, even though we’re not supposed to be angry with someone who’s dead, we resent her for leaving us behind. The mother who abandoned her child or took her own life leaves a daughter with the most direct access route to anger—she left me—but even the mother who falls ill and dies can be an object of blame.

  “In the early sixties when my friends were getting married and having babies, I was cleaning bedpans,” recalls fifty-two-year-old Rochelle, who was twenty-four when her mother died of cancer. “I was angry at my mother because she didn’t have a life, and I was angry at her because I didn’t have a life.” Explains Cynthia, fifty-two, who lost her mother at nine, “In my twenties and thirties and forties, I would think back in anger at how my mother left us. It was totally irrational. She didn’t voluntarily contract pneumonia and choose to die. Nevertheless, there was this gray cloud in the background of my thoughts, a cool kind of anger at what she’d done to me, personally, that ruined my life.”

  Like Cynthia, I know my mother didn’t want to leave me. I know that she, with a desire I can’t possibly comprehend, wanted to see her children grow. But the fact is that she went away and left us all to cope with the wreckage she left behind. Even now, twenty-four years later, her absence remains a terrible hole. No home to return to for a holiday celebration. No one to tell me what I was like as a child, or to reassure or comfort me as a new mother. No maternal grandmother for my children. The anger and sadness I once felt when seeing a mother and daughter shopping or lunching together has been replaced by the venom I feel when I pass three generations of women walking on the street, the grandmother and the mother pushing the daughter’s stroller together, laughing at a joke I didn’t hear, out for just another regular afternoon in their shared lives.

  I can still get angry about this, so angry sometimes that I could stamp my feet and scream. I’ve substituted yoga for domestic destruction, overcome my dressing-room fits, and attacked empty chairs that represent my mother in several Gestalt-inspired episodes, but a residue of rancor persists. Am I still just trying to hold on to my mother? Or has this sense of outrage become a permanent part of me?

  Like most other emotions, anger carries extra baggage, and mine tends to travel with a significant amount of guilt. From an early age I received the subtle cues that told me never to speak out against the dead. The sanctification process following a mother’s death is one that surpasses the rigor of any church, elevating all subsequent mention of her to the most laudatory and idealized heights. As Virginia Woolf, who was thirteen when her mother died, wrote, “Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.”

  Because we loved them, because we wanted them to be flawless when they lived, we honor our mothers by granting them posthumous perfection, and we soothe ourselves by creating the mothers we wish we’d had. Karen, twenty-nine, whose mother died nine years ago, had a childhood so torn apart by her mother’s alcoholism that she ran away from home at fourteen. Nevertheless, she has exalted her mother to nearly mythic proportion in her mind. “I know that despite her alcoholism, she’s smarter and more perfect now in my head than she was when she was alive,” Karen admits. “As far as I’m concerned, there was never a wrinkle in anything I ever wore from the time I was born until I left home. I know I’ve done this as a type of memorial, a way of remembering her in a way she would want to be remembered. She very much wanted to be perfect. Giving her that gives her the respect she always wanted.”

  Like anger, idealization is a normal and useful early response to loss. Focusing on a mother’s good traits reaffirms the importance of her presence, and processing the happy side of a relationship is a gentle way to activate mourning. But every human relationship is affected by ambivalence, every mother an amalgam of the good and the bad. To mourn a mother fully, we have to look back and acknowledge the flip sides of perfection and love. Without this, we remember our mothers as only half of what they were, and we end up trying to mourn someone who simply didn’t exist.

  “Mommy was a saint,” my sister once said, several years ago, to a chorus of audible nods. And I thought, a saint? She was charitable and compassionate, and she routinely took care of others first—all that, I maintain, is true. But she was often nervous and unhappy, and she made more than a few decisions that haven’t served me all that well. I don’t particularly like to remember those parts, don’t necessarily want to recall the things she did that even today, from an adult perspective, seem unreasonable or unfair. I want to look over my shoulder and see my mother only as the woman who shared cigarettes and PTA gossip at our kitchen table with her neighborhood friends; who carefully and methodically combed the knots out of my long, tangled hair before school when I was six; who curled up on my bed and listened patiently to an off-key version of the haftorah I would sing at my bat mitzvah at thirteen; and who clutched a box of tampons and shouted directions at a closed bathroom door to help my best friend in the ninth grade.

  But that’s not all of who she was. She was also the mother who constantly coerced her children to hide information from their father so he wouldn’t get upset and, when he slammed the garage door and drove off one night, sat in the kitchen and cried, “What am I going to do? I’m nothing without him”; who was so frustrated with her own constant, unsuccessful dieting that she said nothing about my rapid and deliberate weight loss in 1978 until I had dropped to 102 pounds on a five-foot, seven-inch frame; who screamed at me all the way home from my second failed driver’s license road test, shouting, “If you think I’m going to continue taking time out of my day to drive you around, you can just forget it”; and who turned a sixteen-year-old daughter into a bedroom confidante, telling me all the reasons why she should leave my father as well as all the reasons why she couldn’t and, in the end, turning me against him as well.

  I’ve heard that every emotion contains within itself the impulse for its opposite, but where does one end and the other begin? When I think too long about my mother, love and anger and guilt become incestuously intertwined. I have to work actively to separate them out, to differentiate the good from the bad, and, in doing so, to allow my mother to become a composite of positive and negative traits. I couldn’t mourn my mother until I was ready to allow her, after death, to be nothing less—and nothing more—than she had been in life. If I can’t mourn the Bad Mother, a piece of me remains forever connected to the piece of her I refuse to see.

  It’s hard to understand how we can harbor negative feelings toward someone we love when the two appear to sit at such competing ends of a spectrum. But negative emotion can bind people together just as tightly as positive emotion does, which is why even daughters of abusive mothers need to mourn the loss. At first, this may sound like a cross between the impossible and the absurd: Why grieve for a mother who gave you virtually nothing but grief? Why bother mourning if you wanted her to leave, or if her departure freed you, giving you more than you feel you lost?

  All ties, positive and negative, have to be evaluated before a daughter can reconcile her mother’s death or departure and move on. When the mother was a victimizer, this process involves a more difficult, more painful, and potentially more confusing journey for the daughter left behind. She often chooses to accentuate the positive, idealizing the lost mother and minimizing the abuse, or she may focus only on the negative, unable to acknowledge that a mother who hurt her so badly could have possibly loved her, too. This bewilderment is evident when twenty-two-year-old Laura reviews her relationship with her mother, who was murdered two years ago:For the first few years, when I was very young, my mother was extremely nurturing, extremely loving, because I didn’t talk back. As a kid, you don’t really have a personality, and that’s what she wanted. I was her life. She would tell me things like, “You’re the reason I’m aliv
e.” “I love you kids more than your father.” I actually heard more of this than my sister did, because I looked like my mother. As I got older, I started to have opinions, but she still put me in this category: “You’re so cute.” “You’re a little thing.”

  My parents divorced when I was nine, and I turned into her confidante. She told me everything. And at the same time, if I responded in a way she didn’t want, she blew up at me, told me I was out to get her, and reminded me of twelve things I did when I was four. I fell into a deep depression. I suffered a lot of neglect, too, especially after they divorced. She just wasn’t around . . .

  I know there was some love in there, but she was just so fucked up. She was just so fucked up. And I see some of it in me. Sometimes I’m like, Whoa. Where did that come from? It just doesn’t go away, either. I have to actively work on changing myself.

  I’m still so angry at her. I want to get through that. I want to get right size with the anger, right size with the grief, but it all gets so distorted. Like, No, I must really hate her. No, I must really love her.

  Like Laura, twenty-five-year-old Juliet first had to work through her ambivalence toward her family before she could accept the loss of her mother, who died when she was seventeen. The youngest of eight children, Juliet grew up in an alcoholic home where both parents drank. She was her mother’s protector, and after the funeral, Juliet relied on alcohol to numb out her feelings for nearly seven years. At twenty-three, she found herself “just stuck.” “I’d painted myself into a corner,” she says. Her older sister was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Juliet decided to join. As she sobered up, seven years of feelings slowly returned, and she began to mourn what her mother had, and hadn’t, been to the family. But first she had to break through years of family training that had taught her to resist or ignore her emotions, and to sanctify her lost mother.

  Now I feel mad at my mother, and it’s weird. When I got into therapy and talked about it for the first time, I whispered about it. My therapist said, “Why are you whispering?” I said, “Because I’m not supposed to be talking about this.” I grew up with so many secrets and always had to keep up the facade and play the role. Now, I’ve had to realize that my mother was part of the family’s disease. The whole family was diseased by alcoholism. And I’m so angry at her. Damn it, I needed what I needed. I needed a mother, and I needed someone to be there. But as soon as I get angry, I want to defend her. I always get caught in the conflict of, “Oh, she’s so good, and she tried so hard.” That’s what I feel when I think of my mother now. Conflict. I don’t like that.

  A mother who inflicted physical, sexual, or emotional abuse on a daughter damages her child’s healthy sense of self, ability to trust, belief in personal safety, and perception of the world as a meaningful place. Mourning the abusive mother is an attempt to take back as much as possible of what was robbed. It doesn’t invalidate the abuse, or mean the daughter wishes the mother could return. It doesn’t have to be about feeling sad. It’s about letting go, and setting oneself free.

  “Half of me isn’t sad my mother died, because I know she’s a lot happier,” says Donna, whose mother committed suicide three years ago. “She felt so much pain all her life—back pains, stomach pains, and then alcoholism. She was always happy on the outside, but deep inside there was a little girl on her hands and knees, crying and just wishing somebody would take care of her. She always needed to feel loved. That was why our bond, I think, was so close. I would always hug her and tell her I loved her, and cook her meals and drag her from bed to bathroom to make her throw up.

  “For a couple of months after she passed away, I have to say I couldn’t think of anything good that came from her,” she continues. “I couldn’t think of any nice things she’d done, or anything about her person that had been pretty neat at all. But I know my mother did a lot of good. Once the haze started to clear, I was able to grab hold of the things flying in front of my face and stare at them and figure out what they were and why they made me feel a certain way. My mother’s death basically released me. It gave me freedom to do things I’d never have been able to do.”

  When an abusive mother dies or leaves, her daughter’s chance for reconciliation also disappears. As long as the mother was present, the possibility of reunion, however slim, remained. For a daughter who clung to the hope of an apology, a reversal, or a payback for all the lost years, the dashed potential is another loss that needs to be acknowledged and mourned. Her mother will never say, “I’m sorry.” She’ll never quit drinking. She’ll never find the therapist who’ll help her change. She’ll never, in effect, become the mother she never was. But she’ll also never be physically able to abuse her daughter again.

  Here It Comes Again

  Several mornings a year I fight the impulse to crawl back under the blankets and hide. On those days, the calendar is not my friend. July 10, my parents’ anniversary, is the first, followed closely by July 12, the day my mother died. Then comes her birthday on September 19, which gives me a brief respite before the holiday season begins. One month later, while I’m trying to figure out how to revise the Roman calendar to catapult myself straight from October to January, the card stores and supermarket set up their holiday displays, reminding me we won’t be flying anywhere again this year, and that whatever Thanksgiving we have will be haphazardly fashioned with friends in California, 2,600 miles from the place that still shows up in my dreams as “home.”

  I used to pretend these days didn’t bother me, even tried to ignore them at first, but the insidious thing about anniversaries is that the psyche always knows they’re there. Our internal calendar doesn’t let them just slip by. Thirty-two-year-old Eileen, whose mother died when she was three, wrote to me about the intense sadness she always felt when she saw sunsets. She physically avoided them for most of her life. Driving home one day, she finally decided to watch one and experience the accompanying emotions. In doing so, she remembered that after her mother died, she frequently ran away from her father’s house at dinnertime and sat on a curb, watching the sun set and waiting for her mother to appear and bring her home. After making this connection, she went to mark the event on her calendar—and discovered her mother’s birthday was the day she had finally chosen to watch the sun go down.

  Certain days or times of the day, week, or year can act as cyclical triggers, resurrecting grief responses. Holidays, crises, and sensory reminders can bring up the old feelings again, too. Therese Rando calls these “STUG reactions,” or subsequent temporary upsurges of grief, and points out that intermittent periods of acute longing for the lost loved one are part of the normal mourning process. When we can anticipate their arrival, as in the case of distinct calendar days, we can take steps to prepare. At a time when collective ritual has lost ground to individual concerns, we are free to create our own traditions. Thirty-one-year-old Addie, who was nineteen when her mother died of heart failure, used to dread spending Mother’s Day alone. “When I was working at a gift shop, I once worked on Mother’s Day for a co-worker who wanted to be with his mother,” she recalls. “All day long, mothers and daughters came into the shop together. I hated it—I felt so angry and sad. Cheated. I went home that night and cried for at least an hour. Just this past year my therapist helped me to see I needed a way to still honor my mother. So I decided to garden on Mother’s Day. I made a ritual of planting flowers and praying for strength, life, and light. It fits for me because I’m honoring my mother and nature, and celebrating the life-giving aspect of myself—which was truly the gift my mother gave to me.”

  Birthdays also activate grief responses, not only because they remind us of the phone call or card that never comes but because each one we celebrate brings us closer to the neon number: the age a mother was when she died. Because we identify so strongly with our mother’s body, and because our fate was once so intertwined with hers, many of us fear that the age of her physical demise will also be our own. To reach the year is a milestone; to pass it becomes one of our mo
st glorious achievements.

  “I see this over and over again,” says Naomi Lowinsky, Ph.D., a Jungian analyst in Berkeley, California, who frequently counsels motherless women. “As some women approach the age their mothers were when they died, they just start going bananas in one way or another. They have weird symptoms, they’re depressed, they’re suddenly having heart palpitations, or other things there’s no medical explanation for. It’s a very, very powerful connection.” Vanderlyn Pine, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and one of the country’s leading experts on death and American society, found this grief response to be so common that he created a name for it: the “parental trigger.” Dr. Pine, who was nineteen when his father died, says that reaching a same-sex parent’s age at time of death suddenly catapults a child into an awareness of personal mortality and a type of mourning for the parent that he or she wasn’t capable of experiencing until that point. “As I was approaching the age my father was when he died, I realized I was getting very focused on that date,” he explains. “His death was triggering my reactions at the time, but it didn’t trigger me back to being nineteen. Instead, I was getting ready to look at the death of a forty-eight-year-old man through the eyes of a forty-eight-year-old man. It was like, boom. My father had pulled a trigger inside me. When I woke up that morning, I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘I’m forty-eight years old. But I look pretty good for forty-eight.’ I sort of looked myself over and thought, ‘How could you have been so young? How the fuck could you have died? There I was at forty-eight, judging my father’s death in a way I wasn’t capable of at nineteen. I was suddenly a forty-eight-year-old man looking at a 48-year-old man dying and thinking, ‘How shocking!’”