by Hope Edelman
Bereavement experts talk about the importance of maintaining a relationship with the deceased, and about how the inner dialogue continues long after a loved one has gone. When I reach for my father now, I find only silence, but it’s neither uncomfortable nor unfamiliar. Long pauses and audible ellipses always demarcated our conversations when he was alive. I try to speak to him sometimes, silently; but, even now, I don’t know what to say. For the last twenty years of his life, we rarely managed to communicate at a level more significant than the meteorological report. And it makes me wonder: Did we ever communicate any other way?
I have to go backwards, to look at where it all began.
I know little about my father’s life before I was born, only disconnected snapshots meted out from time to time. He grew up, with both parents and his older brother, in New York City during the Depression. His grandparents ran a corner newsstand. On Saturday afternoons, he saw double features for a quarter and bought three candy bars for a dime.
The stories he told of his childhood were brief and intermittent, deliberate parables linked to lessons he meant for me to learn. When I asked for a raise in my allowance, he told me how once he had asked his mother for a nickel to buy an ice cream cone and she couldn’t come up with enough change. When the school system wanted me to bypass kindergarten and go straight into the first grade, he insisted that I stay back with the children my age. He’d skipped two grades in elementary school, he said, and was miserable as a result, always too young to make real friends.
I can tell you a great deal about my mother’s family, about her grandparents’ immigration from Russia and Poland, and about her eight aunts and uncles, her two younger sisters, and her parents, all of whom I knew. But my father’s family was always a mystery to me. It’s small—only his brother and his brother’s children survive. And he’s always kept his past firmly locked away. In the cufflink box on his dresser I once found a picture of his father, a small black-and-white mug shot of a dark, serious man who looked remarkably like him. I used to stand on tiptoe and sneak looks at it during the day, trying to figure out where my father had come from and what he might become. My mother once told me that my paternal grandfather, who died just after my parents met, had a heart attack at fifty-two. “That’s why I’m always nagging your father to stop drinking and smoking, and to keep his weight down,” she explained. When I mentioned this to my father a few years ago, he looked genuinely puzzled. “But my father died of cancer when he was fifty-seven,” he told me, and he didn’t say much more.
When the author Victoria Secunda says, “Mothers represent the day, fathers the night—and the weekend, the holiday, the special dinner out,” she succinctly describes the family I knew for my first seventeen years. My mother was the continuous presence in my life. My father was the parent who waxed and waned, leaving for work each morning before I woke and returning in time for dinner and prime-time TV. The quick and the physical—that was my father’s domain. He taught me to throw a softball and mow the lawn. He corrected my math and chemistry equations. He showed me how to pitch a tent. He was the disciplinarian of my childhood, the distant yet larger-than-life figure who set the house rules. He handed out allowances and he reprimanded us. When we traveled as a family, he always drove the car.
My mother was the parent who woke me each morning, made sure I drank a full glass of orange juice with breakfast, and always called, “Have a nice day!” as I bolted for the bus. She was there when I came home. She chose my clothing, accompanied my grade-school classes on field trips, and read me stories before I went to bed. My mother taught me how to play the piano, cook a three-course meal, and knit a simple scarf. The lessons that required patience and repetition came under her tutelage, and as a result, it was in her company that I spent most of my time.
The morning my mother died, my father assembled his three children around the kitchen table at dawn. He looked at us and blinked quizzically, as if to ask, “Have we met?” and I understood fully for the first time that I had only one parent left, and that he was one I barely knew and didn’t particularly like. So much prose has been devoted to the Good Mother/Bad Mother complex, but far less to the corresponding split in our fathers. “One man, two fathers. Daddy and the Other Father,” is how Letty Cottin Pogrebin describes her father in the memoir Deborah, Golda, and Me. When memory fails, the old home movies from the sixties show me that I had a daddy who carried me on his shoulders and let me blow out the candles on his birthday cake. This daddy is the man who, during the first years after his wife died, tried to compensate as best he could. He rearranged his work schedule to be home by 5:00 p.m. He gave us money to buy our own clothes. One day he came home with a microwave and taught himself how to cook. I used to set the table and watch him as he prepared the meals, a big man in a chef’s apron thumbing through his new cookbooks as his Scotch and soda sweated droplets on the counter by his side. In the warmer months he barbecued, and two nights a week we ordered in.
I loved him for these efforts, only vaguely understanding how difficult his transition from husband and part-time father to full-time single parent must have been. I remember how his face pinched up the first time we took a car trip after my mother died, when nobody wanted to sit in the passenger seat. But most of the time, all I could see was the Other Father. I’d been my mother’s protector, the one who always defended her when they argued, and our afternoons of bedroom “girl talk” had given me information about their marriage that no sixteen-year-old daughter should have to know. I’ve heard that when a mother shares with her daughter bitter feelings toward her husband, the mother keeps that daughter allied with and bound to her even after she dies, and prevents the daughter from forming her own relationship with her father. I know some of my anger toward my father developed this way. And I know some more of it came from knowing he had withheld information from my mother about the severity of her illness, denying her the opportunity to turn to the religion she believed in so deeply, or to fashion any sort of goodbye. And beyond all that, I was angry with him for being just a father. When my mother transformed into a saint after her death, I turned my father into the ultimate sinner. As hard as he tried, nothing he did could possibly please me. His most grievous fault was that he wasn’t her.
I always knew that my father fiercely loved his children. He showed this love as best he could: with his brief telephone calls; with the ten-dollar bills he stuffed in my pocket each time I walked out his door; with the Priority Mail packages that arrived, like clockwork, the day before someone’s birthday, with a preprinted card inside signed “Love, Grandpa” or “Love, Dad.” My adult friends and boyfriends who met him in his later years knew him only as a gentle, quiet, sober, lonely man. Yet I once knew him to be hard drinking and emotionally unpredictable, a man who behaved so much like a child that his children felt as if they needed to parent him. It was one thing to accept the good/bad duality in my mother, the parent who was dead. It was much harder to reconcile feelings of love and resentment toward the one who was still alive.
I used to think the distance between my father and me was peculiar, even shameful in some way, but when I asked ninety-three other motherless women to describe their current relationships with their fathers, I discovered that I was by no means unique. Only 13 percent of these women described their father-daughter relationship as “excellent.” Thirty-one percent said it was “poor,” and the remainder categorized it somewhere in between. Some of these daughters had once been close to their fathers, only to lose the connection after their mothers died. Others said the relationship soured when a stepmother entered the family. And still others said their father-daughter bonds had never been strong, although they hadn’t really noticed that when their mothers were still alive.
Whatever the circumstances, these figures are disheartening at best, and troubling at worst. A good deal of research in the past ten years has focused on the importance of the surviving parent to a bereaved child’s long-term adaptation, and in every study conducted
the verdict has been clear: A good relationship between a bereaved child and her surviving parent helps buffer the ill effects of the loss. A strained relationship, or one characterized by neglect or abuse, puts the child at risk for numerous long-term adverse effects, including depression, high blood pressure, diminished feelings of self-worth, and vulnerability to stress.
Researchers once looked for a direct cause-and-effect relationship between early parent loss and depression. Now, it’s widely believed that the surviving parent provides a crucial intermediary link. Depression is much more likely to surface among bereaved children who receive little or no emotional care from a surviving parent than among those who receive compassionate, reliable care from that parent after the loss. “Without a doubt, the most important external influence on the emotional state of the child and on how he copes with his loss is the parent or adult who raises him,” Tamar Granot says.
The work of Phyllis Silverman and William Worden has provided us with far more knowledge about motherless children raised in father-headed households than we had only a decade ago. When they compared a group of children who’d lost a mother to a group who’d lost a father, they found that the motherless kids were more likely to experience changes in daily living routines, and less likely to have their emotional needs met. They were also quicker to get a step-parent and more likely to be living with a depressed parent—which in turn increased their own chances of becoming depressed.
In 2002, approximately 840,000 American girls under the age of eighteen were living with their single fathers.6 Of all children raised in single-parent homes, these girls may have the most personal difficulties, especially during the teen years. The Harvard Children’s Bereavement Study revealed that adolescent motherless girls being raised by their fathers were more likely to act out or engage in delinquent behavior than girls who’d lost their fathers. “A lot of times they were the oldest child in the family and were given responsibility for childcare and meals,” William Worden explains. “That was part of the resentment. And the dads would often bring a new honey into the house, and that was part of it, too. There wasn’t one particular reason. But the significant acting out on the part of teen girls who lost mothers was way, way beyond that of teen girls whose dads had died.”
According to Richard A. Warshak, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and an expert on father custody, girls raised by fathers show lower self-esteem and higher anxiety than father-raised boys and mother-raised children of either sex. This is partly because of a father’s doubts and insecurities about raising daughters, he says, and partly because of a girl’s anxiety about becoming a stand-in spouse.
“When a father has to raise a child of the opposite sex, it’s complicated,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “He’s in part influenced by his own identifications with his parents. A dad’s identifications with his own mother help him understand his daughter, and his memories of how his father treated his mother and sisters, if he had any, are embedded in his ideas of how to treat women. If a man feels relatively comfortable with the aspects of his mother he felt in tune with and shared, then he has something to draw from. But if he had an uncomfortable relationship with his mother, he doesn’t necessarily have a firm bedrock for relating to his daughter.”
When a mother dies or leaves the home, fathers and daughters find themselves in an unexpected and awkward position. They are strangers and intimates, allies and foes. Explains thirty-two-year-old Maureen, who was nineteen and the youngest of three children when her mother died, “My relationship with my father was nonexistent when my mother was alive. She’d really alienated me from him. I had to totally start from scratch with him. When he started dating six weeks after the funeral, there was so much tension in the house. I had a lot of anger toward him I just didn’t know how to cope with. My stepmother has been instrumental in getting my father and me to talk as adults, and my own maturity has allowed me to patch some things up. We’re getting better at relating to each other today.”
Many motherless daughters trace their current struggles—particularly in intimate relationships—not just back to the loss of their mothers but also to their relationships with their fathers. Twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her divorced mother committed suicide, went to live with her father and stepmother, neither of whom helped her mourn as a child or feel emotionally secure.
My father was very angry, very . . . I don’t know what the opposite of nurturing is—indifferent? I was always afraid of my father. He could always say something mean to make me cry. My stepmother was just really terrible. She and I never got along. Recently, I began to conceptualize that not allowing me to grieve for my mother as a seven-year-old was abusive. If my father couldn’t take care of me emotionally, he should have found me someone who could.
I had to develop coping skills as a child to survive in his house, and I’m realizing what worked for me then might not work so well for me now. One of my basic ideas is that I don’t trust anyone. I could never trust my father or my stepmother, and now I feel like no one’s worthy of trust, and in fact trust is kind of stupid. It’s like setting yourself up. And I feel like I always have to be hypercompetent, and never have any vulnerabilities or express any needs. There was a time when I couldn’t have any needs. I had to shut them down. But now I’m in a good relationship with a man, and I have good friendships. I’m starting to feel more emotionally secure, and I think I might be able to open up a bit more now and maybe express some needs.
In a 1993 University of Detroit-Mercy study of eighty-three adults who lost parents between the ages of three and sixteen, the psychologist Bette D. Glickfield found that the subjects who remembered their surviving parents as warm and nonrejecting were most likely to believe that they could depend on others as adults. “Being able to talk freely with the surviving parent about the circumstances surrounding the death, to express sorrow to the surviving parent about the death, or to ask questions about the deceased parent, as well as having a parent who encourages independence and trust in others, predicts one’s ability to feel emotionally supported,” she says. The idea is that daughters who feel secure after a mother’s death are able to go on to form secure attachments with others.
Twenty-six-year-old Holly doubts that she’d avoid adult romance the way she does if she trusted that she could depend on others. For her, such trust was shattered when her father abruptly withdrew from her soon after her mother died. Holly says she never felt emotionally attached to her father when she was a child, and after her mother died when she was sixteen, she did not expect their relationship to improve dramatically. But she also did not expect her father to move in with a girlfriend six months later and leave her in the care of an elderly great-aunt until she left for college the following year. Feeling angry and abandoned, Holly swore she’d never make the mistake of depending on anyone else again: My father continually lectured me during my childhood about the value of family togetherness. So the way he ditched me was a shock, and it left deep scars. Now, I often feel as though I can’t let myself get married or even head toward marriage. I haven’t yet figured out how to take consistently good care of myself, and because of my father’s behavior, I’m deathly afraid of accepting from someone else what I want or need but can’t give myself. I’m afraid of the dependence that kind of acceptance would imply. This is especially true with me and men. I’d rather go without what I need than get it through relying on someone else.
A father is a daughter’s first heterosexual interest, and her relationship with him becomes the most influential blueprint for her later attachments to men. Throughout a daughter’s childhood and adolescence, she picks up clues from her father about how to relate to males. Though it may sound implausible at first, given what we know about same-sex role modeling, some of a girl’s feminine identifications come from having a father who exhibits the traditionally masculine traits of instrumentalism and assertion. Fathers also tend to reinforce sex-typed behavi
or in their daughters, subtly urging them to conform to behaviors and play that emphasize caretaking and cooperation. But when a mother dies or leaves, a father’s traditionally masculine behaviors can’t meet all of a daughter’s needs. His ability—or inability—to take on the expressive parenting role is suddenly magnified, and his strengths and weaknesses in this area become more apparent and more important than they were when his wife was present.
On top of this, another layer—the father’s ability to cope with mourning—is added to the post-loss father-daughter relationship. “Even today, fathers still tend to be people who will not talk at length or reveal their feelings to their children, and in some cases do not want their children to reveal their feelings to others,” says Russell Hurd, Ph.D., an assistant professor of educational psychology at Kent State University in Canton, Ohio. And we must not forget that surviving parents are themselves trying to cope with a devastating loss. Husbands don’t expect to outlive their wives, and they’re often emotionally and practically unprepared for the demands of daily family life. Right when children are the most needy, widowed fathers, understandably, have the least to give.
Four Types of Fathers
Interviews with more than ninety motherless women revealed four common coping strategies that fathers adopt after the loss of a spouse. These categories are not mutually exclusive; a father may show evidence of more than one response, or switch from one to another over time. Like the mourning process in general, a father’s adjustment to single-parenthood is fluid and evolutionary, and a daughter has different needs at different ages. A good indicator of where the father-daughter relationship will ultimately end up is the point at which it began. Still, a mother’s absence can change the way a father relates to his daughter during the interim. The events of those months or years are the ones that can deeply affect a daughter’s feelings of security and self-worth, and her ability to form satisfying relationships as an adult.