by Hope Edelman
“I often hear from women about how unsafe they felt with their fathers, without their mothers present,” says Colleen Russell, MFT, a therapist in Mill Valley, California, who for ten years has been leading support groups for motherless-daughters. “Even if there wasn’t any sexual behavior, there was a sexualized environment that felt scary and unpredictable. The daughter reminded the father of his wife, and a lot of the time his anger toward his wife was displaced onto the daughter.”
As Denise, who was twelve when her mother died, moved further into adolescence, she began to fear a violation of the incest taboo. “My father was so irresponsible,” she recalls. “The rule in my family was ‘He’s a kid, he can’t help himself. He’s not responsible for anything.’ So I felt like I was responsible for protecting my father from sexual impulses toward me and my sisters. In my case, I was projecting, because I was the one who was an adolescent and felt the impulses, and here I was in this house. I was the mother. I was making the dinner. I was doing all the housework. I think on some level, I wanted my father, and I hated the fact he wouldn’t sleep with me. Of course, I would have sooner died. It upsets me very much now to even say it out loud. If that thought had become conscious at the time, I probably would have slit my wrists.”
These thoughts often consciously develop in response to the “seductive father” who surrounds his daughter with sexual innuendos or treats her as what the author Signe Hammer calls a “surrogate goddess,” the replacement image for a sanctified dead wife. Even when sexual abuse doesn’t occur, these fears are real and damaging.
“On some level, the little girl feels she’s supposed to be the father’s wife, either emotionally or physically,” Naomi Lowinsky explains, “or the father feels the little girl is supposed to be his wife, and the burden of carrying the whole feminine side of the family gets put on a child who’s not ready to carry it.” If incest does occur, the trauma can confuse a girl’s sexual identity, thwart her normal developmental process, and complicate her later relationships with men.
She’s forced into a highly adult role too soon, becoming the equivalent of a woman in a child’s body.
Ginny Smith, the narrator of Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres, reveals what can happen to a motherless daughter who becomes a victim of incest. The middle daughter in an Iowa farm family, Ginny, who was an adolescent when her mother died, grows up with deeply ambivalent feelings about sex and marriage. As the novel progresses, she begins to recover memories of her father in her bed at night, and her recollection of incest during her teen years sends her into an emotional tailspin that ultimately ends with her decision to leave her marriage, her family, and her hometown in a quest to reclaim her life.
Beyond Resentment and Past Blame
WANTED: Female housemate . . . must love children. Enjoy the comfort of a large modern home with swimming pool etc. with a family who has lost a mother. Two daughters and a father live there now and the two girls would love to have a new “Mom,” especially the twelve-year-old. Other child is sixteen.
—A father’s advertisement in The Valley
Advocate, a weekly newspaper serving
western Massachusetts and southern
Vermont.
My wife recently was diagnosed with aggressive metasticized breast cancer. My biggest concern of this impending devastating loss is my energetic, hopeful, naive seventeen-year-old girl. How can I get some help in helping her accept this loss?
—Personal letter from a father
in the Midwest
It would be unfair and simply untrue to assume that fathers aren’t concerned about their motherless daughters. They know that love requires more expression than a check sent through the mail. Yet they’re also aware of the emotional limits American society forces on males. Grief does not come easily for them. As Therese Rando explains, males in mourning tend to retreat into themselves, while females reach out. Neither party can be satisfied when a daughter needs to be comforted and a father needs to withdraw.
“He was the parent; he should have been taking care of me,” motherless women insist. This is the lament of the orphan, frustrated by the father who couldn’t meet her needs. We all have prescribed ideas, born at the point where society and family intersect, of what “parent” means, and we have even stricter ideas of which tasks belong to Mom and which to Dad. When a mother dies, a child typically transfers all of her expectations for care onto her surviving parent, although it’s the rare father who can take them all on himself.
Surviving parents assume a larger-than-life stature in a developing child’s life, Maxine Harris explains. “As the only parent, he or she bears the weight of all the child’s expectations and fantasies,” she writes. “No longer free to be just a parent, the survivor must be the ‘perfect’ parent,” which, to motherless daughters, means being father, mother, protector, nurturer, champion, safety net, role model, and provider, all rolled into one.
For many years, with my father, I just expected too much. I remember a phone conversation with my sister in which I was detailing some or another current grievance against him. “You know what the problem is?” she said. “You want him to be a mother. And he’s not ever going to be one.”
She had a point—a valid, accurate, straight-to-the-point point. In that moment, I understood that my frustration came as much from what I wanted and never had as it did from what I did have. I knew my father had human limitations. I’d just been reluctant to accept them.
By constantly expecting my father to be more than he could be, I could hang on to the belief that the nurturing parental element of my family didn’t die with my mother when, in truth, it pretty much did. And so as I worked to let go of my illusion, I also had to let go of the dream of ever having the strong, decisive, emotionally available protector I always wished for, the one who would solve every problem for me.
I know that not so deep inside my psyche still resides a place where I feel worthless and unloved, because one parent died and the other withdrew into his room. When I meet another motherless woman who feels the same way, we have that electric moment of connection, the instantaneous joy of finding someone with whom we feel no impulse to explain. We already know each other’s secrets; we share each other’s fears. But we always speak of our fathers tentatively, our voices low, as if a difficult relationship with the first man in our lives so damages our confidence that we then deny ourselves the right to speak about it later with conviction, or with strength.
My father and I did not have an easy time together. We were not bound by similar bodies or mutual impulses or comparable dreams. For many years, it seemed as if all we shared was a surname and the memory of a woman who died decades ago. Then my children came along and, through his interest in and love for them, we found a common ground. Sometimes it was hard to watch them enjoy the playful, curious, happy part of him, a part I hadn’t known since childhood, if ever. But most of the time I would sit on my hands, press my lips shut, and let them get to know each other without intrusions from the past. The problems I had with him were my problems, not theirs.
Until the very end, my father and I both tried to have a relationship, as best as we knew how. A few weeks before he died, I flew from my home in California to his in suburban New York. My siblings and I needed to know what kind of burial arrangements he wanted, but none of us particularly wanted to ask. It was my turn to visit, so I volunteered for the task.
It was early December and my father had been bedridden for a week or two by then, attended to by a revolving staff of hospice volunteers and a devoted full-time aide. The day after I arrived, I pulled a chair up to the side of his bed. I took his hand, still pudgy despite a precipitous weight loss, and held it between mine.
“We still have some time left,” I told him, “but there’s something I really need to ask you now. If you don’t want to talk about it we don’t have to, but it would be good if you could try.” I’d been prepped for this conversation by my friend Susan, a soc
ial worker, and so far I thought it was going well.
“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”
“Is there anything you want me to take care of? Any arrangements you’d like me to make?”
He shook his head quizzically, as if he were surprised I’d ask. “All the finances are in order, and I have a will,” he said. “No, everything’s done.”
“And the burial? Do you want to be buried with Mom?”
“Of course,” he said.
The conversation was going well, too well, actually. Too clinical. Too different. I’d gotten the answer I needed, but I wanted something more. Something substantial, damn it. There would be no more chances to get this right. And with that thought, emotion came charging through.
“I’m going to miss you,” I told him. “A lot.” Tears and mucus started pouring down my face but I didn’t have a Kleenex nearby. “Is there anything you want to tell me while there’s still time?” I asked. “Anything you want me to know?”
He scrunched his lips and rolled his eyes up in thought, then shook his head. No.
We sat together quietly for a moment. “Are you scared?” I asked him. I couldn’t help wondering.
“No,” he said, more matter-of-factly than I would have expected. He angled his chin toward the photographs of his grandchildren taped to the mirror on the wall. “That’s the only part that hurts,” he said.
He died two weeks later, a peaceful passing just before dawn, with my sister by his side. It was the kind of death I’d always wished my mother had had. In her final days she had been blindsided by the severity of her illness, refusing to believe her life was coming to an end. In his dying, my father faced his mortality head on with a courage, a dignity, and a kind of inner strength I’d never seen him model in life. It made me wonder what other secrets he’d held, what other capacities could have been revealed. There had been, I realized, still so much to learn from him. This wasn’t the answer I was looking for in his bedroom that day, but I think, over time, it will turn out to be exactly the answer I need.
Chapter Six
Sister and Brother, Sister and Sister Sibling Connections (and Disconnections)
MY SISTER MOVED TO LOS ANGELES in 1992, two months after I returned to New York. This hadn’t been part of the plan. For months we’d been discussing how I would finally end a decade of circuitous wanderings in Manhattan, where we would then live twenty city blocks apart in mutual sibling bliss. But six weeks after I unpacked my boxes, Michele called and said an interview in Los Angeles had come up, so she flew west to check it out, and of course they wanted her immediately, and, well, it was too good a deal for her to pass up. Within three weeks she was gone.
I was, mildly speaking, devastated—that old Abandonment sign flashing its neon warning again—but I can’t say I was all that surprised. Michele had moved to Manhattan the year our brother, Glenn, left for college, a silent exchange that kept at least one child in close proximity to our father (in case of emergency, as if mere presence could prevent one). Like so many agreements in our family, this one has always been unspoken, so when Michele started filling my empty boxes I didn’t object. We both knew what was happening. It was my turn to be the anchor and her turn to sail.
Five years later, after Glenn had returned to New York, I left for Los Angeles. I moved there to join my fiancé, but found solace in the knowledge that my sister was nearby. She helped plan my wedding, pulling together a planner, a caterer, and a photographer in three days flat. She was my only bridesmaid, and during the reception she brought guests to tears of laughter and warmth with her toast.
Compassion and support came late to us two. Until we reached adulthood, we didn’t get along. Like most sisters separated by three years—too few for us to play parent and child, too many for us to be peers—we grew up on a shared diet of rivalry and rancor as we competed for our brother’s adoration and our parents’ limited time. It makes sense to me now that when our mother died, Michele and I found little comfort in each other. Instead, we intensified the division we knew so well. Familiarity offers false security when change permeates the house, and competition was our established code.
We’d been raised to protect and care for our younger brother, which we continued to do the best we could. But we exhibited no such empathy for each other. Tension between siblings is often a barely restrained, misdirected rage, and after our mother died, Michele became the target of mine. She, in turn, remained perpetually on the defensive. And as we argued and glared and ignored each other, a new, bizarre competition developed between us: who’d suffered more hardship when Mommy died, who could do the most for Glenn, and who could persuade Daddy to give her more.
All this was taking place in a confusing milieu of enforced normalcy and unexpressed grief, with our father periodically delivering short speeches about how the individual is more important than the unit, and how we should all learn to fend for ourselves. This sounded, at first, like a fine idea to me. At seventeen, I didn’t want the responsibility I felt for my younger siblings, and I chose to attend a college nine hundred miles from New York. Escape was my original plan. But underneath all the resentment I felt toward Michele must have been a protective instinct and a bond even rivalry and distance couldn’t kill. The night my father called me at college, threatening to desert the family, I tried to negotiate with him by phone, finally resorting to threat—“If you leave those kids, so help me God, I’ll bring them here to live with me”—and I understood at that moment how committed I was to those words. Despite all our previous troubles, Michele knew it, too. When we talk about that night now, she says she, too, was packing her bags, ready to come live with me.
I’m not sure I can identify a discrete turning point between us—perhaps maturity took care of most of the repair—but I know that night marked the beginning of a new understanding between Michele and me. In our shared adversity we found a common ground. Losing a mother ultimately meant we each gained a sister. I’m not sure that otherwise we’d have become friends.
Lest this story sound too pat and tidy, I’ll admit we’re hardly adequate mother substitutes for each other. Michele is still the younger sister, and she’s often frustrated when I’m not a good role model; I’m still the older one, and I’m often surprised and annoyed when she acts more capable than I. And even when we work to overcome them, the tiny crimes of the past don’t necessarily evaporate by will.
That night in 1992 before Michele moved to L.A., I finally broke down and cried.
“Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “I need you to be strong for me.”
“I can’t always be the strong one,” I said. “Goddamit. You’re the only security I feel I have in this family. I don’t want you to leave.”
And then, very quickly, as if waiting for her cue, she shot back with, “Well, what about when you left for college when I was fifteen?” and I understood how deep these memories of betrayal lie, that no matter how far Michele and I travel, we always come back to this.
Older daughter of two, middle daughter of five, younger sister of older brothers—the combinations are varied, and motherless women represent them all. Eighty-five percent of the women interviewed for this book have siblings, who are always central characters in the family histories they tell.
In an earlier chapter, I said a daughter’s relationship with her mother is likely to be one of the longest-lasting of her life. But those of us who have siblings, and especially those of us with sisters, can expect these relationships to persist even longer than the ones we have with our parents. The quality and intensity of these sibling relationships fluctuate over our lifetimes, filled with as many storms and sunny days as the twenty-four-hour Weather Channel.
Sibling ties start developing the moment a second child is born. When a mother dies or leaves, their strength and quality quickly become apparent. Sibling relationships rarely do a 180 when a family undergoes a trauma such as mother loss. Instead, as in my family, previous patterns tend to exaggerate. Brothers and sisters w
ho were close and supportive beforehand typically draw together more tightly after the death. Likewise, siblings with loose connections usually split even further apart—especially when the mother was the force that held disparate family members together. While outer influences such as counseling or support from an extended family member can prevent extreme reactions, the intensification of previous patterns usually persists until the trauma phase subsides, and often continues into adulthood.
Margie, twenty-five, remembers sitting quietly with her younger brother on their grandmother’s couch the morning after their mother committed suicide. Her parents were divorced, and though Margie was barely seven, she transformed her panic and confusion into a quick and fierce desire to align with her five-year-old brother, whom she’d been raised to protect. “It seemed clear to me that all the adults around me were falling apart, and that nobody had the capacity or the desire to take care of me,” she says. “So I immediately started thinking about taking care of my brother. I started thinking that he was my family, and that we were in this together, like a team.” Today, the two siblings are “incredibly close,” Margie says, and she continues to offer nurturing and support to him in the town where they both live.
Margie’s immediate impulse to protect her brother may have been in part a defense against her own grief, providing her with a distraction from the confusion and anger she felt about her mother’s suicide. It also corroborates studies that suggest siblings can draw security from each other when a mother or mother-figure is gone. Children as young as three have shown evidence that they can calm their younger brother’s or sister’s fears. About half of all preschool-age children will offer comfort to a younger sibling who’s distressed.