Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  Twenty-five-year-old Margie says that after five years in a relationship with an emotionally stable partner she’s finally learning how to rebuild the trust and security she lost when her mother committed suicide eighteen years ago and she went to live with an emotionally detached father and stepmother for the next eleven years.

  This man I’m involved with comes from a happy nuclear family. His parents are still in love, and the siblings are all close. Of course, they have their own family problems, like every family does, but generally they’re pretty content. So he has a really different thing going for him. His givens are not necessarily my givens. It’s a given for him that I love him and he loves me and we want to be together. He has this idea that I’ll always be there—I’m not going to die, I’m not going to stop loving him, I’m not going to reject him. I don’t have that feeling yet, but I am getting to a point where I’m ready to open up a little bit and express some needs.

  I’m thinking now that I can be interdependent with others, that there are more options than pure independence and dependence, with dependence as bad, bad, bad, and that maybe I can begin to trust and express vulnerability in a way that’s not destructive to myself. I’m slowly redefining myself as someone who can want and need people in her life. Yes, I can survive without them. I’ve proven that to myself. I can survive without nurturing and love, but it’s a pretty destructive and painful way to live.

  Like Margie, women who enter secure, long-term relationships with partners they feel they can trust often find that these unions act as stabilizing influences for their most intense fears of loss. Gary Jacobson, M.D., and Robert G. Ryder, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health, found that the formal act of marriage also allayed some of these concerns. As they prepared to study 120 married couples—90 with a history of parental death before marriage and 30 with no prior parent loss—they expected subjects who’d lost parents during childhood or adolescence to have the most problems during their first few years of marriage. Instead, they found that more than a third of the couples they rated “exceptionally close” had experienced parental death prior to marriage, twice the number they’d anticipated. These couples exhibited a strong degree of intimacy, were able to communicate openly, felt grateful for the spouse, and enjoyed a feeling of family reconstitution.

  Forty-three-year-old Mary Jo, who was eight when her mother died, says she achieved this security in her second marriage, as she applied the lessons she’d learned from the breakup of her first. When her first husband left her, the abandonment she felt was so severe that she recognized a need for professional help. With the aid of an empathetic therapist, she began to mourn her mother’s death. As she worked through those feelings of loss, Mary Jo saw how she had been approaching her romantic relationships looking for the mother love she felt lacking in her life. And she started to learn how to choose an emotionally available partner whom she hoped could meet some—but not all—of her needs. Today, she describes her second marriage as much healthier and more stable than her previous one. “My husband is really a rock of reliability and strength and love,” she says. “Fortunately, he’s very unlike me in terms of catastrophic thinking. He’ll tell me, ‘That fear has no basis in reality, Mary Jo,’ but he’s also wonderful about letting me cry when I need to cry. There are some times when I think about all the deaths in my life and need to cry for what looks like no reason, and he holds me or just sits with me. I think the combination of him, and my own resilience, and having good friends and a good therapist has been instrumental in getting me from a very dangerous place to here.” Mary Jo says that as she learned how to diffuse her dependency needs among several different people, each of her relationships, including her marriage, began to feel more secure.

  Women with Women

  Motherless daughters who choose women as lovers look for the same emotional security as those who choose men, and also find solace in those who offer stability and consistent care. Their desire for mother love, however, often involves a direct search for the same-sex connection they lost. Karen, twenty-nine, who came out at age fifteen, says she specifically looks for girlfriends who can offer the nurturing she kept trying to elicit from an alcoholic mother who died nine years ago. “After my mother died, I kept trying to find the validation she never gave me through my lovers,” she explains. “Being lovers with women has certainly made that one step more complex. I mean, I don’t look for Mommy and Daddy; I look for Mommy and Mommy. I tend to be attracted to older women, and that gives me no end of thought. I ask myself, ‘What exactly is going on here?’ and ‘Is there something suspect?’ My former lover was ten years older than me, and in a sense she adopted me. When my mother was sick, we went to see her together, and it was clear that my lover—and not my mother—was the one mothering me.” Today, Karen is living with her lover of the past three years. During our interview, she waved her arm to indicate the comfortable furnishings of their apartment and explained that all the items that surrounded us belong to her partner, who literally and figuratively provides her with the sense of home she never had as a child.

  In her oft-quoted essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich suggests that woman-woman partnerships are far more natural than a predominantly heterosexual society likes to admit. A child’s first intimate bond is typically with a female. A boy who’s encouraged to choose a member of the opposite sex as a mate thus experiences a continuity of attachment. Girls, however, are expected to shift their emotional allegiance to men. “If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children,” Rich writes, “it would seem logical . . . to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women [and] why in fact women would ever redirect that search.” The motherless woman searching for maternal love in a mate may find that the most natural place for her to find it is in another woman’s arms.

  After dating men for ten years, Sabrina, twenty-seven, is about to begin her first lesbian relationship. She’s always been attracted to women, she says, but has avoided dating them because she’s hyper-conscious of trying to reunite with her mother, who committed suicide thirteen years ago. “When I’m with a woman, there’s always a transference going on,” she explains. “Sometimes I want to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was just thinking you were my mother. I hope you don’t mind.’ But for the past seven months I’ve been working with a woman who’s bisexual, and we’ve begun a sort of relationship. I haven’t slept with her yet, but she offers a lot of the nurturing I’m looking for. Her mother was an absentee mother, who left her when she was a child. We’re like two lost people holding each other.”

  About half the lesbians interviewed for this book knew they were gay before their mothers died, and several of them said their mothers’ deaths freed them to come out without fear of family conflict. One lesbian, living happily with her partner of eight years, said she’s so certain her mother’s reaction to her sexuality would have been hysteria and withdrawal that she’d probably be living with a man if her mother hadn’t died. Other bisexual and lesbian motherless daughters say they chose women as emotional and sexual partners after relationships with men failed to provide the nurturing and comfort they sought, or that they channeled their sexual impulses toward women because they feared having such impulses toward men while living alone with their fathers. Although some of these daughters may have been attracted to other women all along, they also point to specific trigger events—and not just the deaths of their mothers—that guided them into the bisexual or homosexual relationships they’re involved in today.

  Love Substitutes

  Motherless daughters talk about empty spaces. They talk about missing pieces. They talk about the void that exists where a family once was, and the gaping hole that sits permanently between their stomach and their ribs.

  This emptiness turns the unmothered into emotional hoarders. Accustomed to receiving less than the
y want or need, they try to take in as much as they can, as quickly as possible, as if excess today guarantees a stockpile for tomorrow. “The unmothered child often wants to grasp things because she’s so afraid that they’ll go away, that they won’t be there when she needs them,” Clarissa Pinkola Estés explains. Back-to-back relationships, overeating, overspending, alcoholism, drug abuse, shoplifting, overachieving—all are her attempts to fill that empty space, to mother herself, to suppress feelings of grief or loneliness, and to get the nurturing she feels she lost or never had.

  These behaviors typically emerge during adolescence, when a newly acquired autonomy gives a girl more options for soothing herself. But without a mother-figure or caretaker to identify with, she loses some of the capacity for self-mothering, and she does not yet have the emotional maturity to obtain it in a constructive way. Trying to mother herself and drown out her pain, she then turns to sex, food, alcohol, drugs, shoplifting, or other compulsive behaviors as substitutes for love.

  Instead of working from the inside out, a motherless daughter uses addictions to heal herself from the outside in. She may try to medicate with alcohol or drugs, satiate with food or material goods, and master her environment with achievement and success. The same panic that makes her spin around in a crowd to look for that single stranger who’ll deliver her from a lifetime of loneliness and pain sends her bolting to the grocery store or shopping mall to let acquisition and consumption push her genuine feelings aside, even if only for a while.

  “Compulsion is despair on the emotional level,” writes Geneen Roth in When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy. “The substances, people, or activities that we become compulsive about are those that we believe capable of taking our despair away.” These behaviors develop and persist because they aid us in some way. A woman deliberately gains fifty pounds to make herself unattractive and thereby avoids confronting her fear of intimacy. A girl becomes an overachiever to elicit the praise and respect from strangers that she can’t get from her family, or to force her surviving parent to acknowledge her success. An adolescent turns to drugs and alcohol to numb her unbearable feelings of loneliness and loss.

  Since her mother’s fatal heart attack nineteen years ago, Francine, thirty-two, has used food as her source of comfort. Of the ten children in her family, Francine was the only one who shared her mother’s overeating habits, and food became her substitute for maternal love. “I would bring in anything that would sort of push everything else away,” she explains. “I’ve had to work with this all my life. Everything is oral for me. I could easily be an alcoholic if I let myself be. I started smoking right after my mother went into the hospital and just recently quit. That was a major difficulty for me. One thing I’ve noticed over the years since my mother has been gone is that I’m really, really weak around dairy products. Whenever I’m hurting, that’s what I turn to. I’ve read books about how mother’s milk represents nurturance, and dairy is a good substitute for that.”

  After unsuccessful attempts with several weight-loss programs, Francine is now working with a therapist to address the underlying cause of her compulsions: the emptiness and loneliness she’s felt since her mother’s departure and her family’s subsequent demise. Instead of reaching for the quick fix of cigarettes or food, she’s now trying to achieve longer-lasting results by identifying exactly what she needs and obtaining it through less self-destructive routes.

  “I’ll still turn to booze, and sometimes I need a candy bar or I’m going to kill, but I give in to these weaknesses a lot less frequently than I used to,” she says. “I’m getting stronger. I have a lot of good friends I can turn to who care about me. I also care about myself more, and I’m learning to get love from me. I write in my journal a lot, and I sing. I make crafts. I’ve become an activist. If something makes me mad, I’ll write a letter or do something about it. That’s a big difference, because I was never able to express anger before. Being a girl, I learned to hold it in and cry.

  “I was doing really well a couple of years ago, until I started trying to get pregnant and couldn’t. It started bringing up feelings of loss, and I started eating a lot. The past year and a half has been very emotionally trying. The difference now is that I see it as temporary, and I feel I can get through it. Before, this kind of stress would just plummet me back.”

  In most families, a mother’s absence contributes to a daughter’s compulsive behaviors, though rarely causes them The loss more often exacerbates an existing problem or forces a budding addiction into early maturity. In Francine’s family, the seeds for addiction already had been planted before her mother died. Francine was overeating as a child, and her mother’s heart attack and the resulting family chaos gave her even more reason to use food to suppress her feelings.

  As Arlene Englander explains, women who feel helpless against their addictions often use mother loss as a convenient excuse for their behaviors. “If you insist that B follows A, that the reason you’re an alcoholic is because your mother died, then your addiction becomes irreversible,” she says. “The logic then is that since your mother remains dead, you have to remain an alcoholic. The daughter who can realize that her mother’s death may be only one of the contributing factors, and who can understand that she re-creates herself every day of her life, becomes less of a victim. We all have to be aware that as adults, we can be responsible for re-creating our own psychological health.”

  That’s what Carol, who spoke earlier about her difficulties with relationships, learned a few years ago, when she finally sought help for her bulimia and compulsive shoplifting. Carol traces the origin of these compulsions back to her early childhood with a distant mother, and their intensification to the period that followed her mother’s death. “I was just going along until age seventeen, and then it was like somebody pulled the rug out from under me,” she explains. “To compensate, I moved into a mode like my mother’s—efficient, detached, we-can-handle-it-all. She rarely expressed emotion, so I didn’t know how to do that. And that’s when my eating got worse.”

  Compulsions substitute action for emotion, and eating and stealing became Carol’s escapes from a grief she didn’t know how to manage. “I was trying to cope with the pain by eating, and then to regain control, I’d purge or exercise like mad to try to rid myself of it,” she admits. “It became almost a ritual. I always felt a slight sense of relief afterward, like ‘It’s okay now. I don’t have it inside me anymore. ’ I also compulsively shoplifted and stole. I know a lot of anger was behind that. I felt like I was trying to get back at somebody even though there was nobody, really, to get back at. And it was a way to get what I never got. Stealing stayed with me until just a few years ago. I wasn’t stealing from stores anymore, but in the workplace I’d take things or come up with sneaky little ways that I could try to somehow get taken care of by someone other than myself. It was like I was playing out my family issues. I wasn’t getting what I really wanted through work, so I acted out by taking things.”

  When she was caught stealing from the workplace and lost her job, Carol joined Debtor’s Anonymous, which she describes as a support group for people with financial debts to others and emotional debts to themselves. Today, she’s trying to redirect the energy she once put into her addictions toward coping with her feelings of loss. She hopes she’ll then be free to have a fulfilling relationship with someone else.

  That’s the real irony of compulsive behaviors: A woman turns to them as substitutes for love, but they then prevent her—and protect her—from finding the reciprocated human warmth she really seeks. To break addictive patterns, she has to be willing to face the emotions that initially made the behaviors attractive to her: anger, guilt, grief.

  It’s the same cure for the anxious lover’s search, and the avoidant daughter’s withdrawal. Only when we let go of the lost mother do we stop looking for her in every potential partner we meet and stop expecting her to leave us again. The strength we gain from confronting these fe
ars is ultimately what gives us the self-worth, the self-respect, and the courage to love and be loved in return.

  I met my husband in the spring of 1995, when he rented office space to the fledgling Motherless Daughters organization that was forming in New York. It took a year for us to start dating, and another year before we married. He pursued me, which was a novel and unexpected twist. For the first time, I was the one afraid to step into a relationship. This one, I knew from the beginning, was one that was going to last. I didn’t want to mess it up.

  There are two common relationship strategies among survivors of early parent loss, Maxine Harris explains: deliberately keeping relationships brief but intense and always being the one to leave a relationship first. Both are methods for minimizing anxiety about intimate relationships, which are often synonymous, in a motherless daughter’s mind, with potential loss. I’d always thought the men I’d chosen were ambivalent and evasive. Only after meeting the man who would become my husband did I realize the truly erratic one, most of the time, had been me.