by Hope Edelman
So there I was: I looked like a woman, I acted like a man, and underneath it all I still felt like an adolescent, constantly looking for assurance that I was competent enough, attractive enough, good enough as I was.
A motherless woman is a walking paradox. At the same time that she emits qualities of personal strength, the loss of a mother frequently has damaged her self-esteem, eroded her self-confidence, and evaporated her secure base. This is the fundamental insecurity that makes her scan a room of women and conclude she doesn’t fit in. Other women have mothers, she thinks, but I have only myself. Never mind that she has a father or siblings or close friends or a spouse. In a crowd of other women, as a female, she feels alone. Fierce independence and self-sufficiency are her shield, thrust forward as her public display of competence-despite-loss and drawn close as her private protection against the crushing loneliness she’d otherwise feel.
To depend too much on someone else, she believes, would mean to risk the pain of further loss. “No thanks. I can handle it myself,” she’ll say, when what she’s really feeling is, “I want your help, but I’m afraid if I depend on you, you’ll leave.” When the person she relied on most has left her, the only companion she can unquestionably count on is herself. For the motherless daughter, depending on independence isn’t nearly as contradictory as it sounds.
Laundry bleach and four-course meals and how to wear a string of beads—it’s not that I don’t know any of these things or couldn’t learn about them if I tried. I have my daughters write thank-you notes for every gift they receive, and I’m always after my husband to store leftovers in Tupperware instead of sticking the used pot on a refrigerator shelf. But I resist seeking out domestic information for myself. For me to pursue such bits of knowledge actively would mean accepting at the deep, emotional level that my mother isn’t coming back. And how do I know this for sure? In my dreams she returns still, her death a horrible, confusing mistake; but she’s mute and distant, a shadow presence, ignorant of all that’s happened in the years since she left. In this realm of subconscious double-think, where my mother is dead but not-really-dead, I am still the daughter waiting for her mother to be the guide. I can’t replace her. Not even with myself.
Perhaps this is my way of honoring her, by insisting that my small domestic quandaries can be solved by her alone. Maybe that’s why I was always unsuccessful at finding a singular mother substitute. Although I’ve longed for the presence of a more mature, experienced woman in my life, when I meet one, I’m never sure how much is appropriate to ask for, or exactly what I hope she could give. The mother of a former boyfriend once complained that I didn’t respect her, and I ask myself now if that was true. I know I intended no disrespect, but my emotional distance and insistent self-reliance must have been interpreted as such. I had absolutely no idea how to . . . well, how to be in the presence of an older woman. It’s been so long since I’ve known one well. How much insight does sixty years give you? What kind of authority is reasonable for either of us to command? To treat an older woman as my equal seems to devalue her experience and insight; to step into submission is to ignore mine. Unless the other woman acts first, establishing our relative positions from the start, I’m uncertain, awkward, and self-conscious, fearful of her judgment. I insist that my children behave perfectly in her presence. I never know what to do with my hands.
To allow a woman to mother me—really and truly care for me—is a proposition I’ve always found simultaneously appealing and terrifying. As much as I’ve want to feel the soft, strong pressure of a woman’s arms around me when I’m sick or lonely or scared, I’m afraid an ongoing presence would feel like to much of an intrusion to me now. Still, I wonder if all the years spent alone, hoping a mother substitute would magically appear on her own, have made me too self-reliant and self-protective to ever accept one. I wonder if for me it’s just too late.
Jocelyn, who spent twenty-one years searching for a woman to emulate, says that for her it was not. She was five when her mother was institutionalized, the first of a series of hospitalizations that persisted for the next twelve years. When Jocelyn’s mother was home, she drank so heavily that she added even further conflict to the family. Without a stable mother figure to observe and identify with during her childhood, Jocelyn says she never felt secure or worthwhile as a female. Then, in her midtwenties, she met a woman at her church:Kaye was thirteen years older than me, divorced with two kids, and we became close friends. I think she was looking for someone to give her life some meaning, and I was looking for a mom, is what it came down to. I don’t think she understood at the time how much she meant to me. It was just a friendship—I am heterosexual and so is she—but it was like I would study her continuously. I remember even following her into the bathroom and watching her put on her makeup. She’d get really nervous and say, “Would you get out of here? Why are you watching me?” At the time I didn’t understand why I had this need to watch her, but now I realize it’s like the little girl who was watching Mom. I never got to do that. After I’d known Kaye for a few years, I felt as if I’d been in a room with building blocks scattered all over the floor, and when she walked in someone said to me for the first time, “Okay, put the blue block on top of the yellow block, and then put the red block next to it.” Friends would say to me, “What’s happening to you? You’re so different.” I had such a hunger that was finally being met. Kaye and I have been friends for about ten years, and even though I live in a different city now, I really feel like it’s a solid friendship. If I need a woman’s advice, I know I can go to her.
I am heterosexual and so is she, Jocelyn said, inserting this statement quickly, for added clarification. After all, what other explanation besides lesbianism do we have for a woman who so deeply craves the companionship of another female the way motherless daughters do? Many women I’ve interviewed released sighs of relief when I mentioned this topic, admitting that the gender confusion they often feel has led them to question their sexuality. If I sometimes feel more like a man than a woman, they wonder, and if I’m looking for a woman who can enter my life, does that mean I’m gay?
“I was always very comfortable around men and boys,” explains thirty-six-year-old Jane, “but I went through a stage where I thought I might be a lesbian, because I just craved that female touch. I would react like, ‘Oh my God, a woman touched me’ every time I got a hug. Sometimes I wished I could just rent a mommy and have her snuggle me on a couch. I get around some women who are motherly, and I’m completely mesmerized. It’s like an out-of-body experience. I just want to age-regress and be snuggled, and never come out of this fantasy.”
Jane’s fantasies about women had more to do with the emotional and physical comfort she associated with an older, female protector than they did with her sexual preference. Amanda, thirty-two, says she came to the same realization during college, when she started dating a woman to see if her emotional impulses were somehow linked to sexual desires. She discovered that she preferred the social and emotional company of women, but that her sexual interest was still limited to men. Today, she splits her companionship needs between her husband and a close group of female friends. “I really treasure my girlfriends,” she says. “I just have more fun with a girl. I remember pursuing guys as friends, and boy was that a go-nowhere thing. I’ve recently gotten involved with a group of women who make jewelry out of clay. I relate better to the older women, and I’ve made some good friends in the group who are older than me.” From these friends, Amanda draws the feminine energy and emotional support she says she rarely can get from men. When she needs one mature, experienced woman she can depend on, she goes to the grandmother who helped raise her and who still represents her home base.
A mother surrogate unquestionably can help steer a girl through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. The most important factor that helps children who grow up under adverse family or social conditions to become emotionally adjusted, competent adults is the active involvement of at least one st
able adult who cares. A feminine mentor who’s emotionally invested in a motherless girl’s well-being can help her develop self-esteem and confidence as both a female and as an individual. “What that child gets from that mentor is a sense that she matters,” Phyllis Klaus explains. “That she’s important. That she counts in the world. From that, she builds her sense of self. She hears that she’s competent, and she can build competency. That then helps her feel independent and good about herself, instead of her ending up anxious, dependent, and depressed.” Healthy development depends on a girl’s firm belief that she’s worthwhile, lovable, and acceptable as she is, and she needs that same security to develop a comfortable gender identity. “A child’s natural tendency is to identify with her same-sex parent, and to have that hidden but available gendered sense of self gives her a lot of security in development,” Klaus says. “So I look for what ways a motherless daughter has been able to find that in her life. Very often, there’s an aunt or a friend’s mother who’s had some impact on a girl’s sense of being a girl.”
Where do daughters find female support and comfort after their mothers die? Of the ninety-seven women who said they found one or more mother substitutes, 33 percent named an aunt; 30 percent, a grandmother; 13 percent, a sister; 13 percent, a teacher; 12 percent, friends; 10 percent, a co-worker; and the rest cited, in descending order, neighbors, friends’ mothers, mothers-in-law, stepmothers, husbands, lovers, and cousins.9 The largest group—37 percent—said they hadn’t found anyone and had learned to rely on their own resources instead. Some created a collage of guidance, pasting together bits of influence drawn from religion, books, television, film, and the memory of a mother that fades more with each passing year.
The logical first place for a daughter to seek a mother substitute is within her extended family. The psychologist Walter Toman says the best replacement for a loved one is someone who’s as similar to the lost person as possible, which probably explains why maternal aunts and grandmothers are among the most oft-cited mother substitutes.
Such “most similar” persons, however, are as a rule hard to find. If such a person who is similar in every respect or practically identical with the person who was lost, say a parent, could be recruited. . . then the substitute person could be psychologically acceptable to the bereaved soon after the loss has occurred, perhaps even immediately after it. In most instances, however, the loss of a person requires an extensive period of mourning and waiting. This period is usually more extensive the longer one has lived with the lost person, and the less the person coming up as an eventual substitute resembles the person who has been lost.
For these reasons—as well as those outlined in chapter 6—a stepmother is rarely an immediate or readily accepted replacement figure. Her arrival in the family may occur before the daughter has had time to begin mourning and separating from her lost mother or while the daughter is in a developmental phase that involves either a strong attachment to her father or a rejection of all parental figures. In more than half of the eighty-three stepfamilies included in the Motherless Daughters survey, a stepmother arrived within two years. The daughter’s feelings of anger and betrayal often prevented her from accepting her stepmother as a viable, feminine model.
When a daughter grows up perceiving an adult woman as a threat, she may unconsciously carry the competitiveness she once felt or still feels toward her stepmother into her adult relationships with other women. A female co-worker, for example, who gets the job a daughter wanted may stir up the old feelings of replacement and rejection she experienced each time she believed her father chose her stepmother over her. The adult daughter then directs her anger toward her co-worker, when it’s really the stepmother she’s been competing with all along.
But even this anger toward the stepmother usually comes from an even deeper source: the death of the mother. When a daughter displaces her unreconciled anger toward the mother who abandoned her onto her father’s new wife, she projects all the Bad Mother images onto her stepmother—thus, the Evil Stepmother archetype—and reserves all the Good Mother images for her lost mother. As Rose-Emily Rothenberg explains in her article “The Orphan Archetype”:Because the actual mother is absent, the orphan frequently has the fantasy that the true mother must have been the perfect, ideal, all-giving mother. This leaves the living “mother” to carry its opposite, the dark and demonic side. Since the stepmother is not the “real thing,” nor the stepchild her “real child,” both she and the child are left to endure the “second-best” psychology in this dual mother-child constellation.
A daughter’s angry and resentful charge of “You’re not my real mother!” often provokes a stepmother’s silent, yet just as resentful, response, “Well, you’re not my real child, either.” How many motherless women tell stories that support the Evil Stepmother archetype? Far more than those who refute it, reflecting the difficulties that develop between stepmother and stepdaughters when the birth mother is lost through death or desertion. Idealization of the lost mother, unrealistic expectations for the stepmother, and the arrival of step- or half-siblings can all create disharmony between a motherless daughter and the new woman of the house.
Amanda spent twelve years with a stepmother she once hoped would become her surrogate mom. She was three when her father gained custody of her in a divorce settlement that prevented her mother from seeing her again, and for the next four years, Amanda lived with her father and grandmother and prayed each night for a new mother. She eventually got her wish, but this new mother wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for.
I wanted a mom so bad. When my dad said he was going to marry Ellen, I was really happy. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. This was the mid-60s, and she was part of the Gidget scene, and a former beauty queen. Her clothes were perfect. Everything was perfect. But I would learn, even within that first year, that this was a weird person. I called her the Ice Maiden. Within ten months she had a baby, my half-sister, and she went into a depression from the time Callie was one until I left the house when I was eighteen. I more or less became Callie’s mother, because my stepmother was just on the couch with the remote or shopping or getting her nails done or reading Harlequin novels. Over the course of the years, I felt totally abandoned by anybody real. And I was so disappointed. Nobody acknowledged it, or ever asked how I was feeling. I grew up feeling like . . . just so self-absorbed and really sad and sorry for myself.
It’s true that the Evil Stepmother stories I’ve heard are one-sided, but if even their most basic facts are accurate, many motherless women were raised by stepmothers who were, if not downright abusive, then at least coolly detached, ranging from those who gave preferential treatment to their biological children and turned stepdaughters into domestic servants to those who restricted a daughter’s contact with her father and appropriated the lost mother’s possessions after his death. Jealous of a stepdaughter’s closeness with her father, unwilling to accept a child of the “other woman” in her new family, or simply inexperienced at mothering, stepmothers may falter, give up, or turn on a motherless child. Entering a family where the previous mother has died puts a stepmother in the hot seat. A sanctified lost mother can pique her insecurities even more than a divorced mother’s presence will: a live woman, she can compete with; a saint, she knows she can’t be. Her frustration and anger may get displaced onto the stepdaughter, who represents the closest approximation of the dead mother in the home.
Among older children with limited dependence on the nuclear family, a difficult stepmother may be more an annoyance than a daily trauma, but for children who still live in the home, the consequences of poor replacement mothering can be longlasting and profound. The British psychiatrist John Birtchnell, in a study of 160 female psychiatric patients who lost their mothers before age eleven, found that 82 percent of those who had poor relationships with their mother replacements suffered from depression later in life. It seems that inadequate mothering after a mother dies or leaves, rather than the mother’s
absence per se, is an important link between mother loss and a daughter’s later depression.
More than a dozen women have told me that they believe their lack of confidence, their low self-esteem, and their pervasive loneliness come not from losing their mothers but from growing up with a critical and demanding stepmother they felt they could never please. When explaining the hurt she still feels when thinking of her childhood, a thirty-four-year-old woman explains, “Some of my worries and needs are because of my loss of a bond that a child is not meant to lose, but some of them are because of the sickness that followed in the form of a twisted ‘stepmonster.’ I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to separate the pain of losing one from the pain of acquiring the other.”
Yet all stepmother-stepdaughter relationships are not doomed to failure. Caroline, for example, says she deeply misses her stepmother, who died three years ago. This woman, whom Caroline refers to as her “second mother,” joined the family six months after Caroline’s birth mother died, when Caroline was eleven. “Mother Jean was thrilled to take over our family. She took on one teenager and three budding teenagers, and then a few years later had her own child, my half-sister,” says Caroline. “My second mother appreciated us, and left us alone to be ourselves. She didn’t mess with our selfhood, but we knew she was there for us when we needed her. We all loved her dearly and feel very fortunate to have had her. Losing her was no easier, maybe even harder, than losing my first mom.”
Caroline, who’s now fifty-three, had good replacement mothering as an adolescent and adult. Nevertheless, she has still longed for her birth mother’s support and encouragement as she has reached the feminine milestones of menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. Caroline, like other motherless daughters, found that even when a stepmother provides the essential triad of physical care, nurturing, and consistent emotional support, a daughter invariably still feels that one, final missed connection. “There’s a sense the birth mother holds secrets, that she’s the source of certain knowledge that no one else has access to,” Evelyn Bassoff explains. “Even if the motherless daughter gets all the information about menstruation, birth control, and childbirth, I’d imagine she’d still feels something missing, something her mother could have given her that other people can’t. It’s that sense of continuity from mother to daughter.” Finding a woman isn’t always enough when it’s the woman you feel you need.