by Hope Edelman
I chose to go to law school, thinking it was something I could do well, to the encouragement of one of my teachers at Cornell. So I took the LSAT before my husband did, even though he was a year ahead of me at Cornell. And then my mother’s sister and my father’s brother, who were the ones I visited on school vacations, decided it was acceptable for me to go to law school because I wouldn’t have to support myself, so I could do this crazy thing. In fact, my aunt recently died and my daughter found a letter I had written in college saying something about just taking the Law School Aptitude Test, and saying I did fine on the English but I don’t think I did well on the math, and maybe if I get a low grade that will end this crazy idea of mine about going to law school. Sometimes I’ll reflect on what my mother might have counseled me if she had lived longer and seen the way my interests developed, and I think that she would have been with me.
My view is that I am what she would have wanted me to be, in fact far beyond any of her wildest dreams of what I could be, not because of my limitations but because of the limitations of society. I have her picture on the wall in my chambers, and it’s where I can see her every day when I leave. I kind of smile when I look at it and say, “She would have been proud of me.”
Resilience and Determination
Surviving a disruptive family can inspire the type of personal strength that insulates a daughter against professional despair. As Victoria Rowell, who plays Drucilla Winters on CBS’s daytime drama The Young and the Restless, explains, the years she spent living as a foster child in five different homes helped her withstand the rejections she experienced first as an aspiring ballet dancer and later as an actress, long after other performers might have given up:Overall, my foster experience was very successful. But because of the rejection aspect of the situation, you’re definitely more prepared for a situation later when you hear, “No thank you. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.” You’re accustomed to it. You’ve learned how to accept “No.” There’s a toughness that occurs as a result, and that plate of armor makes you more prepared, and protects you in a variety of situations that may arise in the business. I’m not saying that rejection feels good, but I’m saying that I’ve found I’ve been able to take it and let it roll off my back. It’s interesting, because rejection in the business is completely different than rejection in personal life experiences. Personal rejection hurts worse. You never get used to that.
Because a motherless daughter usually interprets personal rejections as a narcissistic injury similar to the loss of a mother, she often has trouble coping with breakups, divorce, and death as an adult. However, having already survived one profound loss, she also may develop what psychologists call a “diminished sense of crisis.” Smaller losses, such as waiting for a call-back that never comes or being passed over for a job, then feel minor in comparison to losing a loved one, and she can manage them without severe distress.
Access to Deep Emotions
Self-expression allows a daughter to transform her emotion and experience into positive action, and to turn misfortune into useful material. Mariska Hargitay says her ability to connect to loss so deeply in her personal life has helped her access those emotions in her acting as well.
I remember being in an acting class where people couldn’t be emotional. We had to do an exercise where you came through a door with a circumstance. That was easy for me to do—to pretend there had been an accident, to pretend I’d just lost someone. But I remember sitting in the class, thinking that the other people weren’t emotionally available [in their scenes]. My boyfriend at the time still had his parents, and he could never imagine what it would be like if someone told him there had been an accident and someone died. But I’d already experienced so many of these deep, profound emotions that I didn’t have to learn them. I could imagine anything. And I think that’s one of the reasons I can be so emotionally available as an actor. I understand pain and drama. I understand that it only takes one second for a life to change. I think children who experience that have a different understanding than children who don’t.
Anna Quindlen says the subject matter she chooses to write about and the way she conveys her ideas both have been deeply influenced by her mother’s death from ovarian cancer when she was nineteen.
I really feel my mother’s death is the dividing line between the self I am and the self I became. That was probably the time in my life when that dividing line would have existed anyhow, but it’s difficult for me to adequately communicate the difference in the person I feel like I became after she died. I was quite immature, very self-centered, and kind of frivolous in many ways before this happened, and it just changed me radically in ways that only became clear to me later on. When I was doing [the syndicated column] “Life in the 30s,” people would always say to me, “I don’t understand how somebody your age has these kinds of insights into everyday life.” What became clear to me after a while was that one of the reasons I did was because the unexamined life became impossible for me to have after that year.
My mother’s death made me a much happier and more optimistic person. People are always a little incredulous when I say that. I really felt that from this experience, you could take away one of two things. One is you could just think, “What’s the point? It’s all over so quickly.” But the other is that you can look at life and think, “My god. Every day that you have is so precious and so important.” When somebody dies you realize that if they had it to do all over again they wouldn’t want to win the Pulitzer Prize or make the bestseller list. If they had to do it all over again, they’d just want one more day at the beach, or to sit with their kids quietly on a blanket somewhere and talk about something one more time. I think the experience of my mother’s death made me treasure those little things in a way I never would have before, and I think that’s a real element of my writing that comes out. I’m not interested in writing about the inauguration or the hostage releases. I’m interested in looking at the little moments in people’s lives. I think those are the most illuminating, and the most dear.
Overcoming Survivor Guilt
Writing, acting, dancing, academic achievement: all of these accomplishments are realized most easily within optimal social and financial environments. Even the most prodigious talent will have trouble reaching its full potential in a severely troubled family or under crushing socioeconomic conditions.
In some families, a mother’s death will free a daughter from these constraints. A daughter whose single mother raised her on welfare, for example, goes to live with her brother and sister-in-law in a middle-class community after her mother dies. A daughter whose mother prohibited her from attending college away from home is free to accept an offer from a prestigious university in another state. Or a daughter who spent her childhood caring for an alcoholic mother suddenly has time to devote to her own interests.
The daughter who believes opportunity arrived because of—rather than in spite of—her mother’s death may have an even stronger will to succeed. By creating a productive and satisfying life for herself, she can attach meaning to her mother’s death—she did not die for naught. But this daughter also may carry a heavy burden of guilt for enjoying a success that exists only, she believes, because her mother died.
Twenty-eight-year-old Sheila struggled for more than a decade with her competing feelings of entitlement and regret. She believed the world owed her a satisfying adult life after an adolescence of loss and disruption, yet at the same time she felt certain that if not for her mother’s death when she was fourteen, she never would have left the working-class urban neighborhood where she grew up. Instead, Sheila spent her adolescence living with her father and stepmother in an affluent suburb where 80 percent of her high-school classmates were college bound. She went on to earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but she always felt uncomfortable, believing she had used her mother’s death for her own personal gain.
In graduate school, I found my niche. I thought, “This is it. This is what I do, and
I do it well.” Then I had sort of an attack of feeling like if my mother were alive, I wouldn’t be getting such praise from respected members of my field or starting this career. It dawned on me at a certain point that although the thing I wanted most was to have my mother back, I wasn’t willing to give up what I’d gotten since she died. A few years ago, I finally admitted to my dad, “I think if Mommy had lived, I wouldn’t have achieved the things I’ve achieved.” It took me eleven years to say that because I’d been so overcome by the guilt of enjoying the life I had. He told me, “You’d still be doing what you’re doing, because you are who you are. You’ve always been a person who was going to get what she wanted to get.” It took me a long time to realize my father is probably right. My life would have been different if my mother were here, but I think I’d still be somewhere I wanted to be, doing something I wanted to do.
Like Sheila, some motherless daughters believe they’re dishonoring their mothers by leading a happy, productive life after the death. Success represents an individuation they may not yet be ready to make. As thirty-two-year-old Roberta explains, “After my mother died when I was sixteen, I almost felt, out of love for her, a need not to have my life work. It was as if I were saying, ‘If I love my mother, I have to prove it to myself by screwing up. By not going to school. By not being happy.’” This is another way to honor the mother, but it’s not a daughter’s destiny. It’s her choice. And it’s a sacrifice that few mothers would truly want their daughters to make.
If a mother’s death offers a daughter the chance for a more fulfilling, more challenging, or more productive life than she believes she would have had otherwise, the daughter has every right to that future. There is no disgrace in using whatever raw materials are available to succeed. There is no shame in turning loss into life. Like the phoenix, the mythological bird that ascends from the ashes of its own destruction, every motherless daughter has the potential within herself to rise from tragedy, and take flight.
Epilogue
THE REDWOODS, my mother said, were taller than our house, their trunks so wide that cars could drive right through. “That’s right,” she said, “a little tunnel, right through the base.” We lived on what was once an apple orchard, and all our trees bore fruit. I couldn’t imagine that one could ever grow that high or that thick. But the postcards and pictures she brought back from her trip to northern California with my father offered proof that what she said about the redwoods was true. In one photograph she stood alongside a massive russet sequoia, her hand raised in a playful wave. The first branches were so high they didn’t even appear in the frame.
I wish I had those photographs now. I don’t know where they wound up. Time and mobility and lack of organization have scattered our family photos so that most have landed in a glossy paper shopping bag I keep in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in my Los Angeles home. I keep thinking I’ll find the time to lay them all out on the carpet and organize them into chronological albums, but the task feels too daunting every time I begin. There are hundreds, literally hundreds, of photos. Maybe even a thousand. They span the period between my parents’ engagement in 1959 and my mother’s final months of illness in 1981, her entire adult life. When I shuffle through the images I can’t help thinking of the ones that should be there but aren’t, the pictures of her smiling at college graduations, holding her grandchildren, laughing from beneath a halo of grey hair. My mother would be sixty-seven if she were alive today. Sixty-seven. It’s impossible to project the last image I have of her, at forty-two, that far into the future. To me, my mother is forever young.
I’ve tried to find her over the years, in the various places I’ve lived, but she’s remained elusive. In Tennessee, a therapist put an empty chair in front of me and had me pretend to talk to her, but the conversation was one-sided and strained. An astrologer in Iowa couldn’t find her anywhere in my chart. A shaman with a crystal pendulum in Malibu smiled and nodded and said she’s “in the light.” If I had to pinpoint my mother’s location myself, I’d say she’s nowhere and everywhere, at the same time. She’s a foggy memory I can’t quite bring into focus and a gentle spirit that infuses all my days. She exists in the background of my life now, hovering, suspended, shapeless, like familiar air.
To be a motherless daughter is to live with the awareness of a presence, but not its physicality. Something is missing, yes. But we must not forget that something has been given to us, too.
To be a motherless daughter is to be riddled with paradoxes and contradictions, to live with an eternally unresolved longing, but it is also to know the grit of survival, to hold an insight and maturity others did not obtain so young, and to understand the power of renewal and rebirth. “We gain so much, whether we like it or not at the time,” says Colleen Russell, who was fifteen when her mother died. “The strength comes from the adversity and the challenges. I wouldn’t have had the sensitivities I have if I hadn’t lost my mother. I know I would have taken more for granted. And I have different ideas about life and death than I think I’d otherwise have.”
In my late teens and twenties, I used to play a mental game with myself. I’d look around and weigh all the good things in my life against the possibility of having my mother back. During college, the choice was easy. Would I trade my education for the chance to have my mother back? Of course. My boyfriend? Yes, even him. In my twenties, the answers weren’t quite so clear. Would I give up my career as a journalist? Okay. My graduate degree in writing and the years I spent in Iowa? Well, all right. My apartment in New York, my first book contract, my core of faithful friends? Probably. Maybe. I didn’t know. And then I reached my early thirties, and I had to stop playing the game. It ended the day I looked around at my husband and my daughters, at the life we’d created together in California, and knew I would no longer be willing to make the trade.
Does this make me a selfish person, or one who has finally found a life that she loves, despite her early loss? I believe it’s the latter. Thirty-one-year-old Debby agrees. When Debby was a teenager, her younger sister and her mother were her two closest friends. But when Debby was twenty-two, her sister died in an accident, and one year later she lost her mother to cancer. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘If some things could have happened differently in your life, what would they be?’” she says. “And I’d have to say there isn’t anything I’d change. I’m sorry for different things that have happened, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way. The losses are so entwined in my life and so much a part of my personality and my maturing, and so much a part of the person I am today. And I like who I am today. It stinks that these things had to happen to me, but I can make the decision to let them be a plus or a minus.”
Adds forty-four-year-old Wendy, who was fifteen when her mother died and is now the married mother of a sixteen-year-old daughter, “It amazes me sometimes, how things have reframed themselves over time, and how if you work on your grief, you eventually do heal. So many things that used to be so painful to me because of my mother’s death have now become so rich and rewarding because of her death, if that makes sense.”
We have all learned something from mother loss—lessons that perhaps no child or adolescent should have to learn, but valuable lessons nonetheless. We have learned, if nothing else, how to take responsibility for ourselves. The next, and even more important, step is to move into the place where we can take consistently good emotional care of ourselves, too—not by excluding others from our lives, but by learning how to trust, respect, and value the children we were and the women we are. As twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her mother died, explains, “I think I’m a very strong person, and I know it’s because of my mother’s death and everything that happened afterward. Somehow, I managed to grow to love and respect myself and take pride in who I was, as that child who managed to take care of herself and survive. If my mother had lived, could I have had self-confidence and self-love? Well, I don’t know. I think it came from me having to be competent and realizing
no one was going to take care of me but me. Sure, other people might come and go and aid me, but I can take care of myself. That’s really important to me as a woman. We’re taught to be other-directed and to get affirmation externally, so I feel pretty powerful in that sense, because I feel that I get a lot of nurturing and love from myself.”
Forty-four-year-old Carla, who was twelve when her mother died and fifteen when she lost her father, adds, “Sometimes when life doesn’t go exactly as I wish, or when I meet with disappointments, I think, ‘Would someone else who’s gone through what you’ve gone through be able to do what you’ve been able to do as an adult?’ It’s my way of saying, ‘Carla, you’ve had to deal with a lot. And you’ve still done all right.’ That’s served as my barrier against great feelings of defeat. When life hasn’t gone exactly the way I would have wished, I think, ‘You’ve made a good life for yourself in spite of all you’ve been through, and that’s something to recognize and be proud of.’”
Margie and Carla have discovered how to give themselves the kind of comfort and praise they believe they lost when their mothers died. Over the years, they developed the kind of inner guidance and emotional security that motherless daughters so often say they lack. They did this by learning to encourage, praise, and comfort themselves. And this is the best kind of substitute mothering a woman can hope to receive.
I visited northern California for the first time in November 1992, when I was researching the first edition of this book. On an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon, Phyllis and Marshall Klaus offered to take me sightseeing. We had time for only one major attraction: They suggested either Sonoma Valley or Muir Woods. I remembered the postcards and photographs of the redwood forests, where branches grew higher than houses, and cars could drive through trees. I chose the woods.