Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman Read Free Book Online Page A

onslaught of emotions: fear, resentment, abandonment, guilt. And anger. Rage, rather than grief, is the most common reaction to the death of a parent during childhood or adolescence. This creates a dilemma for the motherless daughter, who’s been taught from an early age that “good girls” don’t show strong negative emotions, at least not for public scrutiny. Popular culture has spent decades depicting angry women as violent and crazed, hardly the tragic hero an infuriated man is allowed to be. Rambo gunned his way through the jungle to thunderous applause, but Thelma and Louise’s pistol-packing road trip shocked the nation. As women, we have few adequate models for releasing rage, and we often give in to the impulse to pretend it isn’t there.
    Which is really an unfortunate consequence, because anger can be our ally, at least for a while. As a first-response emotion, it can protect us from feeling intense sadness until we’ve passed through an initial adjustment stage. But clinging to anger too long keeps us from addressing the emotions underneath, and those—resentment, desertion, confusion, guilt, love—are the ones on which true mourning is based.
    For seven full years after my mother died, I carried my anger around like a righteous and heavy cross, all too willing to let it define me as a noble sufferer but secretly unsure of how to relinquish its weight. I couldn’t exactly dump it in the middle of a Psych 101 lecture and nonchalantly walk home, weightless and free. I’m sure my college roommates still remember the periodic temper tantrums I
threw. During the years I lived with them, I immersed myself in activity—a full class load, the college newspaper, a sorority, volunteer work, a part-time job—anything to keep me from having to spend time alone. But in the brief interludes between those commitments, I occasionally came home, slammed my bedroom door, and hurled my possessions across the room, screaming nonsensical sentences until my throat turned raw. Clothing ripped from hangers, books slammed to the floor, stuffed animals hurled against the walls. The physical release was liberating, and even necessary, but the mania of it was a terror to us all. Yet it was the only way I could think of to free the rage that kept welling up inside.
    This was a diffuse anger, largely nonspecific, and one I didn’t understand. Anger, I’d always thought, had to be object directed, and though I focused some of mine toward my father, I didn’t know where to direct the rest. Without a discrete target, it shot out at wholly unpredictable moments: on the telephone with the electric company, over dinner with my boyfriend, at the history paper I couldn’t concentrate on long enough to write. I glared at the mothers and daughters I saw trying on clothes together in department-store dressing rooms. I wanted to destroy every Hallmark Mother’s Day card display I saw. Rationality was not an issue. For a long time I hated the month of October, because the leaves insisted on turning color and falling to the ground even when my mother, who’d loved the fire of autumn, wasn’t there to see it anymore.
    “You know this feeling,” says Debby, thirty-one, whose mother died of cancer eight years ago. “You’re driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, ‘Goddamit. What gives you the right to laugh?’ Because nothing has happened to them. You don’t understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.”
    This is a reactionary rage, often fueled by a sense of deprivation and a belief the world owes something to the daughter who lost her mother too young. But underneath it is usually a deep anger toward the mother herself. Even though she loved us, even though we’re not supposed to be angry with someone who’s dead, we resent her for leaving us