Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman Read Free Book Online Page B

behind. The mother who abandoned her child or took her
own life leaves a daughter with the most direct access route to anger—she left me—but even the mother who falls ill and dies can be an object of blame.
    “In the early sixties when my friends were getting married and having babies, I was cleaning bedpans,” recalls fifty-two-year-old Rochelle, who was twenty-four when her mother died of cancer. “I was angry at my mother because she didn’t have a life, and I was angry at her because I didn’t have a life.” Explains Cynthia, fifty-two, who lost her mother at nine, “In my twenties and thirties and forties, I would think back in anger at how my mother left us. It was totally irrational. She didn’t voluntarily contract pneumonia and choose to die. Nevertheless, there was this gray cloud in the background of my thoughts, a cool kind of anger at what she’d done to me, personally, that ruined my life.”
    Like Cynthia, I know my mother didn’t want to leave me. I know that she, with a desire I can’t possibly comprehend, wanted to see her children grow. But the fact is that she went away and left us all to cope with the wreckage she left behind. Even now, twenty-four years later, her absence remains a terrible hole. No home to return to for a holiday celebration. No one to tell me what I was like as a child, or to reassure or comfort me as a new mother. No maternal grandmother for my children. The anger and sadness I once felt when seeing a mother and daughter shopping or lunching together has been replaced by the venom I feel when I pass three generations of women walking on the street, the grandmother and the mother pushing the daughter’s stroller together, laughing at a joke I didn’t hear, out for just another regular afternoon in their shared lives.
    I can still get angry about this, so angry sometimes that I could stamp my feet and scream. I’ve substituted yoga for domestic destruction, overcome my dressing-room fits, and attacked empty chairs that represent my mother in several Gestalt-inspired episodes, but a residue of rancor persists. Am I still just trying to hold on to my mother? Or has this sense of outrage become a permanent part of me?
    Like most other emotions, anger carries extra baggage, and mine tends to travel with a significant amount of guilt. From an early age I received the subtle cues that told me never to speak out against the dead. The sanctification process following a mother’s death is one
that surpasses the rigor of any church, elevating all subsequent mention of her to the most laudatory and idealized heights. As Virginia Woolf, who was thirteen when her mother died, wrote, “Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.”
    Because we loved them, because we wanted them to be flawless when they lived, we honor our mothers by granting them posthumous perfection, and we soothe ourselves by creating the mothers we wish we’d had. Karen, twenty-nine, whose mother died nine years ago, had a childhood so torn apart by her mother’s alcoholism that she ran away from home at fourteen. Nevertheless, she has exalted her mother to nearly mythic proportion in her mind. “I know that despite her alcoholism, she’s smarter and more perfect now in my head than she was when she was alive,” Karen admits. “As far as I’m concerned, there was never a wrinkle in anything I ever wore from the time I was born until I left home. I know I’ve done this as a type of memorial, a way of remembering her in a way she would want to be remembered. She very much wanted to be perfect. Giving her that gives her the respect she always wanted.”
    Like anger, idealization is a normal and useful early response to loss. Focusing on a mother’s good traits reaffirms the importance of her presence, and processing the happy side of a relationship is a gentle way to activate mourning. But every human relationship is affected by ambivalence, every mother an amalgam of the