Motherless Daughters (41 page)

Stacey’s mother contracted the AIDS virus through heterosexual sex, and her daughter felt compelled to take the same chance, over and over. In a similar interplay of identification and risk, Sheila says her drug and alcohol use during high school and college kept her feeling close to her mother, who drank heavily when she was the same age. “I had my first drink at fifteen, which is how old my mother was when she had hers,” she recalls. “I was using her same coping skills for escape. My aunt even pointed out to me that I was drinking gin, just as my mother had.” Only when she began differentiating from her mother in her midtwenties and mourned her loss for the first time could Sheila leave her self-destructive behaviors—and her expectation of premature death—behind.

By separating from her mother while still honoring her importance, Sheila actively engaged in what Naomi Lowinsky calls “attending to the ghost.” “When we don’t have enough of a relationship with the ghosts, they come get us,” Dr. Lowinsky explains. “Once you can develop and maintain some kind of relationship with the lost mother, your fears can become more realistic. You can sort out what was your mother’s fate and what’s your own, and realize that we all have fates that are out of our control. In this culture, we often act as though if we jog every day, go to the doctor, and eat right, we’re not going to have a fate. Well, terrible things happen all the time in everybody’s life, and it’s not because you didn’t eat right.

“I think a lot of motherless daughters tend to place all the responsibility for their fates on their mothers,” she continues. “It almost clears them of the burden. All a daughter has to do is worry about not getting cancer when she turns the age her mother was, or not commit suicide at the age her mother did. It’s important to understand that your mother had her fate and you have yours, that yours is going to have all kinds of things in it, and a lot of them aren’t going to be things you signed up for.” Until a woman separates what’s fear from what’s fact, she remains captive to the belief that her mother’s destiny will double as hers.

 

The first time I met Rochelle, I was immediately attracted to her energy. Her leather pumps clicked quickly across the wooden floor as she approached me with her arms raised, rushing to kiss me hello the first time I walked through her front door. Petite and slender, she darted from room to room, tossing deep laughs toward the ceilings, her long, curly hair framing her face in a chic halo of disarray. At fifty-three, she was just about the age my mother would have been. But she was younger, much younger, than I imagined my mother
would be. If she hadn’t told me, I never—and I mean never—would have guessed that Rochelle survived two separate cancers, one in her colon and the other in her breast.

You see, I never imagine cancer as a disease you can survive. (Never mind that my maternal aunt is alive and thriving eighteen years after her diagnosis. Never mind that one of my friends underwent a double mastectomy and reconstruction in her early forties, and three years later is doing fine. My mother’s death skewed my illness paradigm so dramatically that I automatically equate the threat of cancer with the inevitability of death. I realize this when I speak with female friends whose mothers had mastectomies ten or twenty years ago and today still join their husbands for weekend rounds of golf. Their daughters have some concern about breast cancer, but fear doesn’t dictate their days. They view illness through the eyes of survivors. “Sure, I take precautions,” my friend Cindy says. “But if I get it, I get it. And if it happens, what would I do? Probably the same thing as my mother—have the surgery, do a few months of preventative chemotherapy, and get on with my life.”

Mothers teach us how to cope with illness, both through modeling and suggestion. “One of the things we learn from mothers when they’re sick is how to be sick,” Dr. Milburn explains. “They teach us how to think about our bodies and about physical symptoms. A lot of women come from families that focus on physical symptoms as a sort of style. And lots of daughters whose mothers died young become highly attuned to any physical changes in their bodies. Whereas somebody who didn’t already have a set of beliefs about her potential for illness or early death might ignore a particular physical symptom, a motherless daughter may not be able to ignore it. I try to give women insight into their health behaviors, which gives them a chance to make choices about changing them. We begin with, ‘What did you learn about illness from your mother? How did she think about it?’ and try to interpret a daughter’s beliefs from there.”

“If it happens,” Cindy said, “what’ll I do? Probably the same thing as my mother.” For me to affirm the same would mean to say I would, among other things, die at forty-two. Which I most emphatically don’t want to do. So I’ve been looking for other models now, women who, unlike my mother, caught their cancer in time.
Rochelle, whose pragmatic outlook seems the perfect antithesis to my hypochondriachal fears, says that before her diagnosis she viewed cancer very much as I do. She was twenty-three when her mother died of lung cancer that had spread to her brain and bones, and after seeing her mother undergo four years of grueling chemotherapy in the 1960s, Rochelle left the funeral convinced she was already heading down her mother’s path. “I always knew I’d get cancer, but it was ‘later on,’” she says. “That’s why I had a catastrophic health-care policy. My mother was sixty, and I thought it would be like that. Later. All of my mother’s relatives also had cancer, so I assumed it was going to come along for me. But I didn’t assume it would come when I was forty-nine.” Twenty-six years after her mother’s death, that first cancer diagnosis inspired Rochelle to separate from her mother by making choices of her own.

I tell Rochelle I can’t imagine how I’d cope with cancer twice, submit myself to the monthly tests she does, and still tell the story in a tone as upbeat as hers. I’ve never had a model for this type of approach, and I’m not convinced such optimism is part of my natural constitution. “Where does your courage come from?” I ask her. “How do you find your strength?”

She leans forward at her desk and rests her chin on her right hand. She is serious now. Her eyes search out mine. “I don’t know if it’s denial or not, but I can sit here and talk about my cancer and it doesn’t feel like it’s me,” she says. “Or at least it’s not all I am today. I guess if I gave you a complete story of those fourteen months, you’d wonder how I was still walking. But I honestly do not dwell on it. The only time I think about it is when I find a breast lump, which I periodically do, and they’re basically cysts. But that’s it. Depression is just not in my makeup. Right now, as long as I’m feeling well and I’m healthy, I’m going to go on with the rest of my life.”

 

I went alone into the hospital room ten minutes after my mother died. I thought I should say a proper goodbye. I was afraid to press my lips against her forehead, so I kissed my fingers and brushed them against her cheek. It was still warm. My mother believed in heaven, but not hell; she told me once that no sin on earth could be so unforgivable to separate a person from God. If there is such a thing as a soul, I have to believe hers had already taken off for that other place. Her body no longer contained any trace of life. It just looked like a shell to me.

Death loses its romanticism when you’re introduced to it so young. It’s no longer the portentous visitor who rides in on the dark to carry loved ones away. It becomes hard and factual, an event instead
of an abstraction. Margie, now twenty-five, learned this at the age of seven when her mother committed suicide. “When someone you love dies, death loses its unreality,” she says. “To me, it’s real. It’s just as real as taking a shit. I never attempted suicide, but death never felt like an extreme I wouldn’t contemplate. It didn’t seem that bizarre to me. It was just another option, an alternative to life. I figured that if my mother could do it, I could, too.”

Children who’ve been traumatized by death are robbed of its beauty and mystery, Andrea Campbell explains. Death is more an abrupt disruption than a cycle of completion and rebirth to the daughter who sees it happen to her mother during childhood or her teens, and she loses her psychic connection to the natural feminine cycle that gives structure to a woman’s life. “The female experience is one of being a cocreator and partaking in the mystery of life,” Dr. Campbell says. “That also means partaking in the mystery of death, and seeing it as a transition and a birth into another place. The young woman is the cocreator who brings forth life, and the crone is her initiator into death. And that passing of the wisdom should take place when a mother is in her cronehood, not her thirties or forties.”

The real tragedy of my mother’s life is not that it ended, but that it ended so soon. Most of us who’ve lost our mothers are less afraid of dying than we are of dying
young.
This is the fear of the maiden, not the crone. It’s the reason why the motherless daughters who were most likely to report that they think about their mortality either all of the time or most of the time are the ones currently between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine.

As I sit here writing, I am forty-one years old. I am the daughter of a woman whose cancer started growing when she was in her thirties, a mother of three who died absurdly young. I am also the mother of two daughters who are far too young to lose me. It does not escape me that I am the same age my mother was when her cancer was discovered. I think about it almost every day. I’m on a rigorous six-month screening schedule now, a mammogram every February and an ultrasound in the fall. The radiologist doesn’t need to send me little postcard reminders in the mail. I never forget. The gynecologist also checks me by hand every spring. It’s overkill, some physicians have told me. It doesn’t hurt to be cautious when you’re
at high risk, others have said. I don’t listen to anything but my own intuition any more. As long as screening doesn’t hurt me, I say, bring it on. I can never be too sure.

The high-risk label is an identification with my mother that I’d rather not have. But it’s been my front for differentiation, too. My mother had her first mammogram when she was forty-one, the one that found her lump. The only mammograms I’ve missed in fifteen years were when I was pregnant or breastfeeding. I eat an extremely low-fat diet. I practice yoga. I take fifteen supplements a day. Preventive medicine and early detection aren’t guarantees of anything, I know, but they’re the best I’ve got.

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” the author Susan Sontag writes in
Illness as Metaphor.
“Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” My mother’s illness gave me a temporary visa to that second kingdom, and I’ve spent as much time there as I wish. But should a lump ever appear that confirms my worst fear, or should I wake up one morning with any other disease that requires me to visit that place again, I would like to believe the choices that guide me through will be mine, and not ones dictated by my mother’s past. Like my mother and so many other women in her position, I hope I too would commit myself to “getting back to life.” But I also hope that—in sickness or in health—I can make the decisions my mother never made, the ones that might have saved her life. The best way I can separate my fate from my mother’s is to survive.