Motherless Daughters (47 page)

Fathers, who typically feel less competent tending to their daughters’ emotional needs, may concentrate on their intellectual pursuits instead. Both Marie Curie (motherless at age eleven) and Dorothy Parker (motherless at five) had close relationships with their widowed fathers, who nurtured their early interests. Curie’s father, left with four children to raise, guided his daughters toward academics, encouraging them to learn chemistry and physics and to speak five languages. Parker and her father exchanged playful verses through
the mail when she was a child on summer vacations, exercises that served as prototypes for her later literary wit. Girls who grow up free of the traditional social and cultural roles that often exist in a two-parent family may become women who refuse to acknowledge or accept gender barriers, which the psychologist Barbara Kerr, the author of
Smart Girls, Gifted Women,
has identified as a characteristic many eminent women share.

Mariska Hargitay, the award-winning star of NBC’s
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,
says she owes much of her success to her father, Mickey Hargitay. Mariska was three years old when her mother, the actress Jayne Mansfield, died in a car accident, and her father helped boost her confidence and self-esteem in later years. “He went to every one of my swim meets, told me I could be president or do anything I wanted, and said I’d be great at whatever I did,” she recalls. “I’d have to eat it, drink it, sleep it, he said, but if I wanted to be the best I could do it. He was a champion—an Olympic speed skater, Mr. Universe. I really feel I shaped my career after his.”

Grief needs an outlet; creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child’s contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent’s death represent precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression. The art that a motherless daughter creates may be strongly influenced by her mourning and may show evidence of it in style, content, or purpose. Margaret Mitchell, who was nineteen when her mother died, knew how Scarlett O’Hara would feel about mother loss. Susan Minot could make the seven siblings in her first novel,
Monkeys,
respond so realistically to the aftermath of their mother’s death in an automobile accident because Minot was twenty-one and one of seven siblings when her mother died the same way. The same is true for her younger sister Eliza, who was eight when their mother died. Eliza Minot’s debut novel,
The Tiny One,
follows a day in the life of eight-year-old Via Revere, who has just lost her mother in a car accident.

As Virginia Woolf discovered after writing
To the Lighthouse
, the completion of a mourning cycle can result in an outpouring of creative energy. Other daughters rely on creative activity to help them work through their mourning. Young children often use creative play to express their emotional pain. Older daughters may turn to writing, art, music, acting, or other forms of self-expression. Even in daughters who show little talent for the arts, psychologists have seen creative responses to mother loss—in the beginnings of a new relationship, in the ability to feel joy, or in the first sense of satisfaction a daughter feels with herself.

Mary Swander, a poet, playwright, memoirist, and professor of English at Iowa State University, says that her graduate writing work-shops kept her sane during her early twenties as her mother slowly died of cancer. Estranged from her father and geographically separated from her two older brothers, Swander cared for her mother alone while completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees. “When I look back at those years, I think, ‘What was I
doing
? Why was I trying to go to school?’” she recalls. “On the other hand, if I weren’t writing I would have gone nuts. It gave me some other focus, and I was working through my grief in the stories I was writing.” After her mother’s death, she continued to mourn through her poetry. Her first book,
Succession,
was based on her mother’s family history, and her second,
Driving the Body Back,
immortalized her five-hour ride across Iowa with a funeral director and her great-aunt as they transported her mother’s body to the family cemetery for burial.

Patricia Heaton, who co-starred in the CBS sitcom
Everybody Loves Raymond
from 1996 to 2005, remembers having a serendipitous opportunity to act out her grief—literally. She was twelve when her mother died suddenly from a brain aneurysm, and nineteen years later she landed the lead role in a stage production about a woman whose mother died during her childhood.

Introspection and focused activity become welcome escapes from the family chaos that typically occurs after a death, and some daughters depend on them, to great personal gain. Linda Shostak, one of the first female partners at Morrison and Foerster law firm in San Francisco and a well-respected trial attorney in California, remembers immersing herself in activity the summer her mother died of cancer when she was thirteen:

Maintaining a high level of activity helped Shostak manage her grief, and she sustained her previously high level of academic success for more than a decade after her mother’s death. As she learned, however, consistent achievement and activity often keep a daughter from mourning at all. Twenty years after her mother’s death, she found she had to relive parts of that summer, sort out her feelings, and create a place for the image of her mother within the new life she’d created for herself.

Success often involves a departure from family and home, a risk other women may not be willing to take. But the motherless daughter frequently isn’t leaving a place where she feels safe and secure; she’s looking for one where she can belong. When the death of her
mother also means the dissolution of her family, a daughter loses whatever secure foundation she had. Her search for safety and security requires that she keep moving forward. Once she starts, there’s no going back—because there’s often nowhere to go back
to.

As Roma Downey, a star of the CBS drama
Touched By an Angel
from 1994 to 2003, explains, “You’ve heard of the expression that you need something to fall back on? When there’s nobody there to catch you, that’s not really an option. But the positive outcome is that it’s a tremendous motivator.” Downey was ten years old, living in Derry in the north of Ireland when her mother died of heart failure. “In the community where I grew up, kids didn’t leave, really. Everybody is still pretty much within the community. They have children, and their children live there and so on and so forth. So for me to have left—first I hopped over to England, and then I made the great leap across the pond—was a wee bit shocking. And of course, for me that was compounded once my father died. I had been returning home with regularity out of duty and love for him, but once he died, there was no reason to go back. I also think I wouldn’t have felt the ease of immigration, the freedom, if I’d had aging, elderly parents. I have moved with great ease, all my life. I very much feel that home is a state of mind, and that it goes with you. I nest with great enthusiasm when I land somewhere, but it’s just as easy for me to pack up and move on.”

Just as artists give their objects eternal life, motherless daughters hope to do the same for their mothers and for themselves. Art, writing, and music offer a daughter the promise of an immortality she believes her mother was denied and also provide her with a means to bring the image of her mother—the one she had or the one she believes she would have had—back to life.

Charlotte Brontë’s earliest surviving work indicates that she may, at the age of eight, have been trying to do just this. In a brief story she wrote three years after her mother died, she told of a little girl named Ann whose mother fell ill. “Once Ane [sic] and her papa and her Mama went to sea in a ship and they had very fine weather
all the way,” she wrote, “but Anns Mama was very sick and Ann attended her with so much care. she gave her her meddcine.” Charlotte dedicated the story to her younger sister Anne, whose birth had begun their mother’s painful decline.
¹³
By allowing the Ann of the story to save her sick mother, Charlotte rewrote her sister’s history for her and, as author and creator, gave herself equivalent power to cure her mother and prevent her death. By becoming her mother’s savior, she also gave herself a mother again.

The comedian Diane Ford aims for a similar effect in the comedy routines she writes. Both her parents died in a car accident when she was thirteen. Today, she often incorporates her mother and father into her jokes as if they were still alive. “I project what my mother would have said in certain instances,” she explains. “She never really said it, but it’s what I think she might have said, so I stick it in there. It’s a way of making me more normal. After I lost my parents, I hated that I was so different. I wanted two parents like everyone else. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten over that. Also, putting my parents in my jokes is a way to connect me to a past that I didn’t really have. Some parts of my made-up past are much better than anything I could have possibly ever lived.”