Motherless Daughters Read Free Page A

rate among women has slowly, yet steadily, gone down since 1990. 2 The AIDS epidemic in the United States, which created 18,500 maternally bereaved children by 1991, never reached projected estimates of 80,000 by the year 2000, although it’s taken the lives of millions of mothers worldwide. And mothers are dying as military casualties of war for
the first time in U.S. history. As of March 2005, seven American mothers had died serving in Iraq, leaving behind at least eight children, one of whom had made her mother pinkie-swear, before shipping out, that she wouldn’t die.
    We know a good deal more about motherless children such as these, and what they’re likely to face as they grow up, than we did twelve years ago. Results from the landmark Harvard Child Bereavement Study, a two-year study of parentally bereaved children conducted in the Boston area and directed by Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., and J. William Worden, Ph.D., were published in 1996. Among some of its findings are:
    1. In general, mother loss is harder on children than father loss, mainly because it results in more daily life changes for a child. In most families, the death of a mother also means the loss of the emotional caretaker, and a child has to adapt to all that this means and implies.
    2. Two years after the loss of a parent, children whose mothers have died are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems, such as anxiety, acting out, lower self-esteem, and lower feelings of competence, than those who lost fathers.
    3. Children remain more emotionally connected to mothers who have died than to fathers who have died.
    4. The degree to which a surviving parent copes is the most important indicator of the child’s long-term adaptation. Kids whose surviving parents are unable to function effectively in the parenting role show more anxiety and depression, as well as sleep and health problems, than those whose parents have a strong support network and solid inner resources to rely on.
    5. The children who were doing best, after two years, were those in families that coped actively with the loss rather than passively, and managed to find something positive even in difficult situations.

    And yet, the more we know about children’s bereavement, it seems, the more the actual experience of losing a mother remains the same.
    I received an e-mail from a college freshman the other day. Her mother died five years ago, and throughout high school in her small town she was known as the Girl Whose Mother Died. Now she’s in college in another state, far from anyone who knows her, and she’s feeling terribly isolated and lonely. Nobody there ever knew her mother, and her new friends don’t understand the profundity of her loss. When someone asks about her parents, she tries to answer without using the words “mother” or “died.” Putting those two words together, she has learned, is a guaranteed conversation stopper. No one wants to talk about a mother dying. No one, it seems, wants to hear about it. Some even claim not to understand. “I don’t have a mother anymore,” she once mumbled to a classmate. “You don’t have one?” the classmate repeated, incredulous. “You mean, like, your parents are divorced?”
    Who can blame a peer for acting on what we all wish were true? Mothers are immortal. Mothers don’t die young. Mothers never leave the children they love. “My dad never even began to grieve my mother’s death,” says thirty-four-year-old Leigh, who was three when her mother died. “He was overwhelmed by it. It didn’t fit in with his picture of how life should be. Mothers should not die and leave five children behind. He told himself that shouldn’t happen, so it wouldn’t. And then it did.” The same false security protected Kristen until her sixteenth year, when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died the following year. Kristen, now twenty-four, still sounds slightly stunned when she talks about the loss. “If