Motherless Daughters Read Free Page B

you’d asked me ten years ago if I thought my mother could die, I would have said, ‘Me? Never. My mother? No way,’” she says. “I’d never, ever, never thought about it. I knew no one in my secluded, little town whose mother had died. I thought it couldn’t happen to me because my family was so happy. My mother’s death completely rocked my world.”
    A father’s death, although often equally as traumatic, usually doesn’t inspire such indignation or surprise. It violates our assumptions
about the world a little less. To some degree, we expect our fathers to die before our mothers. Females may be stereotyped as the weaker sex, but they have more physical longevity. In every racial group in America for the past hundred years, men have been expected to die younger than women. Today, the average twenty-year-old Caucasian male is expected to live to seventy-six, but a twenty-year-old Caucasian woman has a good chance of turning eighty-one. Among African Americans, the difference is even more dramatic: The average twenty-year-old man lives until only seventy, but his wife will probably see seventy-seven. American men of all races are almost twice as likely as women to die before reaching fifty-five.
    Yet this hardly means that mothers don’t die young. Quite the opposite. In 2003 alone, more than 110,000 American women died between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, one-third of them from cancer. More than 676,000 American children currently under age eighteen have lost a mother, about 330,000 of them girls. Nearly 25,000 girls have lost both parents. I calculate that there are more than 1.1 million girls and women under the age of sixty in the United States who lost mothers to death during childhood and adolescence—an extremely conservative estimate because it doesn’t include daughters who were ages eighteen to twenty-five when their mothers died, or daughters who lost mothers through abandonment, divorce, alcoholism, incarceration, or long-term mental or physical illness. 3
    And yet, at some very deep level, nobody wants to believe that motherless children exist. It’s a denial that originates from the place in our psyches where mother represents comfort and security no matter what our age, and where the mother-child bond is so primal that we equate its severing with a child’s emotional demise. Everyone carries into adulthood the child’s fear of being left alone and unprovided for. The motherless child thus symbolizes a darker, less fortunate self. Her plight is everyone’s nightmare, at once impossible to
imagine and impossible to ignore. Yet to accept the magnitude of her loss, or the duration of her mourning, would mean to acknowledge the same potential for one’s self. I remember a phone conversation with my best friend in high school, a few months after my mother died. I was describing some current hardship or another, and relating it directly to the fact that my mother had just died. “Hope,” she said, gently yet firmly, “you’ve got to stop thinking like this. You can’t keep blaming everything bad that happens to you on your mother’s death. How much of your life is it really going to affect, anyway?”
    She had a point, I knew. I was looking for relationships that didn’t always exist, connecting dots that might not legitimately warrant connections, in an effort to explain and excuse any untoward behaviors. Sometimes the act felt inauthentic even as I was doing it. Yet at the same time, I knew without doubt that my mother’s death had irrevocably altered who I was and who I would become. When a parent dies young, says Maxine Harris, Ph.D., in The Loss That Is Forever, children have a personal encounter with death that influences the way they see the world for the rest of their lives. “Some events are so big and so powerful that they cannot help but change everything they touch,” she writes. How could all I thought and felt, then, not trace its path back to the event that had