for their mothers’ return.
Other daughters allow themselves to mourn only from a distance. Hillary, thirty-two, says she didn’t cry as a six-year-old when her mother died, but five months later she came close to virtual collapse when her pet hamster died. She’d kept her core feelings about the loss of her mother buried under protective layers until an external event months later pulled them to the surface. For some daughters, this release may not occur for years.
TRANSFERENCE. An adult who loses a spouse can manage without a close connection to another person for a period of time, but a child who loses a parent can’t exist alone emotionally without significant cost. She’d be left in what Anna Freud called the “noman’s land of affection,” isolated and withdrawn from everyone and with an impaired ability to attach to other people in the future. So instead of detaching from her lost mother, a daughter may try, quickly and directly, to transfer her feelings of dependency, her needs, and her expectations onto the nearest available adult. This may be her father, an older sibling or other close relative, a teacher, a neighbor, or a therapist. During adolescence, a boyfriend or an older female friend often serves the same purpose. Transference can be helpful when the child is too young to detach all her emotion from her caregiver, but if she doesn’t return later to pull away from the image of her mother enough to mourn the loss she will continue to search for her in the people she chooses as replacements.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. The loss of a mother creates a significant developmental challenge for a child. She may be forced to take on responsibility for herself very quickly, causing her to advance some areas of development. At the same time, she may continue to identify with her earlier stage of maturity as a way to maintain a relationship with her mother and deny the finality of the death. The result is an adult who retains some characteristics of an earlier developmental time, one who feels as if a piece of her were still “stuck” in childhood or adolescence. To this daughter, “growing up” feels not only like a mystery but also a practical impossibility: She’s still too wedded to her childhood. “Parent loss per se doesn’t lead to an arrest in development, but it can happen if circumstances don’t support
mourning in the interim,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “All the girl’s other means and interests develop, but some immature aspects are still a part of her. It’s like the child of ten coexisting with the woman of twenty. As long as her mourning is incomplete, she feels there’s something she can’t quite recapture, and she remains in a state of yearning.”
The daughter whose development arrests in some areas may later have trouble emotionally connecting with the tasks and responsibilities normally associated with her chronological age. Without the socializing influence of her mother, she has a difficult time reaching complete intellectual or emotional maturity. Twenty-five-year-old Tricia, who was three when her mother died, says she begins every adult romance with the hope that she’s found someone who’ll hold her and care for her like a child. As her friends marry and start families of their own, she admits, “I’m just looking for someone who’ll lullaby me. It’s kind of like I’m out of sync.”
DELAYED REACTIONS. When researchers at the Harvard Children’s Bereavement Study looked at school-age children one year after the death of a parent, they found no significant behavioral or psychological differences between these kids and those who hadn’t experienced a loss. At the two-year point, however, the parent-loss kids exhibited much more aggressive and disruptive behaviors than their non-loss peers. They were also more socially withdrawn, and suffered from lower self-esteem. Other studies have found that bereaved children don’t show symptoms of disturbance until as much as
Other daughters allow themselves to mourn only from a distance. Hillary, thirty-two, says she didn’t cry as a six-year-old when her mother died, but five months later she came close to virtual collapse when her pet hamster died. She’d kept her core feelings about the loss of her mother buried under protective layers until an external event months later pulled them to the surface. For some daughters, this release may not occur for years.
TRANSFERENCE. An adult who loses a spouse can manage without a close connection to another person for a period of time, but a child who loses a parent can’t exist alone emotionally without significant cost. She’d be left in what Anna Freud called the “noman’s land of affection,” isolated and withdrawn from everyone and with an impaired ability to attach to other people in the future. So instead of detaching from her lost mother, a daughter may try, quickly and directly, to transfer her feelings of dependency, her needs, and her expectations onto the nearest available adult. This may be her father, an older sibling or other close relative, a teacher, a neighbor, or a therapist. During adolescence, a boyfriend or an older female friend often serves the same purpose. Transference can be helpful when the child is too young to detach all her emotion from her caregiver, but if she doesn’t return later to pull away from the image of her mother enough to mourn the loss she will continue to search for her in the people she chooses as replacements.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. The loss of a mother creates a significant developmental challenge for a child. She may be forced to take on responsibility for herself very quickly, causing her to advance some areas of development. At the same time, she may continue to identify with her earlier stage of maturity as a way to maintain a relationship with her mother and deny the finality of the death. The result is an adult who retains some characteristics of an earlier developmental time, one who feels as if a piece of her were still “stuck” in childhood or adolescence. To this daughter, “growing up” feels not only like a mystery but also a practical impossibility: She’s still too wedded to her childhood. “Parent loss per se doesn’t lead to an arrest in development, but it can happen if circumstances don’t support
mourning in the interim,” Nan Birnbaum explains. “All the girl’s other means and interests develop, but some immature aspects are still a part of her. It’s like the child of ten coexisting with the woman of twenty. As long as her mourning is incomplete, she feels there’s something she can’t quite recapture, and she remains in a state of yearning.”
The daughter whose development arrests in some areas may later have trouble emotionally connecting with the tasks and responsibilities normally associated with her chronological age. Without the socializing influence of her mother, she has a difficult time reaching complete intellectual or emotional maturity. Twenty-five-year-old Tricia, who was three when her mother died, says she begins every adult romance with the hope that she’s found someone who’ll hold her and care for her like a child. As her friends marry and start families of their own, she admits, “I’m just looking for someone who’ll lullaby me. It’s kind of like I’m out of sync.”
DELAYED REACTIONS. When researchers at the Harvard Children’s Bereavement Study looked at school-age children one year after the death of a parent, they found no significant behavioral or psychological differences between these kids and those who hadn’t experienced a loss. At the two-year point, however, the parent-loss kids exhibited much more aggressive and disruptive behaviors than their non-loss peers. They were also more socially withdrawn, and suffered from lower self-esteem. Other studies have found that bereaved children don’t show symptoms of disturbance until as much as
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