independence. 4 This is not a time of mutual understanding between most mothers and daughters, and the struggle typically lasts into a daughter’s late teens or early twenties. As a study of a hundred autobiographical accounts from Wellesley College students in the early 1980s revealed, more than 75 percent of the daughters at that age still had unfavorable or unflattering views of their mothers.
When a mother dies during her daughter’s adolescence, what would otherwise have been a temporary separation with the hope of later reconciliation then becomes an irrevocable physical fracture. “Wait a minute!” the daughter wants to shout. “I didn’t really mean it. Come back!”
A daughter at the peak of rebellion may be left with tremendous guilt and regret if her mother dies at this time. In her memory, their fifteen-year relationship may then deflate to the six awful arguments of the past year. When I think of the times I hurled hurtful phrases at my mother, using the word love like a knife—“You don’t love me!”
“I don’t love you, I hate you!” and that most horrid and self-fulfilling of all, “I wish you would go away and leave me alone!”—I’m furious at the adolescent I once was. I never believed my mother died because I wished it, but for many girls a certain residue of childhood magical thinking does persist beyond childhood.
“Whenever someone we’ve had an ambivalent relationship with dies, especially if we’ve just had an argument, we often feel a lot of pain and remorse for the angry thoughts we felt toward them,” explains Arlene Englander, LCSW, MBA, a psychotherapist in North Palm Beach, Florida, who specializes in bereavement and complicated grief. “When people are under stress, they tend to regress, and at those times adolescents and even adults can reactivate magical thinking at a conscious level. They then believe they were in some way responsible for the death.”
Lea, now thirty-four, remembers a conversation she had with her best friend when she was thirteen. “We were talking about issues thirteen-year-old girls thought were important,” she says. “I asked, ‘If you had to lose a parent, which one would you want to lose?’ I said my mother, because I was closer to my father, and my life would change less. A couple of months later, my mother had a stroke and died. Between the way a thirteen-year-old’s mind works, and the guilt taught in my Catholic school, it took me a long time to get over the idea that God had heard me.”
An adolescent daughter may also blame herself for not being a “good” daughter and may feel intensely sad about the lost opportunity for later redemption. Paula, twenty-seven, attributes most of the guilt she felt after her mother died when she was fifteen to wishing she’d fought with her less and comforted her more. “It just seems that if I’d known how sick she was, I wouldn’t have said all those terrible things,” she says. “Sometimes I catch myself even now, telling myself what a horrible thing I did on such and such day back then. But now I also say to myself, ‘Well, you were a teenager. You were going through all that,’ or ‘Maybe you were suffering from PMS.’ Something to make it all right. Because I don’t have the chance now at twenty-seven to sit back and laugh with a mother who’s fifty and say, ‘Oh, remember when?’
“You hope that your mother was able to see you were going through a bad period, and that it wasn’t always going to be like that,” she continues. “You hope she didn’t leave with the terrible feeling that you didn’t love her. That’s always my fear. I try to catch myself whenever I’m feeling that way and tell myself, ‘It’s okay. You did what you did at the time, and that’s it. She understood. You didn’t have more time together, but it would have worked out all right if you did.’”
Like Paula, I try to coax myself beyond self-blame, into a place where I can find comfort
When a mother dies during her daughter’s adolescence, what would otherwise have been a temporary separation with the hope of later reconciliation then becomes an irrevocable physical fracture. “Wait a minute!” the daughter wants to shout. “I didn’t really mean it. Come back!”
A daughter at the peak of rebellion may be left with tremendous guilt and regret if her mother dies at this time. In her memory, their fifteen-year relationship may then deflate to the six awful arguments of the past year. When I think of the times I hurled hurtful phrases at my mother, using the word love like a knife—“You don’t love me!”
“I don’t love you, I hate you!” and that most horrid and self-fulfilling of all, “I wish you would go away and leave me alone!”—I’m furious at the adolescent I once was. I never believed my mother died because I wished it, but for many girls a certain residue of childhood magical thinking does persist beyond childhood.
“Whenever someone we’ve had an ambivalent relationship with dies, especially if we’ve just had an argument, we often feel a lot of pain and remorse for the angry thoughts we felt toward them,” explains Arlene Englander, LCSW, MBA, a psychotherapist in North Palm Beach, Florida, who specializes in bereavement and complicated grief. “When people are under stress, they tend to regress, and at those times adolescents and even adults can reactivate magical thinking at a conscious level. They then believe they were in some way responsible for the death.”
Lea, now thirty-four, remembers a conversation she had with her best friend when she was thirteen. “We were talking about issues thirteen-year-old girls thought were important,” she says. “I asked, ‘If you had to lose a parent, which one would you want to lose?’ I said my mother, because I was closer to my father, and my life would change less. A couple of months later, my mother had a stroke and died. Between the way a thirteen-year-old’s mind works, and the guilt taught in my Catholic school, it took me a long time to get over the idea that God had heard me.”
An adolescent daughter may also blame herself for not being a “good” daughter and may feel intensely sad about the lost opportunity for later redemption. Paula, twenty-seven, attributes most of the guilt she felt after her mother died when she was fifteen to wishing she’d fought with her less and comforted her more. “It just seems that if I’d known how sick she was, I wouldn’t have said all those terrible things,” she says. “Sometimes I catch myself even now, telling myself what a horrible thing I did on such and such day back then. But now I also say to myself, ‘Well, you were a teenager. You were going through all that,’ or ‘Maybe you were suffering from PMS.’ Something to make it all right. Because I don’t have the chance now at twenty-seven to sit back and laugh with a mother who’s fifty and say, ‘Oh, remember when?’
“You hope that your mother was able to see you were going through a bad period, and that it wasn’t always going to be like that,” she continues. “You hope she didn’t leave with the terrible feeling that you didn’t love her. That’s always my fear. I try to catch myself whenever I’m feeling that way and tell myself, ‘It’s okay. You did what you did at the time, and that’s it. She understood. You didn’t have more time together, but it would have worked out all right if you did.’”
Like Paula, I try to coax myself beyond self-blame, into a place where I can find comfort
Similar Books
