Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman Page A

her, too. This bewilderment is evident when twenty-two-year-old Laura reviews her relationship with her mother, who was murdered two years ago:
    For the first few years, when I was very young, my mother was extremely nurturing, extremely loving, because I didn’t talk back. As a kid, you don’t really have a personality, and that’s what she wanted. I was her life. She would tell me things like, “You’re the reason I’m alive.” “I love you kids more than your father.” I actually heard more of this than my sister did, because I looked like my mother. As I got older, I started to have opinions, but she still put me in this category: “You’re so cute.” “You’re a little thing.”
    My parents divorced when I was nine, and I turned into her confidante. She told me everything. And at the same time, if I responded in a way she didn’t want, she blew up at me, told me I was out to get her, and reminded me of twelve things I did when I was four. I fell into a deep depression. I suffered a lot of neglect, too, especially after they divorced. She just wasn’t around . . .
    I know there was some love in there, but she was just so fucked up. She was just so fucked up. And I see some of it in me. Sometimes I’m like, Whoa. Where did that come from? It just doesn’t go away, either. I have to actively work on changing myself.
    I’m still so angry at her. I want to get through that. I want to get right size with the anger, right size with the grief, but it all gets so distorted. Like, No, I must really hate her. No, I must really love her.
    Like Laura, twenty-five-year-old Juliet first had to work through her ambivalence toward her family before she could accept the loss of her mother, who died when she was seventeen. The youngest of eight children, Juliet grew up in an alcoholic home where both parents drank. She was her mother’s protector, and after the funeral, Juliet relied on alcohol to numb out her feelings for nearly seven years. At twenty-three, she found herself “just stuck.” “I’d painted myself into a corner,” she says. Her older sister was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Juliet decided to join. As she sobered up, seven years of feelings slowly returned, and she began to mourn what her mother had, and hadn’t, been to the family. But first she had to break through years of family training that had taught her to resist or ignore her emotions, and to sanctify her lost mother.
    Now I feel mad at my mother, and it’s weird. When I got into therapy and talked about it for the first time, I whispered about it. My therapist said, “Why are you whispering?” I said, “Because I’m not supposed to be talking about this.” I grew up with so many secrets and always had to keep up the facade and play the role. Now, I’ve had to realize that my mother was part of the family’s disease. The whole family was diseased by alcoholism. And I’m so angry at her. Damn it, I needed what I needed. I needed a mother, and I needed someone to be there. But as soon as I get angry, I want to defend her. I always get caught in the conflict of, “Oh, she’s so good, and she tried so hard.” That’s what I feel when I think of my mother now. Conflict. I don’t like that.
    A mother who inflicted physical, sexual, or emotional abuse on a daughter damages her child’s healthy sense of self, ability to trust, belief in personal safety, and perception of the world as a meaningful place. Mourning the abusive mother is an attempt to take back as much as possible of what was robbed. It doesn’t invalidate the abuse, or mean the daughter wishes the mother could return. It doesn’t have to be about feeling sad. It’s about letting go, and setting oneself free.
    “Half of me isn’t sad my mother died, because I know she’s a lot happier,” says Donna, whose mother committed suicide three years
ago. “She felt so much pain all her life—back pains, stomach pains, and then alcoholism. She was always happy on the