Long Term Effects

Lasting Effects

Motherless daughters may experience difficulties beyond the effects around the time of the mother’s loss. She may struggle to uphold relationships, both familial and romantic. Additionally, her relationship with the concept of mortality may be distorted. More importantly, her concept of becoming a mother may be impacted.

 Relationships

            The early loss of a maternal figure can also affect a woman’s ability to form and grow relationships in her adult life. The relationship between the woman and her remaining immediate family members is especially affected. The relationship between the father and the daughter is specifically tested. At the time of loss, the way the father handles the death can affect how the young woman will cope and can determine the relationship between the father and daughter for years to come. According to United States Census data, 63,000 young girls under the age of 18 were living with single, widowed fathers (Edelman, 2006). As their remaining parent is of the opposite sex, these women tend to experience difficulties in adolescence. Paternal custody research conducted by the Texas Southwestern Medical Center suggests that these girls show higher anxiety levels and lower self-esteem than other children in single parent homes, such as a son being raised solely by their mother or father or a father raising his son (Edelman, 2006.) The daughters may find that they must care for their fathers a bit more, perhaps filling a maternal role in their home. This can cause strain in the relationship and increase the anxiety the daughter feels. Additionally, the father may struggle with being the primary caretaker. His struggles to help his daughter can contribute to her anxiety or self-esteem issues.

Romantic relationships can also be affected for the motherless daughter. According to Edelman, these young women “often bond with partners quickly and approach relationships with a child’s expectations, [and] have enormous difficulty withdrawing emotionally when a romance comes to an end” (2006). Their emotional immaturity may stem from the absence of their mother. The motherless daughter experiences a deep and personal relationship with loss. Through the loss of a mother, the daughter may find it difficult to experience any sort of separation in life. This can cause anxiety in the woman. There is a need in these women to have control, and they feel a deep personal connection to anyone they choose to be in a relationship with because they recognize the fragility of life and take it seriously. Thus, a healthy love life may be difficult to maintain for a motherless daughter.

Mortality

            In her letter to Edelman, a Minnesota woman revealed the following fear: “I feel like I’ll probably die when I’m thirty-nine and leave my children to suffer the same pain and confusion that I have” (2006). This woman is not alone in her struggle to understand and accept her own mortality. Motherless daughters commonly fear coming to the age in which their mother died. Another woman called the age her mother died at “the magic number,” an age in which she was terrified of being. Edelman writes that she herself has always known, without calculation, how many years lie between her age and forty-two, the age her mother was when she passed away to breast cancer. Almost humorously, Edelman refers to the motherless daughter’s obsession with the age her mother died at “Mortality Math 101.” This numeric fear is very prominent in the motherless daughter community. According to Edelman, more than 75% of motherless daughters that participated in her survey and interview process feared that their fates would be somehow intertwined with their mothers’. Death is prominent in the life of a child who experienced maternal loss. It becomes engrained in the child’s mind. There is no life after the age their mother died. That was the end. Without realistic fear, the daughter fears the same demise as their mother, whether it be a car wreck, a heart attack, or cancer that took their mother’s life. Oftentimes, these women struggle to look past the age of their mother’s death. For example, passing the age of the mother’s death creates an even stronger barrier of separation. The woman doesn’t know how to move on with life because she never saw her mother do it. Motherless daughters have a tendency to fixate on that moment in time, which can be detrimental to their life experiences. A motherless daughter may not take a responsible risk, such as having children or taking on a new job, due to their irrational fear that they will meet the same fate as their mother did.

Motherhood

Motherless daughters may find the process of becoming a mother especially challenging. One of the reasons motherhood is so difficult for motherless daughters is because of the grieving process. Grief should not be viewed in a rigid cycle, especially not when referring to childhood grief. As the brain is developing, the way a child grieves will change. Edelman explains this in her work, Motherless Mothers: “[A] seven-year-old is more likely to have periodic grief reactions throughout the teen years as she becomes better able to understand and process new aspects of the loss over time” (2007). Edelman goes on to describe those periodic grief reactions: Subsequent Temporary Upsurge of Grief (STUGs). STUGs are often triggered by important life events, such as the birth of a child. As a motherless daughter becomes a mother herself, she may experience a STUG. Hit with a sudden desire for maternal advice and presence, the joy of motherhood may induce a burst of grief.

An initial upsurge in grief may occur, but many motherless daughters find motherhood to be a very rewarding and healing experience. Women see motherhood as an opportunity to mend a broken cycle.  Edelman reveals that the healing comes from a dynamic relationship: “The daughter consults with her mother in memory and imagines the kind of updated relationship they might have shared” (2007, p. 9). Once again, the daughter feels connected to her mother. Childhood memories may begin to make more sense for the daughter. If the child had questions about why her mother parented her the way she did, the answers to those questions may be revealed through the act of motherhood.  Motherless mothers also have the unique challenge of understanding the realities of motherhood. Early loss leaves the daughter with an unrealistic understanding of who their mother was. When becoming a mother, the daughter must learn to accept that their mother was likely not as powerful as she had anticipated. Two Edith Cowan University psychology professors explain an important shift of grief in their article for Journal of Family Studies: “Reactions were often induced by situations or events that highlighted the absence of their mothers in their children’s lives, rather than their own” (Rowe & Harman, 2014, p. 32). Motherless mothers feel the absence of their children’s maternal grandmother.