Motherless
My first husband lost his mother twice: the first time when he was five and his parents split up and his father took custody of him and his two brothers. His mother left the state, moving back to her native Nevada where her parents lived. The second time he lost her was about a year later, when he was six years old, and his mother committed suicide.
Everything I know I heard second-hand, and a lot of the details were always somewhat sketchy. His mother was, from what I understand, “mentally unstable.” She had apparently spent time in a “mental hospital” (which is rather nebulous) and had made a number of unsuccessful suicide attempts over a period of years before finally succeeding. My understanding was always that he took the boys because of her mental illness. Many, many years later, when K himself died, his maternal grandmother told me that there was actually a custody battle raging over the course of that year between the time they split up and she died. If that’s true, then that would indicate that she wanted her boys with her.
K never saw his mother again after she moved to Nevada. When she died, it had been a year since he had seen her. He and his brothers were never allowed to mourn their mother. They did not attend a funeral, and K told me years later that when they cried at the news of their mother having died, their father told them in no uncertain terms that they were not to cry over her because she left them. All traces of her were locked tightly away; the boys grew up not being allowed to cry or even talk about their mother, and believing that she had left them, the implication being that she didn’t love them enough to stick around.
Two years after she died, their father remarried a much younger woman, who formally adopted the boys and made them call her “Mom” (she was a mere 11 years older than the oldest son, 12 years older than the middle son, and 14 years older than K, the youngest). As is routine in adoptions, the boys’ birth certificates were rewritten, deleting their birth mother’s name and information, which was replaced with their new mother’s name and information. This served to further wipe away any trace of their birth mother’s existence.
From what I understand, the boys eventually accepted their father’s new wife as their mother, but I know for K, the feelings of loss of his birth mother never left him. He had vague memories of her, outwardly he expressed anger and disgust about her because that’s what he had been taught to feel about her, but on a deeper level I think he always pined for her. There was definitely a void in him that came from losing her and being deprived of all the basic needs children have of their mothers.
It wasn’t until years into his adulthood – and into our marriage – that a sort of reckoning took place. His maternal grandmother – to whom he and his brothers had been very close as children, but with whom ties were eventually severed at the hands of their father – became seriously ill and K was summoned to Nevada to see her for the first time in many years. I stayed behind at home. When he came home, he brought with him a large box of photos and photo albums – all of his mother (who looked like K in drag – it must have been eerie and quite emotional to finally see a picture of one’s long-lost mother and feel almost as if one were looking in a mirror). He also broke down like I had never seen him break down, describing how, after all those years, he had finally seen her grave.
I poured over the photos, wanting to understand, feeling sure that there might be answers there – answers about the demons that were already destroying K. I saw photos of a pretty young woman, perhaps melancholy, and many of the pictures were of her with her boys – birthday parties, obviously homemade Halloween costumes, holding their chubby baby bodies in her arms. If photographs could talk, these spoke loudly of a woman who loved her children very much. How horrible that they were told over and over throughout their formative years that she didn’t love them, that she abandoned them.
This novel I finished recently, The Outside Boy, deals with a young boy who lost his mother when he was born. That loss has shaped him in profound ways; there is a pining, a void, a longing for the safety and nurturing love he imagines (and rightly so) only his mother could have given him. Reading the story sort of picked at this scab of my own, and I’ve been pondering this whole motherless issue for days now – well, really, for years and years.
People who grow up without mothers seem to share this common emptiness, hunger, and even anger at what they have been deprived of, and how differently they might feel about themselves and about their world if only they had received the tender mother-love that every child needs and should have by right.
My own mother didn’t die. She’s very much alive, even now, and doesn’t even live all that far away from me. But I lost her a long time ago, nevertheless – and even that’s a generous statement, because in truth I don’t think I ever really ‘had’ her.
She was there physically, but she made sure to tell me that she had never wanted me. I was an exceedingly difficult baby and child, and I was treated many times to the story of how she literally almost put her hands around my throat to strangle me when I was two years old, but stopped herself just in time and realized in that moment that she actually loved me. Due to her own deprived childhood and the burdens she was carrying as a young adult with three small children and a volatile marriage, she had great difficulty showing that love, though. I grew up being her emotional caretaker, a burden far too great for a child, and her “whipping boy” by turns. It was confusing, to say the least.
I finally permanently cut ties with her years ago, but she’s tried to contact me from time to time, and her communications still ring with blame and bitterness and cruelty; confirming that cutting ties was the right thing to do.
It’s had an undeniable impact on me, though, not having a mother – at least not having a mother in the ways that children need to have mothers. I think it has made me somewhat closed off; I’ll only let people in just so far. It might be the explanation of why it’s so incredibly difficult for me to ask for help, and even more difficult to accept it.
I think my motherlessness explains my go-to emotion: anger. And yes, there is – has always been – that longing inside me, that emptiness, that awareness of just what I have missed out on, not just as a child, but even as an adult. I haven’t had a mother to turn to for wisdom or help as I raise my own children; I never had a mother to nurture me and celebrate with me through my pregnancies and births and the postpartum struggles I was faced with; no mother to run to when my marriage fell apart; not even a mother to call up on the phone for a recipe.
It’s lonely, and although I feel like I accepted it a long time ago, I also am very aware that for most of my adult life I’ve searched for a mother figure. For a number of years, my first husband’s mother (the one who adopted him and his brothers) filled that role for me – and truly, she was more of a mother to me than my own flesh and blood mother had ever been. But after my marriage to her son dissolved, he died, and I remarried, she eventually took herself out of my life with little explanation. It was implied that although she had volunteered to be my second child’s grandma every bit as much as she was my first child’s grandma, she never bargained for me to have so many kids, and she “didn’t want to get involved in that.”
For a time, Michael’s mother felt something like a mother to me. I really adored her, and we quickly grew close. Even after she moved to Florida, she and I talked on the phone and exchanged emails regularly. And then she died very suddenly when I was pregnant with Lilah.
I think being motherless is one of the reasons I loved midwifery care so much during my last three pregnancies. The hands-on nurturing was something I had never experienced before, and it was sublime. Even now, looking back on it, it makes me teary-eyed.
So, I mother my children, and especially my babies, always mindful of how profoundly this first, primary connection will impact them over their entire lives – how they see themselves, how they relate to other people, how they feel about their place in the world, and even how they parent their own children some day. When I stroke Scarlett’s soft head (as I’ve done to all of my babies), as I hold her close and nurse her, as I whisper silly nonsense into her ear, as I kiss her toes and nibble her belly, what I’m saying is, “I never had this, but I want you to have it,” and, “You are loved so very much, simply because you are you.”
I hope my children will be spared that lonely hunger that follows me like a shadow, because I know I will never be free of it.
Lisa is a married SAHM, raising seven kids in Southern California. To maintain her sanity, she writes a blog, Life As I Know It.
