The legacy of motherless mothers & their daughters who become mothers

There are books about motherless daughters and motherless mothers. I’m the daughter of a motherless mother, but I only came to glimpse even the tiniest look at what it must be like for my mother, and millions of others, a few years ago.

Mother and mothering is a concept that doesn’t restrict itself to women with children, or perhaps even women period. But the need to have a relationship that is like that which we have with a person we call mother – that, I believe, is indispensible.

Nobody Loves Me Better (originally published 5/04)

by Jill Miller Zimon

My mother hates my hair color. She says it’s unprofessional, a color only men like, and if I want to be taken seriously, I’ll retreat to dishwater brown.

I give her compliments too. A few years ago, after she had cosmetic surgery, I told her she looked creepy. Who wouldn’t want me for a daughter?

And yet, this woman does for me what I’d never do for myself. While I finished up graduate school, she planned my wedding. My kids’ Halloween costumes? Made by Grammy. Clothes with missing buttons? Ripped seams and extra long hems? Stuffed in a plastic bag until she visits her only daughter.

I let her commandeer my house when she comes. I don’t buy food for days beforehand because I know she’ll shop and pay for everything. She makes her bed and retrieves towels from unfolded piles of laundry. Then she folds the rest. Not like I fold, mind you, but I let it slide.

Do I feel guilty? Am I abusing the woman who delivered me and survived teaching me how to drive a stick shift? The truth is, my mother can’t help herself. She’s become the mother she never had as an adult daughter. And that’s what I feel guilty about.

My mother was 27 years old and parenting three kids ages 7, 4 and 1 when her mother died at 52. She became motherless at a time when young mothers depended on their extended family for answers about marriage, childrearing and personal growth. Those issues were private. No one consulted Dr. Phil, Oprah, iparenting.com, What to Expect books or Sylvia Rimm in 1966.

Sadly, my mother’s efforts to parent me as an adult woman with a family and its associated challenges can’t be based on anything she knows. She can draw only on what she imagines a mother of an adult daughter should be.

Her motherless status doesn’t haunt me, but after I call her to ask if there’s any substitute for matzo cake meal, and what the heck is matzo cake meal anyway, I think about how she never had anyone to ask these same questions. When she agrees without hesitation to fly to Ohio at her expense and baby-sit so that my husband and I can have a long weekend alone, I’m aware that she never had a mother around to do that for her. When she bombards me with questions about what to give my kids for any occasion, I know she’s eager to provide all the love she must have expected and wanted her mother to provide to her grandkids, if only she’d lived.

I feel like I’m taking advantage of her most often after I’ve complained to friends about how she called my dye job cheap. Then I remember that more than a couple of these friends have been motherless mothers for too long themselves.

The older I get and the closer I am to the age when my mother confronted her own breast cancer more than 20 years ago, the more I think about what it must have been like to be so young with no mother. I tell myself, be kind, be kind, be kind. Don’t laugh or criticize when she says she’s lugging 15 pounds of brisket to my house for Passover so I won’t have to cook. Let her point out as many times as she wants that I’ve overloaded my cupboards with carbohydrates and I should prefer exercise to sleep.

Because she’s also the mother who still sends me a corny card and a mushy one for each birthday. Because she’s the mother who stuffs hundred dollar bills in my hands so I can buy things for myself that I wouldn’t otherwise consider. Because she knits sweaters for every person in my family plus my kids’ stuffed animals and Barbie dolls. Because she bakes homemade macaroni and cheese for me even though she’s on the Atkins diet.

In my life, Mother’s Day is every additional day I get to hear my mother tell me she hates my hair. Because at least she’s here to tell me.