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The legacy of motherless mothers & their daughters who become mothers

May 11th, 2008
By JILL MILLER ZIMON


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.



This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 6:48 am and is filed under Humor, Mother, Family, Holidays, Parenting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 6 Comments

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    I am a motherless mother. My mother died when I was 24. I had two children of my own. My youngest sister who was 6 at the time came to live with us. She became my "daughter" and my children her siblings. To this day (they are 32 and 31 and my son is 29) they consider themselves brother and sister. She calls me mom and she is my child. My mother was my best friend and it left a huge void in my life. I remember telling my husband that I never wanted my children to love me that much and experience the pain that I was feeling. It happened anyway. My daughters and I are very close and talk daily. I wouldn't miss this experience for anything, just as I am sure my mother loved our closeness. I do the same things with my kids that she did with me - down to the corny crap and fixing their favorite dishes, sewing, dogsit, etc. Happy Mother's Day. You don't realize how important it is until you don't have one anymore.
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    Joy, thank you so very much for sharing this today. When I wrote that column four years ago, there actually wasn't much out there about motherless mothers but I was in a place where I was trying desperately not to be rude to my mother for all the things she would do that I felt were undermining my independence and confidence. And in trying to understand what was going on, I remember it dawning on me that, like you, my mother was so young, and a young mother, when she lost her mother. How devastating.

    It was really an epiphany and, as you say, I really didn't realize what I had as much as when I realized what she'd lost.

    Have a wonderful Mother's Day and thanks for commenting.
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    How true. I realized the extent of loving my mother when on her final days; I was ready and I would have done it doing things I rationally dont believe in and praying that even if she was dozing in hospital, at least to be alive in hospital... 18ys later I miss her as miserably as the day she died. meanwhile I grew older, possibly a bit wiser anyhow more knowledgable, our son is a grown man. But planning to become a cheerful grandmother on the years to come does not make up for the loss and the longing. Mother day stopped being a holiday 18ys ago...
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    Saintixe56 I am really sorry for your pain and loss related to your mother and mother's day. I'd try to think of something pithy to say to persuade you to feel differently, but obviously there really isn't anything anyone can say or do - except maybe to listen, commiserate a little and have this space where you can read others experiences.

    I'm sure you are right re: you will become a cheerful grandmother and enjoy it, but it won't make up for having lost your mother, or the longing. I think that's what I started to realize in my mother's life, was what was going on with me and my kids.

    I handed my mother the column to read when she was in my home, just a couple of weeks before it was going to be published and she laughed and cried. She didn't say much afterwards, but we definitely shared an understanding that we'd never had before.

    Do you mind me asking, how old were you when you lost your mom?
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    Mothers and daughters, along with people of all kinds, not only have to cope with their personal challenges, but they are also constantly confronted with picture postcard ideals that no human being or relationship can ever match.
    Suicide rates rise during the Xmas season!

    I find it healthier to just step back and see the people we do have and have had in our lives as people, in their own right, not merely in their roles in the relationship. to us.
    Then, pick the good parts we see to use in the present and step right past the bad parts without agonizing overly . Not everything has primarily to do with us.

    It's a new day,!
    Seize it!

    PS I wrote the biographies (for my personal use only) of both my parents,, even though the maerials I had to rely on were sketchy.
    The exercise was incredibly edfying and liberating.

    I don't think I ever loved them more than when I dropped myself off into the wings long enough to find them as individuals.- like characters in a play.
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    What a great perspective to share. I think there's truth to that. When we're children and we think they are so unique, or maybe even that everyone's parents must be like our parents, it can be a surprise to learn that other kids' parents - mothers - are different.

    And then, when we learn our parents are, oh my goodness - HUMAN! Another layer of the onion comes off, or another curtain pulled back.

    But then again, as their children, I imagine that as we learn about who our kids are, it's not all that different for the parents?

    Thanks.

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