Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman Page B

person is usually the mother. A child’s first and most profound social experience is with her mother, and that relationship influences her psychological and physical development. As Bowlby and other attachment theorists have observed, children whose mothers are responsive to their signals and interact socially with them during their first year are likely to become more
socially advanced and more capable of forming secure attachments to others than infants whose mothers are preoccupied or avoidant.
    When this first consistent relationship is interrupted or severed, a father, grandmother, older sister, housekeeper—any warm, involved, stable caretaker willing to invest time and patience in the child’s growth—may fill this role. Among children of all ages, the critical factor that determines later distress is not mother loss per se but instead the availability of consistent, loving, and supportive care afterward. A child who can attach to another adult after losing a mother has the best chance of developing without serious ongoing difficulties. Although she often makes it clear that her substitute is second-best to the mother she lost, a daughter may find comfort in recreating with this new mother-figure some version of the relationship she had with her own mother.
    Amanda believes she eventually managed to enter a stable marriage, start a family, and find happiness despite her early abandonment and later difficulties with a distant father and stepmother because she spent four years in her grandmother’s care. After her parents’ divorce when she was three, Amanda lived with her paternal grandparents and uncle until her father remarried. “That was a very nurturing family,” she explains. “I don’t know why my grandparents let me stay with them, but I always wished they’d said to my father, ‘Let us keep Mandy, and you go on with your life.’ I’m still very close with my grandma and grandpa. We relate to each other better than I can with my father and stepmother.” Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Amanda relied on her grandmother for the love and care she never found at home. Her grandmother helped her through her first menstruation and gave her financial assistance to return to school just last year.
    Amanda’s ability to bond with a stable adult in early childhood and maintain that bond until the present gave her the solid foundation she needed to leave her father’s home at eighteen and feel confident in her ability to create a life of her own. If Amanda hadn’t found a substitute after her mother died, her early development might have detoured in a number of ways. Elizabeth Fleming’s case study of Lucy, which appears in Erna Furman’s book, A Child’s
Parent Dies, illustrates the resonating effects of early mother loss when subsequent caretakers are inconsistent or indifferent.
    Lucy was ten weeks old when her mother suddenly died. Maternal relatives raised Lucy for a short period until a cousin took over while her father traveled for work. When Lucy was six, her father married a woman with three children and brought Lucy to live in the new home. Throughout this time, he refused to answer her questions about her birth mother, about whom she knew virtually nothing. Lucy was eleven, overweight, and still wetting the bed when she started seeing Fleming. The therapist believed that the combination of a lack of early consistent mothering, childhood instability, and a taboo surrounding the natural mother had led Lucy to overeat, isolate herself, tune out her feelings, take on the traits of people around her, and consistently start new relationships with the hope that she would find what she had lost.
    She had never been a participant in changes in her own life. She had a tendency to let relationships with others drift off, rather than really ending them. Lucy had to fight the wish to see me because it contained the desire to get more from me than I, as her therapist, could give. [Her] sporadic