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Key points
- The adult left running the household often tries to normalize the mother's leaving and pressures the child or children to move on.
- Being unable to voice emotions about a mother's abandonment may be as damaging as the abandonment itself in the long run.
- The emotional conflicts an abandoned child feels carry into adulthood and include grief, pain, shame, anger, and more.
- As an adult, an abandoned daughter may worry about telling her story, given the cultural pressure, the fear of being labeled, and shame.
This is my second post on maternal abandonment. For the first, click here.
The culture tends to elevate mothers for their perseverance, self-sacrifice, and unconditional love and, for more than half the population who are securely attached to their moms, that’s true more or less. A much more closely held secret is the mothers who walk away from their child or children and motherhood—sometimes for a short period of time, sometimes for years. Some will return, experiencing a sudden “grass is greener moment,” hoping to reclaim their places in their children’s lives. Others opt for occasional contact and some for none.
In each and every one of these stories, the child is powerless to change the narrative.
Stories mothers tell
She and I met for coffee some years ago; we knew each other through mutual acquaintances and the publishing business and she’d moved back to Manhattan after years of living elsewhere, having just ended a long-term domestic partnership. We chatted and then, out of nowhere, the story tumbled out of her. How she’d married straight out of college and had two kids by the time she was 24. How she watched her girlfriends with envy—going out dancing, having fun, meeting new people, working real jobs—while she spent her life running after a toddler and pushing a baby carriage. And so she left and moved to the West Coast where she hung out, danced, and hippied her way to self-fulfillment for six years. And then she came back.
The way she told the story was polished—it had clearly been told many, many times over the years—and she ended by saying that her adult kids were great and had thrived and that she’d done what she needed to do. And—here’s the cherry on top—she’d become a better mother as a result.
Really? What I wanted to say but didn’t was that the price of her freedom was paid by children too small to even articulate what they lost. Instead, I took my leave.
The arc of her story is echoed in Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s memoir Hiroshima in the Morning as well as in the self-serving statements contained in the stories told by the daughters these mothers left behind. Sometimes, the story is about self-fulfillment and expression but it can also be about what’s next. One daughter put it simply: “The man she wanted didn’t want the baggage of a child and she decided to marry him. I was the bag she dropped off along the way, unimportant and not part of her master plan for the future. Can you imagine? I was 6 years old.”
The stories daughters tell
Keep in mind that what follows is all anecdotal and it certainly doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. A number of daughters wrote that their fear of being abandoned again, along with the deep fear of not being worthy of someone’s commitment, stayed with them in adulthood, despite stable marriages and relationships. As one woman wrote: “If the person who put you on the planet feels free to split, how can you believe that it will never happen again? It’s not like lightning not striking twice. After all, a mother’s love is supposed to be the strongest, right? The amount of reassurance I need remains a problem, even with lots of therapy. It doesn’t take much for me to imagine being left.”
As I discussed in the first post, most abandoned daughters were actively pushed to “move on” and not discuss what happened. This papering over of a traumatic event has almost as much effect on the daughter as the abandonment itself. The silence is the perfect medium for the growth of guilt, shame, and issues of trust. One daughter focused on the shame that kept her from talking about it:
“You don’t want people to think of you as the poor girl whose mother deserted her because that makes it sound as if you’re asking for a pity party. And by telling the story, I feel you’re pinning the ‘I am so damaged’ label on yourself too. It’s not as though my mother was an addict or a drunk; a stranger might feel compassion for that. No, she was just a suburban housewife who didn’t feel like being a mother anymore. How do you tell that story without making yourself look bad or pitiful? It’s a real bind.”
Anger, rage, and trying to make sense of it all
While some daughters said that the loss and pain they felt at their mothers’ leaving outweighed their anger, others said the opposite. Some of this may have to do with both personality and the age of the child at the time; daughters who were older were, in the main, more volatile. Now 35, Sherry was 10 when her mother left:
“When she came back 4 years later—her interim relationship appears not to have panned out—I was consumed with rage. At 14, I was old enough to want some accountability and, instead, my mother and father did a charade of pretending everything was just fine. She wouldn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t talk about it. My two younger brothers who were only 3 and 4 when she left were just happy to have her back. So they made me the problem. The angry girl who disrupted the joyful reunion. It’s been over 20 years and that is still the role assigned to me. I don’t trust either of them and have little contact.”
Melissa Cistaro’s sometimes searing, sometimes troubling memoir, Pieces of My Mother, is one daughter’s effort to make sense of both of her mother’s leaving and the woman she was; the act of writing clearly was a way of coming to terms with the experience.
Cistaro’s mother left when she was 4 and her brothers were 5 and 6. Despite their father’s valiant efforts, the children tumbled into disarray. Cistaro is haunted by the generational cycle of maternal abandonment in her family now that she is a mother herself and frets if there’s some genetic flaw that she too carries that will make her leave her kids. When her 4-year-old asks her how her own mother comforted her when she was scared, Cistaro clutches and doesn’t tell her that her mother wasn’t there when she got scared: “To tell my daughter this truth is to tell myself the darkest truth. That I was leavable. Unkeepable.”
Over the course of the memoir, which recounts both her childhood and the moment at which she goes to what she believes will be her mother’s deathbed, she reads the letters her mother wrote her and others and never sent. Those letters become her way of understanding her mother, despite the fact that her mother never apologized or owned the hurt she rained on her daughter. Cistaro’s effort is to make peace and it’s clearly her journey, not everyone’s. I will admit that the sentence, close to the end of the book, “I wouldn’t trade my mom for any other in the world” left me agape.
In contrast, some daughters who answered my questionnaire and who'd become mothers themselves found their mothers' abandonment even more opaque, less understandable, as time went on:
"When my daughter turned 8, which was how old I was when my mother left, I had a new understanding of how incredibly selfish my mother was, walking away from me. Selfish doesn't cover it. Let's call it narcissistic and just plain dreadful. And she wondered why I cut her out of my life at that very moment. She was the same person who walked out except she was uncomfortable with the image it projected. Well, you know that thing about making your bed and lying it? I wasn't being vindictive. I had made peace in the hopes of having a 'family' like normal people but she never explained, never apologized. And when Ella turned 8, I suddenly saw like I never had before. Yes, aha. And I made the right choice. That was a decade ago, and it was the right move I'd fought for a long time."
But each abandoned daughter has to walk this complicated path and there are costs to both making peace and not making peace. In the main, it is a path that is muddled through in parts, with purpose and best done with the help of a gifted therapist.
Many thanks to my readers on Facebook for sharing their stories.
Copyright © Peg Streep 2021
To find a therapist, please visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
Facebook image: Bricolage/Shutterstock
References
Rizzuto, Rahna Reiko. Hiroshima in the Morning. New York: The Feminist Press, 2010.
Cistaro, Melissa. Pieces of My Mother. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2015.
