When the Matriarch dies, what happens to the family's internal structure?

In My Humble Opinion
1

By matriarch, I mean the female anchor, head, heart, hub of the family-- geographical, moral, spiritual. This could be Mom, Grandma, Aunt or Great-Aunt-- whoever is the gravitational energy center of the clan.

[I’m sure there could be another very interesting discussion about what happens when the Dad/Grandpa dies… but that would be different discussion from this one.]

What got me thinking about this was the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed. This is a really engrossing book about a woman who was in a bad place and chose to walk the Pacific Coast Trail in an effort to get better, find her way, heal herself, etc. I highly recommend it. I picked it up one morning and read it straight through. I couldn’t put it down. And Cheryl can be found on various shows, podcasts, and magazines now that she has some fame. Read Cheryl’s wiki bio here.

But here’s the thing: “In March 1991, when Strayed was a senior in college, her mother, Bobbi Lambrecht, died suddenly of lung cancer at the age of 45. Soon afterward, Strayed developed a heroin addiction.[5] Strayed has described this loss as her “genesis story”. She has written about her mother’s death and her grief in each of her books and several of her essays.[6]”

That short summary doesn’t tell you the half of it. :astonished: When Cheryl’s mother died the family flew apart! It was as though someone cut the hub out of a bicycle wheel and the spokes blew away. Cheryl descended into heroin addiction and prostitution. The hike described in the book was her recovery process.

This got me thinking about the effect on a family of the death of the Mom, Grandma, or other Primary Female Figure. That’s what I want to discuss here.

The family doesn’t always fly apart. A good friend of mind is the middle “child” (She’s 70!) in a close family of six siblings. All have children and some have grandchildren. When D’s mother died 20 years ago (her father had died at least 10 years previously) the siblings stayed close and drew even closer. Not all live in the same city, but most live within 250 miles of each other. (In Texas, that’s a day’s drive. :wink:) They are in touch constantly. They travel to destination vacation spots and rent accommodations together (sometimes 15-20 people including kids & grandkids). D told me she is flying up to Michigan for her nephew’s fiancee’s wedding shower! I am fascinated by the commitment of this family to each other in the absence of a Matriarch. BTW, they’re Anglo (which is what we call “white” here in Texas.)

OTOH, I was asking a social worker friend of mine about the Cheryl Strayed Phenomenon, and she said she sees this all the time in big Hispanic families, where the Matriarch was the one who held the family members in relationship to each other, (using my analogy above) like the hub holds the spokes of a wheel. When the hub goes, the force that kept the spokes in position and mediated the tension in the wheel is suddenly removed, and the family members drift away, though not usually as explosively as Cheryl’s family’s dissolution.

I mention the ethnicity in passing and in the interest of being descriptive…I don’t know whether this Matriarch phenomenon is more prevalent ethnic families. <shrug>

Another family I know had family members feuding, but after Mom died, there was no longer any reason for them to pretend that they wanted to be in relationship, so the family structure has disintegrated. However, recently one of the siblings has reached out to another in an attempt to restore connection as they all move into their 60s and 70s.

I’m a childless only child. Both of my parents are gone and I never knew my grandparents, so I am strictly an observer of this dynamic. Have you experienced this-- a strong Matriarch in your family around whom the family orbited? Have you observed how She created (or not) a structure that could survive her demise?

Other thoughts/comments about what holds families of adult children together (or fails to hold them) are welcome in the discussion. Holidays, celebrations, feuds, religious practices, rituals-- all that kind of stuff. To someone who’s all alone like myself, watching how families operate is quite fascinating.

2

Isn’t there usually a gradual transition to someone else as the Matriarch gets older, weaker…?

3

There wasn’t anyone like that in my family. My mother just kept her head down and did what she needed to do; she didn’t have much influence on events, except insofar as she could influence my father. There were no women left on my father’s side of the family by the time I was a teen.

I think there’s something not right about a family that falls apart emotionally without one particular person. Certainly there can be economic problems if the major breadwinner dies too soon, and that can lead to a variety of outcomes, including the family falling apart or the family getting stronger together. Was the matriarch too strong, keeping the younger members from developing their own independent selves? I suppose I’ll have to read the book to understand this kind of family better.

4

My boyfriend’s family was matriarchal. His grandparents came here from Germany and grandma Hilde ran the entire show. But the way she did it, she ended up with 4 man-child sons and a bitter daughter. The 3 remaining sons still live together in the family house (one died in an alcohol-related auto accident) and the daughter lives in a second house in the property (with her man-child sons, one being my boyfriend). I didn’t really know them too much when grandma was alive, but now ten years on they all seem to hate each other. They were more pleasant to each other when Grandpa was still alive but he died a few years ago. There’s absolutely no holidays or family traditions anymore. Everyone seems completely unable to function as a loving family without Grandma as the pass-through even though they live together. It’s all very strange, I can’t wrap my head around how these people live.

My parents’ parents were kind of absent in their lives from the beginning so they have good bonds with their siblings. Neither family has been matriarchal or patriarchal. Mom is extremely close with her sisters. Dad is no less or more close with his siblings since his parents died.

I do think ethnicity plays a big part in how much parents influence the “spokes” of their family. I know one guy who is very Greek and his mother died unexpectedly last year. He was so distraught that he quit his job. He had a good high-paying position but just couldn’t handle life without his mom. I don’t know him well enough to know how it affected their family as a whole, though. Like if it made the family fly apart or come closer.

5

Thanks for these very interesting replies.

It certainly struck me that way when I read Chery’s account. I was not close to my mother, but to be so attached (or whatever) that when she dies you become a heroin addict?? Yikes.

This, too. ^^^

The book is quite interesting, but I doubt of you’ll get any insight into her family. In the wiki bio, it says she has written about this grief elsewhere, so it might be better to look for other sources.

I don’t know what’s “usual,” which is one reason why I started the thread.

6

My family had the opposite problem: two matriarchs contending for supremacy. My parents my two younger sibs and I living in a reasonably happy home with my mother a definite matriarch. Then my grandfather died and my grandmother moved in with us. It did not go well. I was in college and, although I commuted, I generally came home late at night to sleep. But my grandmother felt that my mother should play the subordinate role she had played growing up and my mother was having none of it. In particular, they contended over the raising of my brother and sister and I think it damaged them both, especially my sister who has had a difficult life.

7

When my mother died, my oldest sister became the matriarch. Since she died, it’s just me and my other sister, and we don’t have the same dyanmic.

8

I’m not in a close family. What is the matriarch’s job description?

9

When my mother passed, it just… drifted apart. My father hated holidays, so we just never had celebrations around him. My brother moved about 8 hours away, so he started his own celebrations. I started going to my sister’s house as she lived 30 minutes away. So, when the hub left, the spokes just went out their own ways.

10

My mother tended to organize all family get-togethers. When she died, we just stopped getting together for holidays. My cousins talked about it, but nothing came of it.

11

In many cases, shes the communication and logistical hub. Everyone calls her and she moves information around. For major holidays, she hosts, plans, cooks, delegates. She may goft or loan money as needed. Offers advice.

She can be wonderful or toxic. It depends on her personality and the family dynamic. But in a big family, its pretty important to have a decider. If everyone has to call everyone to pass on news or make decisions, it just doesn’t get done. Someone has to be the one to say “Annie and Bobby both have to go to their inlaws for Thanksgiving and Charlie has to work so we are going to have dinner on Saturday instead. Denise says she can host but she doesn’t have two ovens so I’m going to bring the turkey over, cooked, and Evan is doing the pies. Frank is bringing the dog but I made him promise to bring the crate, too”.

Those sorts of logistics take a lot of time, communication, problem solving skills, and everyone has to have agreed on you as the common authority.

12

I have to agree with you here. This happened to my family. Of course, there is a long and complicated history of how this came to be. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming but I didn’t.

I have a brother who is 2 1/2 years younger and a sister who is 5 years younger. My sister married and moved 1000 miles away when she was 25. My brother lives here where we grew up. We are all in our 60s now.

My mother died in February 2020, one month before the pandemic started. That just added another level of fuckupness to everything that followed. But it’s probably wishful thinking that things could have turned out otherwise if that hadn’t happened.

My mother had raised us alone after my father died when I was 8. It was a hard life and I give her credit for that. But she was not very demonstrative in her affection. Not a lot of “I love you” or hugs. Which is surprising because she always said that God and children were the most important things in life. After us kids had left home, she got very selfish and self-centered. I think this was her way of keeping us close to her and didn’t realize that would push us away. Always doing what she wanted fell on me and my brother because my sister was gone. I got most of it, though, because she believed that I, being single and childless, had nothing better to do. My brother, being a man with a family, had a life. 99 times out of 100, we would do what she wanted but that one time we couldn’t would make her mad and, therefore, we were terrible children. My sister didn’t know this mother, she knew the telephone and vacation mother, who complained to her about me and my brother. She never disappointed my mother because she wasn’t here to do so.

My brother and his family and I would have lunch most Sundays at my mother’s house. My sister and her family would come home once or twice a year. I enjoyed being with them. But we rarely hung out socially apart from family things. My brother and I had been friends in our early 20s but drifted apart over the years. I had never had a “friends” relationship with my sister. But I still thought of us all as close.

About a year before my mother died, my sister started an argument with me over something really trivial. It was only the second argument we had ever had. (The first was over the dress I had to wear in her wedding.) That was when I realized that she was believing my mother that I was a bad daughter. I knew that my mother complained to me about my brother and that she complained to him about me. He and I had talked about this and knew her propensity for exaggeration. But like I said, my sister didn’t really know her. My mother thought she was the best, most selfless mother ever and my sister believed this.

Everyone got along great while my sister was here for the funeral. We laughed and told stories. Then she packed up the possessions she wanted and went back to her life. I didn’t hear from her again until months later when I needed her to pay her share of the probate attorney’s fee. In the meantime, my brother and I had emptied the house and I was starting the process of getting the estate settled. Because of the pandemic, my brother and I worked on alternating days getting everything done. I didn’t see him again until we worked with a realtor that summer. I communicated with my sister by Facebook. I was very disappointed, but not surprised at that point, that when it was all over she never said thanks or that she at least appreciated the hard work. She hasn’t communicated with my brother at all since the funeral. She used some of her share of the money and took her whole family to Disneyworld. I really doubt I will ever see her again.

I appreciated the help from my brother, though in honesty, he was really doing it for the money. I realized that when I saw how his eyes lit up when the realtor told us how much the offer for the house was. I was just relieved that it was finally done.

Christmas had always been a big deal for my mother and it all revolved around her. I had wondered in the past what would happen when she was gone. Of course, with the pandemic, that first Christmas without her couldn’t happen anyway. I do keep up with my nieces here in town and have seen them over the past two years. But this past Christmas, my sister-in-law decided that she didn’t want to celebrate anymore. And she and my brother have become even more Trumpist, which was something I put up with when my mother was alive just to keep the peace. So the idea of seeing them isn’t that appealing anyway, even without the pandemic. I do send birthday messages so I keep some communication alive. At least I have my nieces.

So after all that, yes, I think there was something wrong with my family. I’ve wondered if we were just unconsciously pretending all those years that we cared about each other. I honestly thought we did and never, ever thought this would be the result. And I’ve thought about how my mother always talked about us staying close and yet she planted the seeds that broke us by constantly complaining to my sister about how she thought she was being mistreated. And I don’t think she even realized what she was doing. She didn’t have that much self-awareness. For instance, she left letters for my brother and sister, apparently about being good parents. Yet, she didn’t leave any kind of letter for me. For someone who thought she was the best mom in the world, that’s kind of weird. I don’t think she ever considered how that would look. Maybe the whole happy family thing was a lie and what I thought was closeness was just obligation. I don’t know. I’m just very lucky that I have friends that I consider family.

13

Thanks for that thoughtful (and painful) post. :people_hugging:

14

On my side of the family there wasn’t going to be a transition. My grandmother was the matriarch, she and my grandfather arrived here from then Ukraine, now Poland, around 1920. She spent the next few years scrimping and saving to bring her brother and sisters over too. She was a strong tough woman and everyone knew she was the matriarch the whole time. My mother and only aunt were not her daughters and not interested in following in her footsteps. Maybe different if they’d all been nicer to each other.

I have a cousin now considered the patriarch as the oldest living relative in this small family. After him it’s my older brother, then me. Apparently the family already decided they’d skip past my older brother. They can skip me too. Little bro is better at that kind of thing anyway.

Now in my wife’s family it’s her. It has been that way since her mother passed away long ago. She was the oldest of three sisters and a brother, and she has had virtually no contact with her father’s side after his passing even longer ago. She has nieces but that part of the family is already fractured and when she is gone that may be it.