A need to take sides and look for blame is another problem because we all want to know who’s responsible. A girl coming out of a divorced home is sometimes torn, because she loves her dad, and she loves her mom, and [gets] caught in the middle.   

What can really impact a daughter is remarriage. Her position in the family changes.  She might have been the firstborn; she had her own room, maybe even her own room at dad’s house and her own room at mom’s. Now she’s the third born, and she has a couple older siblings that she never wanted, and she’s sharing a room, so she feels like a displaced person. That can sour her attitude towards marriage.   

CW:  You write about two other types of fatherless daughters.  There’s the case of a father’s death, which usually cannot be helped, and then there is what you talk about as “ambiguous loss.”  Could you please touch on those two types?   

HNW:  The father’s death really disrupts the situation because, whether it is a girl or a boy, most children are not taught how to grieve.  In fact, they are called the forgotten grievers … because the mother gets all the attention. 

The younger you are, the less ability you have to grieve. You don’t have the capability intellectually to process everything, so you grieve again the death of your father in different developmental stages. Every time there is something significant, [she] thinks, Gee, I wish Dad was here.  So, one of the things that we try to do is to teach parents how to help their children go through that grieving process.   

The ambiguous loss is a difficult one no matter who it is because there are two different types. One is where dad is gone from the home physically.  He is out there somewhere. [But] they don’t know where dad is. One of the students in my graduate class was telling me that her father left, I think … she was probably about 12 or 14 at that time.  He left and became a homeless person.  Even today, she will drive into the worst sections of the city every now and then just looking for a glimpse of her father. They could be off to war.  They could be missing in action, but they are still alive within you emotionally and psychologically, and you still can’t really grieve over that loss.   

Another ambiguous loss is when a father is still in the house, but he is gone emotionally and physically.  He could have had an injury, and it’s just his body that is there, or he could be into drug use or alcohol use. We have a lot of “father bodies” in the home, but there is no emotional connection. He brings home the paycheck. He doesn’t connect, and it’s like, yeah, he’s there, but he’s not.