Motherless Daughters

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

“Absorbing . . . insightful . . . a moving and valuable treatment of a neglected subject.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“A moving, comprehensive and insightful look at the lifelong ramifications of the loss of a mother.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Beautifully written.”

—
USA Today

 

“Groundbreaking . . . Brutally honest, exhaustively researched . . . exploring the myriad issues that motherless daughters face in their daily lives.”

—
The Atlanta Journal & Constitution

 

“A beautiful book, wonderfully written and gently crafted . . . Enlightening.”

—
The San Diego Union-Tribune

 

“An important book. One that will help so many people.”

—
New York Newsday

 

“A wealth of anecdotal evidence, supplemented with psychological research about bereavement. . . . Succeeds in opening up cathartic dialogues, personalizing a life-changing event and offering guidelines to help women of any age live with their loss.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“Comforting . . . Painful but reassuring.”

“A beautiful book, wonderfully written and gently crafted . . . enlightening.”—
San Diego Union-Tribune

 

“Fascinating . . . truly groundbreaking. . . . She writes quite convincingly about the grief of children and coping mechanisms of adults who had to cope with too much too soon.”

—
Deseret News
(Salt Lake City)

 

“Offers hope. . . . A cathartic book.”

—
Toledo Blade

 

“Insight into why motherless daughters feel the loss throughout life.”

—
Library Journal

 

“Edelman’s book is different. . . . A complete picture of the resounding effects mother loss has on a woman’s life.”

—
Asbury Park Press

Letters from Motherless Daughters:
Words of Courage, Grief, and Healing

 

Mother of My Mother:
The Intricate Bond Between Generations

 

Motherless Mothers:
How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become

It is the image in the mind that links us to our lost treasures; but it is the loss that shapes the image, gathers the flowers, weaves the garland.

—Colette,
My Mother’s House

Dear Hope,

 

I’m sitting here alone on Mother’s Day. I am twenty-three years old. My mother died almost ten years ago—I was thirteen.

There is an emptiness inside of me—a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother’s love. And I will never be loved that way again.

I feel as though my development as a woman was irreversibly damaged/altered. I’ve always (since then) had male friends. I feel I can only relate to males and I think I’m a very masculine woman—not my overt appearance—but I never learned how to socialize, how to engage in meaningless chit-chat, how to talk on the phone for hours. And now, as men do, I “look down” on that type of behavior.

And there are all of the selfish reasons I miss my mother: I will have no one to help me plan my wedding (I don’t even know where to begin, I’ll have to find a book about it), no one to stay with me after my first child is born. The list goes on and on.

There’s nothing I want more in the world than to have children, but I don’t know if it would be fair to her if I had a daughter. There are so many things about being a woman, a daughter, and a mother that I don’t know and can’t see any way for me to learn. Plus, I feel like I’ll probably die when I’m thirty-nine and leave my children to suffer the pain and confusion that I have.

St. Paul, Minnesota

Dear Ms. Edelman,

 

Do you ever get over it? Do you ever get on with your life? Yes, you do get on with your life, but it is always a part of your life. And it does affect everything you do. Does it ever get easier to talk about her? No it does not. But what amazes me now is how other people never talked about my mother to me, even when I did not. Did they think that we forgot her? I could talk about other people I cared for who died years later, but subconsciously I suppressed any thoughts I had of my mother’s death and tried to bury the pain. As you approach the age your mother was at the time of her death, you are acutely aware of your own mortality. Through the happy times and through the difficult times, I am always painfully aware of not having her to share it with; and the awful fact of never knowing her as an adult, only as a child; never able to relate to her intellectually on an equal level.

My brother was married last summer, and for the first time I felt like I had found my family again. I have a picture on my office desk of the four of us. It is bittersweet, but I realize how lucky I am to have them.

 

Woodside, New York

 

 

Dear Hope,

 

Twenty years ago my mother died when I was 14 and even now, after this ocean of time has passed, tears spring to my eyes in a moment when I remember her and the loss. So much of what you wrote rang true for me and I’m glad for that. I’ve felt guilty about the unhealed wound I carry, but the emptiness is real. The sense that I am alone, that death is inevitable, that I feel insecure in my mothering, that I still search for her in so many ways and faces; these tell me the loss is real.

I have reflected on the loss of my mother and tried to distance myself somewhat from the grief by trying to gauge its effect on my life as objectively as possible. This is effective when I am in my
conscious self, but like most of us, a good deal of my time is spent in unconscious thought and choice, and there the grieving fourteen-year-old reigns.

Being a mother myself has been the most difficult area in which the loss has affected me. The desire to remain the child in relationships, even parent-child, is a struggle to overcome. How does a mother act, anyway? How do I give a wealth of love when I feel empty in the place where a mother’s love grows? How do I help my daughters feel good about their femininity, sexuality and womanhood when my mother died before I could learn these things from her? How do I convince my three daughters that I will always be here for them, that I won’t die before they’re ready, or ever, as they would wish? I know it wasn’t true for me . . .

Lakewood, Ohio

 

 

Dear Ms. Edelman,

I lost my mother to cancer when I was twenty-five years old. She was diagnosed in April and died in July. Nothing prepared me for the pain or the depth of the loss. Every thing you said about a lifetime of grieving is true. And everything you said about being mentally strong because there is no mother to help you, is also true.

I am 38 years old now and although the pain is no longer present every minute of every day, somewhere in the back of my mind is always a sense of missing her and needing her. Sometimes still, that sense of loss won’t stay in the back of my mind and comes forward with such intense pain that I don’t know that I will be able to bear it.

I truly believe that the death of my mother has made me what I am today. I am a survivor, mentally strong, determined, strongwilled, self-reliant, and independent. I also keep most of my pain, anger and feelings inside. I refuse to be vulnerable to anyone, especially my husband. The only people who see that more emotional or softer side are my children. That too is because of my mother.

Bulverde, Texas

Dear Ms. Edelman,

 

My mother, age forty-nine, died when I was fifteen years of age and that nameless, elusive and simply terrible feeling of hopelessness has been with me since. Even after twenty-five years of “living with my loss,” there is a general, chronic melancholy that has been inexplicable to me, much less anyone else.

You clearly define what happened to me when my mother died. My father had a nervous breakdown almost immediately after her death, was institutionalized for a year, and never quite recovered. My brother grieved for a while and seemed to go on with living. It tortured me so to think that I couldn’t get over it; couldn’t seem to move on. I used to think there was something terribly wrong with me and this loss was visited upon me by some wretched twist of fate just to make me suffer. Photographs taken subsequent to my mother’s death reflect an unsmiling sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old girl.