Motherless Daughters Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY HOPE EDELMAN

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  I - Loss

  Chapter One - The Seasons of Grieving Mourning Takes Time

  Ready or Not, Here It Comes

  To Feel or Not to Feel

  Here It Comes Again

  The Resolution Hoax

  Chapter Two - Times of Change Developmental Stages of a Daughter’s Life

  Early Childhood (Age Six and Younger)

  Late Childhood (Six to Twelve)

  Adolescence (Teen Years)

  Young Adults (The Twenties)

  The Later Years

  Chapter Three - Cause and Effect No Way Is the Best Way

  Long-term Illness

  Sudden Deaths

  Abandonment

  Chapter Four - Later Loss Learning How to Let Go

  Predicting the Future: Negative Projection

  Loss of the Second Parent

  II - Loss

  Chapter Five - Daddy’s Little Girl The Father-Daughter Dyad

  Four Types of Fathers

  Daddy’s Other Girl

  The Incest Taboo

  Beyond Resentment and Past Blame

  Chapter Six - Sister and Brother, Sister and Sister Sibling Connections (and Disconnections)

  Minimothers and Their Instant Kids

  Birth Order

  Your Reality or Mine?

  Chapter Seven - Looking for Love Intimate Relationships

  The Anxious-Ambivalent Daughter

  The Avoidant Daughter

  The Secure Daughter

  Women with Women

  Love Substitutes

  Chapter Eight - When a Woman Needs a Woman Gender Matters

  III - Growth

  Chapter Nine - Who She Was, Who I Am Developing an Independent Identity

  Chapter Ten - Mortal Lessons Life, Death, Sickness, Health

  Chapter Eleven - The Daughter Becomes a Mother Extending the Line

  Fear and Desire

  Annie: Moving Beyond the Mother

  Pregnancy and Birth

  Alice: Extending the Maternal Line

  Raising Children

  Emma: Breaking the Chain

  Chapter Twelve - The Female Phoenix Creativity, Achievement, and Success

  The Roots of a Motherless Woman’s Success

  Overcoming Survivor Guilt

  Epilogue

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Praise for MOTHERLESS DAUGHTERS, the phenomenal New York Times bestseller

  “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.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “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

  ALSO BY HOPE EDELMAN

  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

  For my parents

  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.

  Losing my mother has affected my life drastically. Yes, it molded me into a “tough” woman who could, seemingly, handle anything that was tossed her way. It also destroyed almost entirely my ability to trust. It has returned to haunt me when I sustained further losses of loved ones through death, divorce, rejection.

  Thank you so very much for writing about mother loss.

  San Antonio, Texas

  Acknowledgments

  Over the past twelve years, so many people have been instrumental in getting this book on the shelves and keeping it there: Elizabeth Kaplan, my agent; Carl Klaus and Mary Swander, my early mentors; Elizabeth Perle, my first editor; Jackie Cantor, the book’s paperback editor; Marnie Cochran, its current editor; and the sales, marketing, and publicity departments at Addison-Wesley, Dell, and Da Capo. You’ve helped hundreds of thousands of women find a framework for their experiences.

  The Motherless Daughters groups currently operating around the country have worked toward this end as well. Cami Black, Casey Enda, Laurie Lucas, MaryAnn McCourt, Vicki Waldron, Day Cummings, Ruta Grigola, Dawn Klancic, Linda Mills, Colleen Russell, and Irene Rubaum-Keller deserve special notice, as do the ninety-nine women who volunteered their time and their stories for inclusion in this book.

  The work of Phyllis Silverman, J. William Worden, Maxine Harris, Laura Munts at Mommy’s Light Lives On, and everyone at the Dougy Center in Portland, Oregon, continually guided and inspired my writing. Many thanks to all of you for your generosity and your research.

  Ten years ago, a woman stood outside the Today show studio in Rockefeller Center with a handmade sign that read, “Thank you, Hope.” I handed her a brochure about support groups in New York City. She turned into one of the most dedicated volunteers the children’s bereavement community has ever known, a valued resource, and a trusted friend. She also did a stellar job as the research assistant for this book. Michele Cofield, stand up and take your bow.

  Thirty years ago, an Archie comic book pen-pal service matched me with a girl my age in Minnesota. We wrote letters almost every week for eight years, through my mother’s death from cancer and then, unpredictably, through her mother’s death two years later as well. For many years, she was the only other motherless girl I spoke with about my loss. Sylvia, where ever you now are, please know how important your friendship was to me at a time when I needed it most.

  My siblings were always staunch supporters of this book, even when my version of events differed from theirs. My father died before this new edition was completed; he would have been proud to know the book has such a life of its own. And my mother, whose life and death gave me the inspiration to write and my first story to tell—she is the real heroine of this book.

  Finally, if not for a small and dedicated group of women in New York City in 1994, there would have been no Motherless Daughters organization; if not for the Motherless Daughters organization I never would have met my husband Uzi; if not for Uzi there would be no Maya or Eden, who each carry a portion of my mother’s name. Because of them, I believe in immortality. Through them, pieces of her live on.

  Introduction

  Twelve years ago, the first edition of Motherless Daughters was published. It was the final step in a long odyssey for me, the end result of years I’d spent searching for just such a book. I was seventeen when my mother died of breast cancer, no longer a child but not yet quite a woman. I was old enough to drive, however, and one of the first trips I took after the mourners dispersed was to a local library. I was a reader, and in lieu of a support group or teen-grief therapy, neither of which existed in my town in 1981, this was my best option for support. I needed information. I wanted to know how you were supposed to feel at seventeen when your mother had just died. I wanted clues for how to think about it. How to talk about it. What to say. I wanted to know if anything, ever, would make me feel happy again.

  I didn’t find that book, not that year, nor the next year, nor in any of my subsequent searches in bookstores and university libraries and computer databases in any of the next four states in which I lived. In every book I skimmed about mother-daughter relationships, the assumption was that a mother’s death occurred after a daughter had reached mid-life or beyond. I was seventeen, twenty, then twenty-four years old. These books weren’t speaking to me. The same was true for the academic texts I found, some of which discussed the short-term effects of early parent loss on children, but none of which talked specifically about daughters who’d lost mothers and how the loss affected them over time. I knew I had a specific set of difficulties, and a point of view that departed significantly from most of my friends’, but I couldn�
�t find anything written about this. The silence that descended upon my family after my mother died seemed echoed on the bookstore shelves. I had no idea that thousands of other girls like my sister and I were out there. In my mind, we’d gone through something so strange, so rare and aberrant, that it didn’t even merit inclusion on the page.

  Then, when I was a senior in college, my boyfriend clipped an Anna Quindlen column from the Chicago Tribune for me. “My mother died when I was nineteen,” Quindlen wrote. “For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: ‘Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes—I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.’” I read it four times on the el train on the way to my part-time job that afternoon, and carried it around in my wallet for years. Only later, much later, would I learn how many other motherless women around the country had saved that same syndicated column, and how many, like me, had felt as if someone had discovered a secret portal into their innermost thoughts.

  Losing my mother wasn’t just a fact about me. It was the core of my identity, my very state of being. Before writing the first edition of this book, I had no sense of how many other women felt the same way. The answer, as I soon learned, was a lot. Within two months of its initial publication, Motherless Daughters landed on the New York Times bestseller list. I hadn’t unlisted my phone number, and I’d come home at the end of the day to find long, heartfelt stories of mother loss left on my answering machine. I was living in New York City at the time, and about once a week the clerk at my local post office would hand me gray mailbags filled with envelopes—letters that readers had sent to the publisher, who had forwarded them on to me. “What kind of business are you running, woman?” she once asked me. “I want a piece of that.”