It never really hurts, except when you allow yourself to imagine: what if things had turned out differently? How would it have been if she’d lived, if she’d been lucky? You would have had a mother, which is to say that you’d be a different person entirely. You would be someone who could believe in the notion of luck as something within your reach; of yourself as a person who might be lucky, or blessed, or even just normal.
The normalcy is the thing that is robbed from you. You grow up feeling as though you wear your motherlessness on your skin; as though any stranger could pick it out at twenty paces. There’s something odd, maybe a little bit suspect, about a girl without a mother. Growing up as that girl is tough; you feel your hard luck every day of your life. You feel it in your heart, and in your lungs. You feel it as a heavy stone around your neck. You develop a frantic self-consciousness, underpinned by the fact of your motherlessness, which sets you unmistakably apart from the crowd. While other teenagers might feel like freaks, you know you are.
You glean bits and pieces from magazines, from television, from your friends and their mothers. How to be a woman; how to act around other women. Still, femininity seems somehow off limits to you, as though you were an imposter, not properly initiated. Your aunt sends makeup, nice underwear, and you are relieved: these are the real things, from someone who knows. You can never be sure of yourself. The thought of having your own daughter one day terrifies you: you are, quite certainly, not qualified for the job.
You grow up thinking of your mother as a saint, because that’s how everyone talks about her. You are in your twenties before it occurs to you that there must have been some bad things about her. Even the thought is foreign; it stretches the boundaries of what you can know. Instead of a flesh-and-blood woman, there is only this faint sense of perfection, departed. Kind and good-humoured until the end, and stoic in suffering. Et cetera. Sometimes you wonder how you could ever, ever live up to this, and you find yourself angry with your mother – angry with your dead mother! – tears pricking at your eyes. I think you must be very angry with her, says your therapist, and you cry all the way home from your appointment because someone has finally given you permission.
On the radio comes a question from a teenage girl about how she can keep a relationship with her mother who has died. This is the thing, you realize: you want a relationship. Not a one-sided flood of missing and wanting, of love and anger. Not this endless hammering against a locked door. But it’s impossible, isn’t it, trying to have a relationship with a memory, and such an incomplete one at that. You feel her absence so sharply sometimes, when you try to check yourself against someone who is gone. And yet: there are moments when she seems less than gone after all. You have her old watch repaired and start wearing it, and when you catch a glimpse of your wrist one day you feel a jolt of recognition, your brain lighting up with a memory you didn’t know was there. You sniff an old bottle of her perfume – this is surely Tragic Behaviour, but you can’t help yourself – and the sense of her is so sudden and immediate that you have to lean against the doorframe. You are so keenly aware, in these snatched moments, of her tantalizing almost-presence. Just on the other side of that curtain. It is as though you might be able to reach her, for a fraction of a second, if you cobbled together enough of the spare parts of her life.
You decide to get a tattoo on your arm: Athena, the Greek goddess. You’ve felt her as your alter ego since childhood. Why? your friends ask. You shrug, wondering how much to tell them, how far to go. Her motherlessness is the real reason, of course, but for now you just tell them that she is the goddess of wisdom. And of war.
As you get older, your peers also start to lose parents, here and there. At university, an acquaintance’s mother dies rapidly of a brain tumor; a few years later, a close friend’s father dies very suddenly. Which is to say: it is less strange, now, to have only one parent. You are less of an anomaly. No longer the girl with the dead mother, who was before that the girl with the sick mother. (She’d had cancer since you were three, which made it hard for you to believe that she had ever been healthy; had ever had a body like other mothers’ bodies.) But there is still a kind of verbal fudging, a reluctance to let other people find out during the course of casual conversation. “My mom.” Present or past tense? Past is honest, but invites questions: When did she die? I was eleven. Do you have siblings? No. So it’s just you and your dad then? Yes. Where does the rest of your family live? Far away.
The opposite is true on those rare occasions when you encounter other women who have lost their mothers. Girls like you, who have to walk through the world dodging every mention of mothers and daughters, who don’t know how to answer questions about “your parents.” A strange, sad club to be in. But how to describe it, that electric realization that floods though you when you find another one: she’s like me. The relief at not needing to be furtive, not needing to (eventually) have The Conversation, when the other person will tilt their head at you and sigh. When they will say, I’m so sorry. And you will shrug and look away, not knowing what to say, or how to meet their eyes.
There is a home video, made when you were about nine. You watch your nine-year-old self lead your aunt (behind the camera) off into the house, blithely walking past your mother as she sits on the couch. Stop, you want to tell the girl onscreen. Reach out and touch her!
Your aunt, a deeply spiritual person, suggests that you try to contact your mother through a medium. You think about it for weeks, look up mediums online, but eventually decide not to go. You believe in the afterlife – or at least, you believe it could be possible – but you have trouble making that the way you think about your mother. Besides, it seems sort of a cop-out: dead but not really! Her death is the thing, the dark kernel at the center of your life as you know it, as you have to live it. You have to go through it and not around it. You tell yourself this, but then you see pictures of a classmate’s wedding on Facebook and it strikes you that your mother will not be at your wedding, and she will not be there when you have your first baby; your whole life, in fact, will be day after day of her not being there, and it feels so impossibly unfair. To have ever had a mother at all: that seems like the mythical thing now, to think that you once held her hand and sat in the car with her and watched TV with her in the same room. It’s wild to you, literally incredible. You have trouble making yourself believe in it.
Then there are the older women, the replacement-mothers. You find yourself forming oddly intense attachments to them, throughout the years. But although they are kind and the illusion can be sustained for a moment, it’s cheap somehow, less than real. All these would-be mothers put together don’t add up to the real thing. Even so, you can’t help loving them in an embarrassingly fierce way; you hope they’ll find out about your mother’s death and fit the puzzle pieces together, but you also hope they won’t. Because then they would know that you embody something shameful: a person left wanting, a person who lacks. A person to be pitied.
The pity is what you fear and hate most of all. It’s a paradox: the deep grief you feel at your mother’s death, paired with the utter horror of having others reflect it back to you in their reaction. You know it isn’t personal – you know you must learn, in time, to accept sympathy with grace – but still you can’t think of anything worse. You don’t want other people to feel sorry for you, even if it’s justifiable. You don’t want them to undermine your courage, you who have been a goddess of war ever since you were a little girl. You want to wear your luck, your lot in life, with a kind of dignity: it’s hard, but also yours.
This is lovely, Joanna. I grew up without a mom, too — she died of aggressive breast cancer at age 32 when I was 5 — and my experience was so much like yours.
As a child, my motherlessness made me HUGEly different from other kids. Our family fell apart after her death, too, and we bounced around the country — I went to something like 14 different elementary schools — which was also a huge difference.
But something kind of magical happened as I grew older. I started seeing all the gifts that I got from my motherlessness and the chaos that ensued. Like, I had a lot more freedom than a lot of kids did. I could and did read literally all the time. Moving every couple of months forced me to come up with a defense strategy which was being super duper smart, and that has served me throughout my life.
Most of all, I got acquainted very early with the concept that life doesn’t owe me a thing. That sometimes you go to Disney World and sometimes your mom dies and that’s just how it is. So although life hurts me — as it always does — I find myself, I think, maybe a little less surprised when fucked-up shit happens. I beat myself up about it a little less than a lot of people do. I tend to not heap self-inflicted pain on top of life-inflicted pain the way I see a lot of other people doing.
These are all gifts. These are all treasures that I cobbled together from my crazy childhood. And I recognize that I was lucky to be born with the ability and the constitution that that was my response. My siblings had much different and more self-destructive responses, so I know there was a lot of luck involved.
Anyway … so many feelings. Thanks for sharing this.
Couple more things came up thinking about this piece, and how motherlessness has shaped me.
I think that maybe not having a mom around freed me up to define myself in a way that a lot of other girls don’t get to. Sure, I had a sexist culture all around me, like we all do, but I didn’t have an example of a woman hating herself in my day to day life the way a lot of girls do … I don’t have any mom-related drama the way a lot of women do … As an orphan, I am free in a way that many other people are not.
At the same time, I think my early experience has made me a little less compassionate towards people who have had mothers and who haven’t experienced major loss.
Like, I remember one time when I was in my 20s, I was at a spiritual workshop with a woman in her 60s whose mother had just died, and this 60 year old woman was like “Whyyyyy meeeeee?” and I didn’t say anything but I kind of hated her.
Because, seriously? What did you think was going to happen to your 80 year old mother? You got her for SIXTY WHOLE YEARS, so wtf are you complaining about?
And most of all, why NOT you? It gets us all at some point, and making it to age 60 without having experienced that kind of loss is a blessing that almost no one gets in this world.
Yeah. Not so compassionate sometimes. :/
About a year after my mom died I was not doing well in school. My ~40 y.o. aunt (and guardian) was asking me why and I said I was depressed. She asked why. I said, (shock!) because my mom was dead. She responded that her mom had died a few years earlier, and she was ok so…why wasn’t I getting all As.
She was awful, but that’s another essay.
Loss of a mother is always a big deal, even if the relationship wasn’t good, because of how important that relationship is/is supposed to be. But there’s a real feeling of unnaturalness when you’re so young. It’s an early induction into the reality of the world as it is, not as we’re taught it is.
Yup, there’s definitely a reason lots of children’s book protagonists are orphans — all the freedom!!!
Oh man, my only regret is that I have but one upvote to give. 😉
After losing my mom, I grasped for what my therapist calls “reclaiming the narrative,” like a drowning person going for air.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of the sacred wound? Essentially it is that our most painful, core wounding is also the source of our greatest gifts. I don’t just mean gifts like freedom from mom-related drama (though there is that ;-P ), but that things like profound empathy, emotional generosity, creativity, drive, etc are borne from it, if you let them.
After losing my mom, it felt like “real life” was so EASY that I found it pretty hard to relate to people. Why were people complaining about homework?! After this loss, what was there to be afraid of? Like Hannibal (the Catharginian, not Lecter, haha), I will either find a way, or make one.
So, definitely not so compassionate sometimes, too. I try to take keen notice when someone ticks me off; the little rage-flare is like a homing device to my most unhealed places.
Thank you for this beautiful reply. I kind of feel like we should be BFFs if you are open to that?
What you say about the sacred wound gets to the heart of something that I have always felt but never really articulated — losing my mom made me special. Not weird, not outcast, but *singular.*
And, yes, after my childhood? The other parts of life HAVE felt easy, in a way. I got my drama quotient as a child, and now I can relax and enjoy. After all that chaos and yelling and hitting and crying and aloneness, and also being powerless to change anything about it, adulthood — where I am the one thing in life I can control, at least — still feels like a beautiful dream, and I am 43.
Love your point about letting the rage-flares light the way to unhealed places. Gonna hafta think about that.
ETA: I often think about this comparative drama/trauma thing when I meet people from parts of the world where drama and trauma are even harder to escape than in the US.
Like, after running from an oppressive regime who tried to kill your family, probably it would be pretty hard to identify with homework stress. Or even possibly losing your mom but mostly still having enough to eat, places to sleep, etc. Perspective.
Ha. Yes about the not-so-compassionate part (me, I mean). One of the women in my PPD support group said she felt it had been triggered by her great-grandmother dying. This was someone who lived very close to her mother and grandmother, and had good relationships with both. Whereas I was an immigrant and have an abusive mother who’s been dead for over a decade, a highly toxic grandmother in another country with whom I’m not in contact for good reasons, and a vicious, batsh!t mother-in-law who wouldn’t visit because our (multiracial) newborn didn’t look enough like them for her taste, and a husband who was going through his own version of PPD and was not helpful. But my co-PPD-group member felt a “lack of support.” I know PPD is a beast, but I still hated her.
These are such great points, and ring so true. Thanks for your words.
Thank you for this.
My mom died when I was 15, after about a year with cancer. I’m 34 now, so it’s less of a major factor in my life, but in high school I can’t even quantify how much it made me feel like a freak. A tragic figure to be kept at a distance. And it made me want to keep a distance.
As an adult, it just comes up less often. And it’s less rare, to have lost a parent. But that one event created a sort of Alternate Universe me, and I can’t even imagine the person I would have been if she had recovered. Wholly different.
But she didn’t, and I am who I am, because of that fact. I don’t want to ever get married (her absence is a huge part of not wanting a wedding; loss of her is a huge part of my commitment-phobia). I don’t want children. I am very reluctant to let people in, and prefer the companionship of animals if given the choice.
Not having a mother as an adult isn’t as rare, but it’s sometimes harder. I don’t have much family left (just my dad, who is the most dad-like of dads and therefore pretty bad at honest communication). Having a mother would mean having someone to call and cry to about nonsense like the rude guy at the post office, or the condescending woman at work. Having someone who would always emotionally support you.
Not everyone’s mom was like that, I know. But mine was. So I have felt, without exception, alone and on my own for the last 19 years. It has made me incredibly tough and self sufficient, but it has also made me hard, and it is exhausting.
Yep. My Mom has been dead about as long as yours has and we also had a good relationship even when I was a teenager. Every so often, I have this strong feeling that there is someone I really want to call, someone I haven’t spoken to in a long time but those conversations are always restorative. It usually takes me a few minutes to figure out that I’m thinking of my Mom.
“… in high school I can’t even quantify how much it made me feel like a freak. A tragic figure to be kept at a distance. And it made me want to keep a distance.”
Totally agree. Thanks for your comment.
Hi Biblioholic,
It sounds like we had completely different mothers (mine told me every day that I was her “earthly punishment,” the worst thing that ever happened to her, would rather accept a used kleenex than a hug from her daughter) but your last sentence describes me to a T.
The aloneness, the toughness, the self-sufficiency. I have never truly let myself be vulnerable and depend on another person, but I wish I could. (It does provide a unique sense of perspective and humor: People will get down on the stereotype of “dwelling in their mom’s basement and mooching off homemade food,” whereas I will see that as aspirational and living the dream. ;-P )
I tried to change these things about myself but never could beyond a social facade. The weirdest part is that facade is enough to fool most people. My nickname was “Sunshine” and people expressed surprise that I was ever angry or upset. Pal, if you only knew!
Anyway, thank you for describing the experience so well. Peace–
PS: I think part of the “tragic figure” stuff, for me at least, was that it almost felt like tragedy was somehow *contagious*. Like if it happened to me, it could happen to them and that was something no one wanted to think about. I mean, I get it. But still.
How beautiful and how heartwrenching. Thank you.
I come from an all-woman family for several generation on my mother’s side. My mom is in her eighties and I’m still scared of losing her. This essay was beautifully detailed in a way that gave me a glimpse into your feelings. I appreciate that. And I do think the mother-daughter relationship is an intense one, and that early mother loss is a uniquely difficult experience.
My husband lost his mother at age seven. It’s interesting to me that when I first met him at 21, he felt very burdened by the loss. Now, well into our 50s, he sees his childhood as largely positive, but he has lost his memories of his mother almost entirely. I’m not sure what to make of that or if I should make anything of it. But we only had one child. A daughter. He was adamant that he liked having a daughter, and I think it was in part because his mother had wanted one.
My son-in-law lost his mother at 22. She really was, honestly, a lovely woman. There really aren’t any really bad things to say about her. Maybe your mom really was that wonderful kind of person. Having said this, I do not think my son-in-law is over the loss. And it has been 10 years. I think he feels very much like what you describe in the last paragraph.
Thank you for this essay. It might help me help my son-in-law a bit.
Nobody “gets over” the loss of a mother or father, if that person was present and loving in their lives. The loss just becomes a part of them, which they integrate as they keep going in life. They go on but they don’t “get over” it. “Get over it” implies that the loss stops mattering, or goes away, and how could that be possible in a case of deep, constitutive love?
I know you were just using a phrase that is commonplace in our culture and probably didn’t mean anything particular by it, but it can be such a destructive phrase when used in relation to the death of an immediate relative. Please don’t use it anymore around people who have lost parents (or have lost children).
Now I’m crying. This was beautifully written.
The scary thing about having daughters is being this person for them. It’s kind of typical online to be either flippant about being a mom, or mawkishly sentimental, depending on the venue, but stepping back and realizing that you’re someone who will leave a mother-sized hole in someone’s life if you die kind of strips all that away. Drawing up guardianship papers in case of the worst made me nearly physically ill. (I’m sure I’m not alone in that.)
I was the same way drawing up a will and setting guardianship.
Now please excuse me while I drive sobbing to my sitter’s and hug my daughter.
Yes yes yes. The idea of leaving my baby girl motherless is terrifying. We haven’t yet drawn up guardianship/will documents yet, which is bad, but it’s so incredibly hard to contemplate. On some level perhaps I feel like it’s somehow giving consent to the possibility of abandoning her.
ETA: I hope it’s clear that I am not remotely suggesting that dying is, in fact, abandoning one’s child, or that orphaned children were abandoned by their parents!! That would be grotesque. But my lizard brain seems to want to convict me of being a bad mother even in the event of my (hypothetical, god willing) premature death.
I know just what you mean and I think you were clear. The instinct is to deny the very possibility.
Agreed. This was so beautiful, and, as the mother of a daughter, so very hard to read.
I haven’t quite internalized that I’m the mother to a daughter yet, and the words in your comment keep dancing around so I’m not paralyzed by them.
I still miss my mom even though she’s been gone over 20 years. I don’t think we ever stop missing those people who were important to us.
This is beautifully written. This is sometimes exactly how I have felt.
It means a lot to hear that, thank you!
Thank you so much for this. My mother is motherless and I’m grateful for your insight into this experience so I can understand her better. Her motherlessness has been such a factor in our relationship and I’m just coming to terms with it.
Yes, this is interesting – I often wonder how my own children will view the fact of my motherlessness. I don’t know anyone else who can shed light onto this, but it’s a whole other layer for sure.
I’ve had a wonderful friendship with my mother my whole life. Not ideal by any means but satisfying and essential. I will miss her every day of my life if and when she dies before me. Reading this made me cry tears of gratitude and sympathy.
Thank you for this beautiful and moving piece. I still have my mother, but I lost my father in a car wreck when I was eight. I wish I had the chops to write the “bookend” to yours about growing up without one’s mother. Growing up without a father in American society has left a similar hole in my psyche and in my heart that I still grapple with every day. And I am now sixty-one.
Oh, definitely write it! I would love to read it. Writing this was scary and confronting because it’s so personal, but reading all the great comments has made me realize there was nothing to be afraid of.
This was so beautiful, thank you for writing this.
thank you <3
Today is the 7th anniversary of my mother’s death and this piece is just what I needed. In many ways, I feel like my relationship with her got stronger after she died, since she was never really able to mother me in the ways that I needed when I was growing up. There’s a grace in being able to grieve and forgive.
So glad you found something in the piece. Thanks for your comment.
This is a really beautiful piece, and I identify with so much of it. Thank you for your words.
I’m curious if there are others who feel kindred with the motherless, but not because of a mother’s death. I am estranged from my own mother, but it’s not so much angry estrangement as a truly strange separation that comes from my own need for boundaries and her issues with substance abuse, mental illness, etc. I function as if she is dead, for the most part, and I feel that in some ways the mother I spent the first years of my life with is actually dead.
This piece touches on the feeling I have when I just honestly don’t know how to talk about her/our relationship (or lack thereof). It’s this huge thing that feels so personal and so shameful, even still, that it’s hard to tell others. I wonder if I’m making the right choices by not talking to her, or if it’s unfair for me to feel like I belong to this motherless club.
Anyone else out there relate?
–It’s this huge thing that feels so personal and so shameful, even still, that it’s hard to tell others.
Yes, this exactly. My relationship with my mom was never “normal,” and I always struggled when I had to justify my choice to cut her out of much of my life. Before she died, I didn’t have the tools or the language to explain to other family members that simply being around her was unhealthy for me, since she had serious mental health issues. After she died, and through my acceptance of my own mental health issues, I think I have more empathy for her, but it still doesn’t make it feel any better or make it any less worse how she treated me.
I know what you mean when you say that you function as if she is dead. And I think it’s ok for you to feel the feelings of being motherless, even though she’s still alive. Not that you need my permission, but sometimes it helps to be invited to the club. Hugs.
– “it helps to be invited to the club.” Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for your words here, and much peace to you in your own journey.
YES, I do I do!!!! Thank you ladyraptorclaws for posting your comment- I was hesitant to say anything because I was afraid of seeming like I was imposing on someone else’s conversation…
I read this beautifully written piece for that exact reason. I’m 33 and have not seen mother since i was 13. Cutting off communication with children for religious reasons being okay in her world.
It feels shameful because it is it’s own kind of death and limbo at the same time. But I feel like I can’t tell people that because I think they will they “Well at least there is a chance you can still talk to your mother so you don’t deserve to grieve.” But there is a loss…
Recently, I talked with a friend who had just lost her father. We were talking about parents and she asked about mine. When I very briefly (and full of shame) explained the situation, she was very empathetic and said it’s hard in it’s own way because there is no closure. I was grateful to her for those words.
Like ladyraptorclaws, I have had to function like she is dead. I’m just now processing all of this and the impact it has had on my relationships or lack there of. I realize I have been denying the grief associated with this for 20 years and this year I am determine to start the process of healing. I can’t go backwards in time and fix anything but I can learn to live my life fully with that mom-sized hole as being part of me. I’ve been reading the book “Death benefits : how losing a parent can change an adult’s life– for the better” to help with this.
Yes – I so much resonate with denying the grief and how much that changes how we do life on the day-to-day. I’m so glad you are actively beginning the process of healing, and am sending you all good thoughts and hopes that you will encounter joy and purpose even if you have to go through some heartache.
Yes, I think I feel similarly. My mother was abusive and we now have minimal contact. Our relationship was never that of a mother and child – I spent more time managing her emotions and caring for my siblings than being cared for myself.
A friend of mine lost her mother at a young age, and our similar (but also vastly different) experiences bind us together. There is a quiet understanding of shared grief for what we don’t have. We have spoken to each other about our similar emotional responses to mutual friends who have close relationships with their mothers – our twinges of sadness and longing.
I know that my friend does not judge me for sometimes wishing my mother were gone or even dead. She knows that I do not judge her for sometimes envying those who still have mothers. We know that we are not making light of each other’s situations, because we do not wish for what the other has gone through: I do not wish for the death of a good (or even decent) parent; she does not envy having an abusive (but alive) one.
It is so strange to try to talk about having/not having a mother, to try to specify what is meant by “my parents” (my mother and father? just my father? my father and my newish step-mother?) depending on context and time of life. How do we even clarify without dipping into topics that are far too personal, as I once did with my boss? It’s really, really difficult to navigate.
That image of you with your friend and finding that neither of you judges/envies the other’s position is so powerful. I hope you (and everyone on this thread) gets to have more of those moments of being known and seen well.
And yes, on the “my parents” question…. oof. I still struggle with this too. I mostly take the tack of identifying clearly who I’m talking about and don’t mention the others, even if it feels like that silence is inherently pointed. I feel for you, and hope that you’ll find a way to speak truth without crossing your necessary boundaries.
Thank you for bringing this up. I also function as though my mother were dead. Most days I ignore the psychological repercussions of this. She’s not dead; she’s probably simply at home watching whatever replaced Oprah; yet she harmed me irrevocably in ways I won’t describe here on a public blog. I don’t know how to talk about it anywhere. It’s certainly not the same as what this piece so beautifully describes, but it’s somewhere.
“It’s somewhere.” Yes, it is. It took me a long, long time to speak to anyone about this part of my story. I still don’t talk about it much, but it’s good to have a therapist and a few friends who I’ve given this story to. If you haven’t gone to a therapist, citystillbreath, I hope you’ll consider it? I don’t know your story so I want to be careful, but I feel deeply for you when you say you can’t talk about it anywhere and wonder if therapy/talking to a spiritual advisor/someone trusted might help. Peace to you on your journey.
Thank you very, very much for this comment and your original one too. Peace to you as well.
I’m a survivor of CSA and I can relate – not so much to the missing mother part but to the feeling like a freak. I read this whole piece thinking that parts of this really fit with my experience as a survivor. Especially the feeling alone. And the amazing connection of discovering other people with any kind of childhood trauma – other children of the secret.
Your phrase – “children of the secret” – is haunting. And powerful, and true. I’m just going to sit with that for a bit… Much strength, peace, and connection to you in your journey, cleo.
Thank you!
I got “children of the secret” from Charles deLint, I believe – although I don’t remember which book. It’s a phrase that’s stayed with me for years.
Children of the secret. Wow.
Hi LadyRaptorClaws,
I hope it’s okay to reply to this, as your comment really resonated with me. My mom was someone who should have never, EVER had kids, or even pets.
Then when I was a teen she died (cancer; my dad, earlier, a brain tumor). My first feeling was *relief*, which I could never say in public because people IRL didn’t know what she was like behind closed doors. :-/
The shame of the truth, the longing for a mom who will not abuse you, the loss… it’s IMMENSE. The worst part has been the part I can’t talk about:
In so many ways, her death set me free. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reconcile all the feelings within me.
Growing up, I had been the quietest, most scared mouse you can imagine. Raising my hand in class — speaking out loud– put knots in my stomach. But after she was gone… it was this very strange emotional landscape. There was nothing to be afraid of, which was so (this word sounds INCREDIBLY wrong), exhilarating.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that my thoughts are with you. I don’t know if this is any help, but going forward my mode has been this:
What choices would I make if I had a beloved daughter who I loved with every breath, and this was happening to her? Then the answers come very clearly. Peace to you–
Yes, relief, and yes, shame! In my case, I was already a young adult living far away, but my dying mother gathered her friends to her a few days before she died and told them she would die any time, and that I’d been told (I hadn’t) but refused to come and see her, but that she’d protected my (golden child) sister from the truth and that her friends should treat me as they saw fit but look out for and comfort my poor sister. So in the days leading up to the memorial service, I got to wonder why fifty or so people were cuddling my sister and glaring at and shunning me. I felt numb and strange and kept feeling frantically like I should pretend to cry so someone would talk to me and hating myself for it, though I didn’t do that. And the times I broke down and DID cry, they all reacted with contempt, maybe because they assumed I was faking it. It was…a weird time.
This was beautifully written. As someone who is digging deep into grief literature after unexpectedly losing my dad a month ago, these words sunk in, and also made me dissolve into a puddle of tears.
But it also made me consider my much younger cousin who lost her mom when she was eight and since then I have wondered when she will come around to thinking all of these thoughts and how it will play out in her 20s, she also lost her dad at age 10. I want to wrap her in a protective shroud and tell her how amazing and brave she is every day without it seeming like a pity party. She’s now 14 and one hundred percent my hero, and I hope one day we’ll be able to talk about the loss of parents in a way that is as open and honest as this piece of writing. Thank you.
Thank for the piece, Joanna, and thank everyone for the comments. Being motherless is a lifelong experience, and it’s so hard to talk about honestly. People can be so gobsmacked by pity (“You were only eleven?”) that I can want to veer away from more details. But a lot of who I am comes from being mothered by her for eleven years, and a lot of who I am comes from having to swim without her for another forty and counting… And it’s all an amazing story.
That’s such a great way of putting it!
Oh gosh I feel parts of this so hard, especially the part about every day being a day that your parent isn’t there. Both of mine are gone, and I’m in high school, and it sucks. I just started high school for the first time a couple of weeks ago (an illness kept me away for the first few months), and I have no one to tell about it or to help me with my homework. When I got really sick for the first time, I had to go to the emergency room alone. I stayed with a friend’s family for a while, and it was just so weird to me to see the relationship between Friend and Friend’s Mother. They did things like go to the library together, and the mother helped my friend with their homework, and my friend showed their mother drawings that they did, and their mother went to Friend’s school to yell at teachers when they were being unpleasant to my friend. I’ve never had that and it’s just so weird to me–the jealousy was killing me, but I also loved living there because I got to at least see it, even though I couldn’t ever have it. Also the bit about weddings–I like thinking about my wedding a lot, and it troubles me that whoever I marry will probably have family invited–parents at least, and maybe siblings or cousins or piblings or grandparents or whoever. I won’t have any family to invite.
I never know what to tell my classmates when they ask about why I live alone. Usually I have to admit I’m an orphan and then leave the conversation, which as lost dodges any details, but is still an uncomfortable conversation to have.
You sound like someone who should hang out on the Toast more often. We’ll listen.
I could relate to so much in your comment! Agree with the poster above – hang out on the Toast by all means. And as others have mentioned in the comments, tragic life events like these are traumatic, but they do shape you in a really important way. It might be cold comfort, but you’ll never be in danger of having an ‘average’ life – which can be both a good and a bad thing.
This was so beautiful. My mother committed suicide when I was 13, which increased the anger, the difficulty of explaining, the guilt, and the suddenness. This essay has left me in a puddle of tears, but thank you it helped to express a lot of my own feelings. The bit about the replacement or surrogate mothers was particularly reflective of my own experience. My father is abusive, so throughout my teen years I latched on to anyone who was slightly motherly. I still face the awkwardness of explaining my circumstances, particularly since my relationship with my father is a mess. It has gotten easier with time, but it’s a pain that never fully goes away. I am not sure I would want it to go away, as now that I am no longer angry, it feels like a more pure pain than day-to-day negative emotions.
Oh wow, thank you so much.
“A strange, sad club to be in.”
I can so relate to this. I lost my Mom to cancer when I was in high school. Finding other motherless children is like discovering a bunch of cousins I didn’t know I had but who resemble me so much the relationship is undeniable.
I feel like there was something in almost every one of your sentences that describes my experience exactly! It was so hard being in my early and mid-twenties and watching my close friends develop adult relationships with their Moms. I knew she was going to miss my graduations and wedding and kids, but that was something I didn’t even know I had lost.
And the idea that there is something essential about being a woman that moms pass along to their daughters is definitely one that I’ve had. Never mind that my Mom had possibly the worst fashion sense of anyone I’ve ever known, rarely wore makeup, and wasn’t very girly herself. I hear my girlfriends talking about shopping or other female things and I wonder what I’ve missed out on.
I’m in my late 30s now and it’s been a little more than 20 years since she died. For a while, it was my defining thing. You wanted to know who I was, why I was that person? All you had to know was that my Mom died. I’ve developed additional identities as I grew older and had other experiences — and most days those identities are at the forefront. But being a motherless child is always at the base.
I feel like I could go on writing my own “me too!” to practically everything you wrote, so I’ll stop here. I’m sorry you’re in this club with me, not out of pity but because the Dead Parent Club is a shitty club to belong to. I think our moms would be proud of who we became.
It means a lot to hear this. Feelings like these can be so isolating, but comments like yours have really made me so glad I wrote the piece!
My experience is not the same–it was my father who died–but this: “to think that you once held her hand and sat in the car with her and watched TV with her in the same room. It’s wild to you, literally incredible. You have trouble making yourself believe in it” resonates so, so much (just with genders reversed). My father died when I was eight, and my memories of him all seem like a sort of dream, or a hazy recollection of a past life. It’s strange to think the girl in those memories was actually me.
Thank you for this. It was truly beautiful.
Thank you for reading. I really appreciate your comment!
One last thing. The book “Motherless Daughters” by Hope Edelman helped me immensely when my mother died. It’s a very comprehensive book, and well-researched. Here’s the Goodreads link:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/132810.Motherl…
And she has a website: http://hopeedelman.com/
You beat me to it. I cannot tell you how powerful that book was for me.
Oh yes, I’ve read that! Actually in a remarkable piece of luck, I found it in a box of books that someone had left on the curb. Maybe it was meant to be 🙂 I devoured it; it was almost a visceral relief to read something so relatable.
UGH when this book came into my life (about seven years after my mom died), I read it with my jaw on the floor, so shocked that so many of the experiences I’d felt alone in were actually VERY COMMON amongst young women who lost their mothers.
Thank you for this beautiful piece, Joanna. My mother’s sudden death (heart attack) when she was 40 and I was 18 shaped everything about me as an adult. I’m an only child and in my mid-50s now, and it is still the most important thing in understanding myself. The loss is always there.
“It is still the most important thing about understanding myself.”
This. Yes. Definitely. Thank you for your comment!
Thank you for writing this. I am newly motherless–Mom died in 2014 after what felt like the shortest bout of cancer ever, when I was 28. I try to be grateful that I had her for so long, but it amazes me how much my desire to get married one day or have children was linked to her, to how much it would have made her happy. (Having a kid sometimes does appeal: what if they reminded me of her? Isn’t that a thing people say happens? Is it grotesque to think about it ahead of time?) I don’t know who I would have been without her, but I also don’t know who I would have been if she had stayed longer. I have an awful, estranged father and no siblings, and she was everything to me; we were closer than I know how to explain. It’s weird to me that my partner, whom I deeply love, never met her–never knew me before I was a motherless girl. I guess it’s the same me, but it doesn’t feel continuous.
One of the last things my mom said to me, on the day that they ended up putting her on the ventilator (she lingered on for a few more days), was that she didn’t want to leave me. (I told her to shut up, like the charming girl I am. I was still hoping for a late-innings miracle.) I hate to remember her voice when she said it, which was so miserable and helpless, but it still sometimes comforts me to know that she didn’t give up, that she wanted to stay with me.
Thank you so much, and I’m really sorry for your loss. My partner also never knew my mother and it is sometimes a real mindfuck. Your point about the ‘self’ not feeling continuous before and after your mom’s death describes it perfectly.
Thank you for writing this. My mother died of breast cancer when I was 14; she was only 38. I’m 42 now, older than she ever got to be, and I have 2 daughters of my own, and I wish every day that she could have known them.
Thank you for this.
Very moving piece, Joanna.
It was interesting to me, because although my mother is still alive, I don’t have a mother, either, and never really have. It’s a complicated story and a whole complicated thing, but basically, my mom is an emotional abuser and my sister and I learned from early childhood to just keep her at arm’s length, because if you let her get any closer than that, she will just chew up your heart for the fun of doing it.
So, growing up as I did, and continuing to live as an adult with a mother like mine, I’ve always been very interested in people who actually loved their mothers and felt loved by them… or who feel their absence from their lives as a distinctly negative thing, even a handicap, as you expressed. The whole concept is so foreign to me. It fascinates me, that so many people have had worthy mothers and mourn them when they die. I won’t have an opportunity to have another mother; a parent relationship isn’t like a friend relationship or a romantic relationship, where there are endless possibilities for more relationships of that kind. So actually loving a mother and being loved by one is something I’ll never experience, even with a living mother out there walking around, doing her best to trash other people’s souls.
Anyway. Enough about my dumb life. Your piece really made me think and feel. It’s a good one.
Wow, thanks so much – that’s a really interesting perspective, and one I’ve been lucky enough to never have to consider before. I’m glad you found something in the piece. Thank you for your comment <3
You wrote a very powerful piece that really resonated with me, even though the specifics of my childhood loss and trauma were very different. While my experience as a survivor of CSA isn’t the same as yours, in a very real way I feel like I did lose my family when I was abused, or as a consequence of it. And I never articulated that before – you’ve also given me something to think about.
My mother was abusive, AND died of cancer when I was 23, and I relate to this article AND your comment. Thanks for saying this! It’s a weird experience getting sympathy for not precisely the reasons you need it. And then there’s that part where people who have been sympathetic back away from you slowly in horror if you dare say anything negative (even if it’s just describing negative facts and occurrences engineered by her, not her character) with regard to your dead parent, because once they die they become saints. Or something. It was also an…experience giving birth with no female support, especially not from a (in this case dead, abusive) mother whose last words to me a few days before she died, when she found out that I’d gotten into graduate school, were “what gives YOU the right to be happy? YOU don’t deserve to be happy.” And the relief that I can still be a loving mother just fine, despite not having had one, even when she was alive. And then there’s the relief when she died. She carefully never shared with me that her cancer was of a non-hereditary kind (though she told my sister, the golden child, as I just found out fourteen years later), so I’d always been afraid of sharing the same fate, but I always thought, “no matter what, I’ve had [x amount] of freedom from you.” Yet there’s STILL a mother-shaped hole in my life.
Are you me?
So…question for other members of the Dead Parents Club: Do you ever feel like a sort of emotional self-cleaning oven, so to speak, to the degree that other, parented and supported people request/demand/expect a degree of emotional support that they do not reciprocate? Because they can somehow sense that you’re both a) very strong because you have to be and b) not necessarily the center of loving attention in an immediate family circle, and used to being solitary, or on the sidelines, or the poor relation at gatherings, or something? Not sure if I articulated this right, but it has happened to me a lot. I don’t think people are necessarily conscious of doing this kind of thing, but sometimes it feels like they can sense this quality and, I don’t know, take advantage. I now avoid people like this, which seems to be a lot of people, even otherwise well-intentioned ones, but it still crops up from time to rime.
Hi Mme Siniichulok,
I think I know what you’re talking about. It seems horribly ironic, doesn’t it? That the person who missed out on the nurturing, support and mothering is the one called to do it for others?
My experiences provided the thinnest of veneer of instant maturity: I was a teen, but as one of my friends at the time said, “became the oldest adult in the world, overnight.” The only way to survive was depend strictly on myself.
On the outside, losing your mother/parents at a young age forces you to get your act together, ASAP. Vulnerability, neediness, wanting someone to tell you everything is going to be OK– these things become luxuries you just can’t afford.
On the surface, it looks like you’ve got it all together. And to cope with people’s profound discomfort that your situation might happen to them someday, you’ve learned to do it all with an upbeat attitude that puts other people at ease.
So it’s not surprising when other people don’t look past the surface, say “You’re so strong!” and look to you for comfort. :-/ For me, I keep those people strictly at a “friendly acquaintanceship” level, just for self-preservation.
So true and well put, both of you. I learned to soothe myself from a very young age (reading, singing, masturbating) and it always befuddles me when people haven’t developed self-soothing skills and look for others to do it for them. Real head-scratcher. Why would you want to rely on anyone else for this?
In fact, why would you want to rely on anyone for *anything* if you don’t have to? In high school, for instance, I got a job within walking distance, while my stepsister got a job 15 miles away that she needed a ride to. And I couldn’t understand that at all … why would you EVER put yourself into a position where you need to rely on other people so often? Don’t you understand how quickly the person you rely on can go away? And then you’re EXTRA fucked.
Can’t fathom it at all. Sure, sometimes you need help and sometimes other people do, too, but having a lot of things that you need someone else to provide for you just seems like tempting fate to me.
Joanna, thank you so much for this essay. My mom died when I was sixteen, and she’d been sick since I was very young, too. I really connected with what you said about having been the girl of the sick mother. It’s a really specific experience within the “girl with the dead mom” realm, and it’s nice to connect with someone else of that experience.
Thank you for this beautiful reply. I kind of feel like we should be BFFs if you are open to that?
What you say about the sacred wound gets to the heart of something that I have always felt but never really articulated — losing my mom made me special. Not weird, not outcast, but *singular.*
And, yes, after my childhood? The other parts of life HAVE felt easy, in a way. I got my drama quotient as a child, and now I can relax and enjoy. After all that chaos and yelling and hitting and crying and aloneness, and also being powerless to change anything about it, adulthood — where I am the one thing in life I can control, at least — still feels like a beautiful dream, and I am 43.
Love your point about letting the rage-flares light the way to unhealed places. Gonna hafta think about that.
ETA: I often think about this comparative drama/trauma thing when I meet people from parts of the world where drama and trauma are even harder to escape than in the US.
Like, after running from an oppressive regime who tried to kill your family, probably it would be pretty hard to identify with homework stress. Or even possibly losing your mom but mostly still having enough to eat, places to sleep, etc. Perspective.
You wrote a very powerful piece that really resonated with me, even though the specifics of my childhood loss and trauma were very different. While my experience as a survivor of CSA isn't the same as yours, in a very real way I feel like I did lose my family when I was abused, or as a consequence of it. And I never articulated that before – you've also given me something to think about.
So true and well put, both of you. I learned to soothe myself from a very young age (reading, singing, masturbating) and it always befuddles me when people haven't developed self-soothing skills and look for others to do it for them. Real head-scratcher. Why would you want to rely on anyone else for this?
In fact, why would you want to rely on anyone for *anything* if you don't have to? In high school, for instance, I got a job within walking distance, while my stepsister got a job 15 miles away that she needed a ride to. And I couldn't understand that at all … why would you EVER put yourself into a position where you need to rely on other people so often? Don't you understand how quickly the person you rely on can go away? And then you're EXTRA fucked.
Can't fathom it at all. Sure, sometimes you need help and sometimes other people do, too, but having a lot of things that you need someone else to provide for you just seems like tempting fate to me.