For ‘motherless mothers,’ parenting heals

Uzi opens the car's back door for her and I watch them drive off between the palm trees that line our driveway. It's more than two thousand feet down to the bus stop on Pacific Coast Highway, a fifteen-minute drive. When I was a kid, the bus stopped right in front of our house. And palm trees! To get to the nearest palm tree, we had to take a three-hour flight.

Eden and I wave through the window as Uzi's car winds down the hill and out of sight. Every morning it's the same routine. And every morning it ends with the same sweet, odd feeling of wonder, how in this house in the Santa Monica mountains, this place of wildfires and hot tubs and no snow, my California daughters manage to bring the best parts of my mother right back to me.

What is it about motherhood that's so healing for a motherless daughter, mending something inside her in a place deeper than scalpels or medication or therapy can reach? Many of the women interviewed for this book spoke of motherhood as an experience that restored their equilibrium, their self-esteem, or their faith. “Having my kids is like discovering the missing link,” explains thirty-five-year-old Sharon, a mother of two who was eleven when her own mother died. “There's a completeness in my life that wasn't there before.”

“The first time my son put his hand in my hand when we were walking,” remembers thirty-eight-year-old Corinne, who lost both parents by age eleven, “and the first time he ran to me and threw his arms around my neck, showing that he preferred me over anyone else, for him to love me back so uninhibitedly and unconditionally, filled some part of me that I didn't expect would ever be filled again.”

It paints a rosy view of motherhood, but there's more than just a simple idealization going on here — although God knows our culture tacks enough of that onto mothers these days. For these daughters, motherhood is the final repair in their process of mourning and recovery from early mother loss. What was broken in their pasts is once again made whole; what was subtracted has been added back again.

When motherhood interfaces with the long-term mourning process, the result is exponential. Becoming a mother can give a motherless daughter access to a more enhanced, more insightful, deeper, richer, and, in some cases, ultimate phase of mourning for her mother, one that may initially be painful but eventually leads her to a more mature and peaceful acceptance of both her loss and herself.

Excerpted from “Motherless Mothers: How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become” by Hope Edelman. Copyright © 2006 by Hope Edelman. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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