Edelman - Motherless mothers: how losing a mother shapes the parent you become

Motherhood and Mourning:

The Power to Heal

Pregnancy:

Time to Prepare

Labor and Delivery:

Crossing the Threshold

Postpartum:

The First Six Weeks

Getting Attached:

Mother-Child Bonding

Zero to Four:

Raising Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers

The Absent Grandmother:

Filling the Void

The Grandma in Heaven:

Explaining Death to Kids

Protective Parenting:

Keeping Everyone Safe

Five to Twelve:

The School-Age Years

The Drive to Survive:

Keeping Yourself Safe

Its About the Child:

Keeping the Focus Clear

Raising Teenagers:

The Zone of the Unknown

Motherless Mothers Survey

Control Group Survey

Resources

H eartfelt gratitude and thanks to all the friends, family, and colleagues who offered insight, support, and companionship over the three years it took to write this book. Without you, it would have been a much longer and lonelier journey, and far less fun. I am blessed by knowing you all.

Elizabeth Kaplan, my agent, always first on my list. Agent among agents, friend among friends.

Gail Winston, the kind of editor an author dreams of. Always patient, exceedingly intelligent, eternally kind. Katherine Hill and Katherine Beitner at HarperCollins. You make things happen.

The women of Motherless Daughters of Orange County, especially Casey Enda, Cami Black, Mary Felix, and Laurie Lucas; the women of Motherless Daughters of Metro Detroit, especially Mary Ann McCourt; Linda Hardy in Tucson; Colleen Russell in Mill Valley, California; Julie Rahav and Shoshanit Feigenberg of the Motherless Mothers Foundation in Tel Aviv; and Shelly Cofield in New York. You do essential, beautiful work.

Gina Mireault, PhD, and Jama Laurent, PhD. Women of insight and encouragement.

The 1,322 women who participated in the online Motherless Mothers Survey, the 73 mothers in the control-group study, and especially the 78 women who shared their stories with me in person. Youve made this the book it is.

The women on my e-mail hit list, who responded with such honesty, thoughtfulness, and humor to all my urgent, last-minute requests. If I hadnt promised you anonymity, I would gladly acknowledge you all by name.

Bruce Bauman, Leslie Schwartz, Kate Vrijmoet, Susan Ulintz, Susan and Larry Laffer, Katherine Alteneder, Jennifer Lauck, Lisa Solovay, Sharon Herbstman, Monica Buckley-Price, Jonathan Greenberg & Loretta Mijares, Muppe & Avri Glick. Friends who support spirit and soul.

The Amigos of Topanga: Doug, Gretchen, Jack, Claudia, Matt, Thea, and all our kids. For the welcome distraction of Baja. What a year were about to have.

My students at Antioch University-Los Angeles and West Coast Writers Workshops. You constantly remind me what it means to be brave and real and true.

Amy Margolis and everyone at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. July wouldnt be July without you.

Joyce Vuong, Linda Laucella, and Tynette Solomon. For invaluable research assistance.

Sherry Raouf, Paula Duke, Jillian Maliszewski, and the staff at Palisades Montessori Center. For loving my girls as you do.

The Clocktower Inn in Ventura, California, where I spent numerous kid-free weekends in 2004 and 2005. Large portions of this book were written there.

Anna, Shelley, and Shaunnie. For the little miracles you perform every day.

Michele Edelman; Glenn Edelman; Allyson Edelman; Amy Jupiter; Noa & Dror Avisar; Haskel & Rachel Eliahou; Gali Eliahou; and Ruth Eliahou. Family.

My father, who died before this book was complete. A man of courage and dignity when it mattered most.

My mother, whose love and patience still sustain me.

Uzi. My husband, my partner, my prince. For the way you keep us all so calm and safe. Everything is possible because of you.

Maya Bear and Didi Girl. Every hour. Every day. You rock your mommys world.

T wo little girls live in my house now. The eight-year-old has the temperament of a sprite; the four-year-old the countenance of an angel. When I return home at the end of a workday, the older one lunges at me in the entryway Mommeee! entwining her body around me in a simian display of unity. The four-year-old races over with her arms raised, bleating Mommy-mommy-mommy, her halo of dark gold hair backlit by the acute, setting California sun.

I reach down for the little one, trying to keep my balance with the older one wrapped around my right leg. Hows my bunny? I say to Eden, nuzzling my face into her smooth neck. I grip Mayas gangly third-grade body tight against my upper thigh in the best facsimile of a hug I can manage. Hows my bear? I ask.

It is an uninhibited spectacle of adoration, an almost embarrassing display of abundance. Two little girls whose afternoon cracks open with joy and relief when I walk through the door. Has anyone ever felt so necessary, or so beloved?

My mother felt this way once. At least, I imagine she must have. Or at least I hope she did. There were three children who would have greeted her when she returned home from a PTA meeting or from a long weekend away with my father, though I cant remember a specific time all of us leaped on her as my children leap on me. We werent a family prone to physical displays of affection, or verbal expressions of love. The only time I remember telling my mother I loved her was in the summer of 1981, when I was seventeen. She was lying in a hospital bed, and I gripped the side bars as I said the words.

I love you, too, she said, but her voice was distracted, already on its way somewhere else.

She died two days later, of a cancer that had begun in her breast and spread to her liver. That was more than twenty years ago, but the images of her final days have never lost their clarity. Its my memories of her as a mother that have started to dull. I cant remember any of the piano lessons she gave me, or if I ever saw her face in the audience at a school play. Has our time together receded too far into the past for me to retrieve these images? Or are they instead being replaced by the memories Im building now, with my own daughters, day by day?

For a long time, when people said, Tell me about yourself, my first impulse was to begin with, My mother died when I was seventeen. It felt like the most authentic description of myself I could give. Now, when Im asked this question, I automatically start with, I have two daughters. Theyre eight and four. Few events in a womans life assume such dominance over her identity, but mother loss and motherhood are two.

A mother isnt all I am, of courseIm also a wife, and a writer, and a teacher, and a homeowner, and an amateur backyard landscaper every year from April to June. But because Ive chosen, very deliberately, to place my daughters at the center of my world, my role as their mother eclipses nearly everything else I do. Once I defined myself by an absence. Now I define myself by the presence of two very short people who demand most of my time.

And yet my identity as their mother is influenced by more than just the relationship we three share. It exists in a complex matrix of intergenerational love and loss, colored by what I remember of my own mothers life and death, and complicated by the survival techniques I relied on afterward to manage on my own. My relentless self-sufficiency, my fear of dying young, my love of all things predictable and safeall of the thoughts and behaviors Id been trying to shrug off on therapists couches for years stubbornly solidified after my first daughter was born. And some of them started getting in the way.