Motherless Daughters retreat

I’m going to a retreat this weekend for women whose mothers died when we were young. My loss was at age eleven, in 1976. I sense that some of my friends are curious about why, 45+ years afterward, I would join a weekly online support group and go to this retreat. Some questions people have politely asked, or seemed to want to ask:

Does a person ever get over a loss like that?

How does that loss affect you so many decades later?

Is the group helpful? Does it not just make you focus on the worst thing that ever happened?

The answers:

I don’t know what it means to get over something. If it means one doesn’t think about the event every day, or that remembering the event does not cause intense pain, then in that sense I feel I’m over it. Recently, though, I do think about my mother every day — which is not quite the same as thinking about the loss every day. I think about her because I watch for ways in which she made me who I am, rather than watching for how the loss of her made me who I am.

On the other hand, I did start thinking about my mom a lot more recently. It was sparked by my going through all of my old journals. (I typed them all — over a million words from 1975 through 2018, which was when I started typing.) While reading my journals in my 50s, especially the ones I wrote from age ten to thirty, I saw the outlines of many resources that had gone missing by not having my mother to talk to, and I saw how personal milestones could have been so much better with a mom. The ability to look for the positives in life, a quality I got from her, allowed me pretty quickly to start noticing how the strengths she instilled in me helped me navigate throughout my life even when I felt lost.

As to how the loss affects me after 45 years, it’s more like thinking back to a fork in a road that is now out of sight. You don’t know how far you are from where you would have been on that main road. But is there any such thing as “would have been”? I don’t think so. One thing I learned in my teens was that I have the life I have, that’s all I have, and I’m entitled to enjoy it. To enjoy the actual life I have had, as different as it has been from what it looked like at age nine, is no betrayal of my mother’s values.

The Motherless Daughters weekly online support group has been helpful by giving me a specific time to tenderly feel the faint echoes of old feelings. It has also been extremely helpful to hear the thoughts and feelings of other motherless daughters. When my husband asks me “how was your call,” I always have so much to say and it comes out in a rush. I never had the opportunity before now to talk with any other person who lost their mother as a child. This group is the place where, if someone says “you’re not alone,” I feel that it’s true.

I had made up my mind that as soon as the in-person Motherless Daughters retreats were happening again that I’d jump at the chance to sign up, and I did. So I’ll spend Thursday night through Sunday morning with Motherless Daughters author (and support group creator) Hope Edelman. I don’t know what to expect to “get out of” it. I hear my inner eleven-year-old asking, “Will I cry?” because at Mom’s death, she did not. She’s very alert today.