Motherless Daughters retreat: Messages

During one conversation at the retreat, facilitator/author Hope Edelman asked us what messages we received (spoken or unspoken) after we lost our moms. 

We all knew by this point in our lives, in 2021, that resources were missing when our loss occurred. Many of us were children at the time; for many of us the loss occurred in the 70s (such as mine) or the 80s. Hardworking families at that time didn’t go to therapy. Most men suppressed their emotions as they’d been raised to do, and many adult women expected girls to maturely be ready to take care of others. Most adults didn’t know how to help a girl mourn her lost mother. How could they, without examples to follow and without reaching out for help?

That was the case with my dad. He sometimes told me, “You’re a good soldier.” He sometimes said he was having a tough time, and how he missed my mom. I couldn’t handle that AT ALL at eleven years old, and I would clown around to force him to change the subject. I was working hard every day to hold my life together. It seemed that my whole job was to keep my routine going smoothly. His words made me feel he was handing me his burden. I would not accept one bit of it. But that was the only way in which “we” talked about my mom. 

Another thing my dad sometimes said was, “You’re all I’ve got.” I didn’t understand what this meant at the time. But now, I think he must have felt very lost and depressed, and knew he was starting to drink more than he should have. His words imply that he saw me as THE reason to keep his life together. I imagine him thinking, without this young daughter to worry about, I’d go right down the drain. “You’re all I’ve got.” I’m glad I didn’t understand the implications at the time. It would have felt like pressure to be strong for him when I was determined to be strong for myself.

So I’d say the message I took in, about how to handle my loss and my new life, was “Soldier on.” The first photo is of the phrases we all called out in answer to Hope’s question.

The second photo is of the messages we now realize we needed to hear. Mine was, “Your feelings will always change.” I resisted unpleasant emotions. I hadn’t learned at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that feelings pass and evolve and backslide and recover like a spiral. 

I lived in the present and sought out silliness, giggling, crushes, books, and music in order to occupy my mind and feel good. Nothing wrong with that; the things that made me feel good were healthy things. I’m proud of my teen self for not drinking or partying, and for choosing friends who also didn’t. As unsupervised as I was, I think that decision was thanks to the self-image my mom had given me: a girl who didn’t need to drink, someone whose valuable mind should be kept clear.

I didn’t look back at my loss or try to understand it, and I didn’t try to imagine my future. The future was obscured by worry. I couldn’t afford to give in to unpleasant emotions because I thought they would churn me like a tsunami wave and never stop. But if I had had help to explore my grief, I might have learned that feelings change like the clouds and the sun and the rain. Had I learned that, I might have been spared some anguish in my young adulthood, when it seemed that painful feelings never went away.

My dad did his best. Very little was known about grief in children until much more recently, partly thanks to Hope’s book, Motherless Daughters.