Motherless Daughters (1 of 4 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. Copyright 2006 by Hope Edelman
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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Motherless Daughters
by Hope Edelman

For my parents



It is the image in the mind that links us to
our lost treasures; but it is the loss that shapes
the image, gathers the flowers, weaves the garland.
--Colette, My Mother's House


LETTERS FROM READERS
http://www.dailylit.com/books/motherless-daughters/letters

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
http://www.dailylit.com/books/motherless-daughters/acknowledgments


INTRODUCTION

Twelve years ago, the first edition of Motherless Daughters was published. It was the final step in a long odyssey for me, the end result of years I'd spent searching for just such a book. I was seventeen when my mother died of breast cancer, no longer a child but not yet quite a woman. I was old enough to drive, however, and one of the first trips I took after the mourners dispersed was to a local library. I was a reader, and in lieu of a support group or teen-grief therapy, neither of which existed in my town in 1981, this was my best option for support. I needed information. I wanted to know how you were supposed to feel at seventeen when your mother had just died. I wanted clues for how to think about it. How to talk about it. What to say. I wanted to know if anything, ever, would make me feel happy again.

I didn't find that book, not that year, nor the next year, nor in any of my subsequent searches in bookstores and university libraries and computer databases in any of the next four states in which I lived. In every book I skimmed about mother-daughter relationships, the assumption was that a mother's death occurred after a daughter had reached mid-life or beyond. I was seventeen, twenty, then twenty-four years old. These books weren't speaking to me. The same was true for the academic texts I found, some of which discussed the short-term effects of early parent loss on children, but none of which talked specifically about daughters who'd lost mothers and how the loss affected them over time. I knew I had a specific set of difficulties, and a point of view that departed significantly from most of my friends', but I couldn't find anything written about this. The silence that descended upon my family after my mother died seemed echoed on the bookstore shelves.
I had no idea that thousands of other girls like my sister and I were out there. In my mind, we'd gone through something so strange, so rare and aberrant, that it didn't even merit inclusion on the page.

Then, when I was a senior in college, my boyfriend clipped an Anna Quindlen column from the Chicago Tribune for me. "My mother died when I was nineteen," Quindlen wrote. "For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: 'Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes--I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.'" I read it four times on the el train on the way to my part-time job that afternoon, and carried it around in my wallet for years. Only later, much later, would I learn how many other motherless women around the country had saved that same syndicated column, and how many, like me, had felt as if someone had discovered a secret portal into their innermost thoughts.

Losing my mother wasn't just a fact about me. It was the core of my identity, my very state of being. Before writing the first edition of this book, I had no sense of how many other women felt the same way. The answer, as I soon learned, was a lot. Within two months of its initial publication, Motherless Daughters landed on the New York Times bestseller list. I hadn't unlisted my phone number, and I'd come home at the end of the day to find long, heartfelt stories of mother loss left on my answering machine. I was living in New York City at the time, and about once a week the clerk at my local post office would hand me gray mailbags filled with envelopes--letters that readers had sent to the publisher, who had forwarded them on to me. "What kind of business are you running, woman?" she once asked me. "I want a piece of that."

The letters were filled with women's stories of loss and abandonment, and of the coping strategies they'd adopted to emotionally survive. Often, the women included words of gratitude, thankful that someone had validated the magnitude of their losses, relieved that they'd finally been given a framework within which to fit their experiences and a platform from which to discuss them. Hundreds of motherless women would show up at readings and seminars, eager to sit in a room with others who understood. "It's like we share a secret handshake," one woman said. Another put it even more succinctly. "I feel like the alien who just found the mother ship," she told the group.

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