Motherless Daughters: How to Survive Mother’s Day Without Your Mom with Hope Edelman

 

Where It Started

Hope was 17 when her mom died of breast cancer. And she did what many people do—she went looking for a book about it. She checked libraries and bookstores, but there was nothing. Books on grief existed, but they were written for women in their forties, fifties, sixties—the ages when it’s statistically more likely to lose a parent. No one had written the book for the girl who lost her mom young.

In her late twenties, in a graduate writing program, a professor finally said: write it yourself.

So she did. And the way she found women to interview for it (this is the part I love) is so pre-internet, 1991, 1992. She made flyers with little pull tabs at the bottom and put them up at a café and a women’s bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. She went back shortly after just to see if even one person had pulled a tab.

Every single tab was gone. Women had pulled them for their sisters, their cousins, their best friends, for themselves.

My answering machine tapes would fill up because women would start telling their stories on the tape. They were so eager—someone was finally saying yes, I want to hear this, because they’d been holding this story in for so long.— Hope Edelman

That’s how much this book was needed. That’s how long women had been carrying this alone.

What We Got Wrong About Grief

Forty years ago, when Hope’s mom died, there was essentially no grief support;  no family grief centers, and even no hospice in most communities. The message of that era was: get over it, get past it, move on. There are five stages of grief and we need to nudge you along.

The good news is, we know better now that grief is cyclical, not linear. Hope says Elizabeth Kübler-Ross never intended for the stages to be followed in sequence, it’s a lifelong process. And it’s individual—your grief won’t look like mine, and mine won’t look like my sibling’s, even if we lost the same mother.

COVID accelerated this shift. So did social media. Celebrities sharing their own grief stories gave entire cultures permission to talk about it. Prince William and Harry are a perfect example—two brothers who lost the same mother at the same moment and went in completely different directions, shaped by the fact that they were at different developmental stages when it happened.

That part matters more than most people realize.

The After Grief

Grief doesn’t go away. It changes shape.

After someone dies, there’s an acute phase — maybe six months to two years — where your brain hasn’t caught up to the reality that they’re gone. Then that acute phase starts to lift, and you settle into something longer and quieter. That’s what Hope calls the after grief.

And within that, there are predictable moments — especially for those who lost their moms young — where it comes back in a new form.

When someone dies, we are in an acute phase where our brain doesn’t understand they’re no longer here. And then those feelings start to abate and we settle into a different kind of long-term grief experience. That’s the after grief. It has a rhythm and patterns of its own. — Hope Edelman

She calls those moments “new old grief.” Old grief showing up in a new situation. Common occasions: Graduation. Marriage. Becoming a mother. Turning your mother’s age at time of death.

New Old Grief

Hope thought she was prepared for motherhood. Motherless Daughters had been out for a few years. She’d done the work. She knew she’d miss her mom. She was ready.

But she was completely unprepared.

All her friends in the pregnancy group had moms who came in during the postpartum period to help, to reassure, to show them what to do. Hope had her mother-in-law, who was wonderful, but she wasn’t her mom. And holding her newborn daughter, she was hit with a grief she hadn’t expected:

I would look at my daughter and think — you’re never going to know your grandmother. Your grandmother’s never going to know you. It’s like I’m the one here now who represents both of us. And it was deep and powerful and really sad in a way I’d never expected. — Hope Edelman

She was grieving for herself with no mom to guide her. She was grieving for her daughter with no maternal grandmother. And she was grieving for her mother who never got to meet her first grandchild. Three layers of grief, all at once, in the postpartum period.

And here’s something important she flagged: a lot of motherless daughters who experience this get diagnosed with postpartum depression, when what they’re actually experiencing is grief. It can look the same. If you’re in that situation, you want to be with someone who can help you figure out which one it is, because the treatments are different.

The Deadline

I grew up thinking 39 was it. It was just this quiet background knowledge. My mom died at 39 so obviously I would too. I never thought past 40.

Hope says 99% of the women she works with carry this.

At Motherless Daughters, they have a name for the moment when you cross the age your mother was when she died. They call it “crossing the silent threshold.” And they’ve created a ritual women can do to mark it — because internally, it is profound, and the culture gives you nothing. No one around you understands why turning 42 feels like the edge of a cliff.

Hope’s mom died at 42. She said 41 was anxious. She was getting every scan, watching every symptom. And then she turned 42, and something strange happened:

My mom’s not older than me anymore. How is that possible? And that was a weird year. But 43 was the funkiest one of all, because suddenly I’m older than my mom. She’s not a role model for me for aging anymore. The older I get, the younger she becomes. — Hope Edelman

And when you get there, you realize how young they really were. When you’re a kid, 39 or 42 seems old, it’s a full life lived. And then you actually arrive there, surrounded by your friends still traveling and reinventing themselves and having babies and you think: she only got half a life.

That’s when you stop grieving as the daughter who lost her mother. You start also grieving as a woman standing next to another woman who lost half her life.

Grief Math

There’s a term in the bereavement world: grief math. Your brain runs the calculations in the background, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. You’ll sit down one day and realize, “Oh. That’s what’s been going on.”

Hope described the year her mother would have turned 84. She realized her mom had now been gone as long as she was alive. Forty-two years here. Forty-two years gone.

It can surface unexpectedly, hitting hard even decades later.

All Kinds of Loss

We touched on something that I think needs to be said out loud: not all mother loss looks the same, and no one gets to decide whose grief is valid.

There’s a tendency, and I’ve seen it happen, where people ask, “how old was she?” as if there’s a correct answer. As if dying at 90 means you’re not allowed to fall apart. Hope works with women who lost moms in their nineties. She doesn’t mix them in community with women who were three when their moms died—not because one grief is bigger, but because they’re different kinds of hard, and the comparison can hurt both women.

Imagine being 64 years old, and your mom has been your daily touchpoint your whole life, and suddenly she’s gone. You don’t know how to be a person without her there. That’s real.

And then there are the women whose moms are still alive—but not there due to estrangement, abandonment, or mental illness and addiciton. There are many ways to lose a mother. There are many ways to not be mothered. Mother’s Day can be a hard day for those women too.

There’s no Grief Olympics. There’s no better or worse, easier or harder. It’s just different kinds of hard. — Hope Edelman

Mother’s Day

Hope has heard from so many women over the years about this day. What she sees most: loneliness and a feeling of being misunderstood. They want to honor their mothers. There’s just no structure for it.

You can’t take her to brunch. You can’t send flowers—or you can, to her grave, and some women do. But the culture doesn’t give you a place to put this.

Some practical things Hope offered for the day itself:

Buy or pick her favorite flowers and put them somewhere meaningful. Take a photo of her and put it somewhere you’ll walk past. When you do, just reach out and touch the frame. A moment of connection. Hi mom. I see you.

And this one I love: the best way to honor your mother is to take good care of her daughter. Do something for yourself on that day that she would have appreciated. Something she would have suggested. Whatever that looks like for you.

And if you need a place to put it all, on May 9th, the day before Mother’s Day, Hope and her co-hosts are doing a free one-hour call for motherless daughters around the world. They say names. They do a toast. They carve out space for the women who are gone, and for the daughters who still love them. It is free. REGISTER HERE. 

 

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