The Parallels Are Surprising

Learning at an early age that dependent relationships can be impermanent,
security ephemeral, and family capable of being redefined, the
motherless daughter develops an adult insight while she is still a child,
with only juvenile resources to help her cope.

Early loss is a maturing experience, forcing a daughter to age faster
than her peers – both cognitively and behaviorally.
The death of a parent marks the end of a childhood.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

What are the odds ? These two women are my grandmothers. Both lost their own mothers at a young age. My dad’s mother when she was only 3 mos old. My mom’s mother when she was 11.

They both lost their first born children to adoption. Both children were conceived with the assistance of much older men.

It may be because my grandmothers were more mature than the men their age and so they were instead attracted to men closer in age to their own fathers. It is unclear that they were unusually close to their fathers. Whether they were or not, is lost in the mists of time.

What Makes You Crazy

The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died,

or that you lost custody of your child,

it is that you can’t talk about it.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

It is incomprehensible that BOTH of my grandmothers lived such similar circumstances – both lost their own mothers at a young age and both lost custody of their firstborn child to adoption.

There probably was no time to really grieve for her mother in my mom’s mother’s life – there were 4 younger siblings to be cared for and the enormous labor required of any woman without servants living in the early 1900s. There were likely no words for my dad’s mother since she was an infant of only 3 months old and pre-verbal.

But what of the deeper wound ? The loss of their firstborn children ?

Who could they talk to about it ? Who wanted to hear anything about what happened at the end of their pregnancies ? Most simply wanted to pretend that none of that had happened and just move on with Life.

Yet, it is unlikely that the wound ever healed or that my grandmothers didn’t think about their lost child every single day of whatever life remained for each of them.

Losing My Mom

I was thinking about my mom this morning. No particular reason. I was reading something and the mother had died, yet she lived on as this significant presence that was influential in her family’s life.

My mom was like that.

I expected to see her at least one more time. Was in communication with her by email just before she died. Her death was a shock to my world, unexpected, and life changing.

It really doesn’t matter when our mother dies. It is the end of an era for us and we miss her terribly. No more long phone calls or in person visits. It’s all gone and done and no getting it back.

Many of my friends, in the same age cohort as I am, have lost their moms and it is clear they grieve them terribly, even many years later.

I am grateful I had my mom and that she was the one I grew inside of because she didn’t have that and she yearned eternally to know that one. I believe they reunited in death. No proof. I just like believing that all that was not known, now is.

Maybe someday, I will have that pleasure to meet my grandmothers. My original grandmothers. The ones I never got to know in physical life.

Losing A Mom

The Dead Mother painting by Edvard Munch

I was talking to a woman in our county seat day before yesterday. She’s is an older woman and she seems to be of a very like mind to myself politically, which puts both of us in the minority here in the county where I live. So, she enjoys having someone who speaks her language to talk to. We really don’t communicate with one another that often but as I was leaving it came out that she had lost her mother at the age of 9.

I was almost finished reading a book by a woman, Mary Sue Rabe, that I met at Jean Houston’s home in August of 2016. Her book is titled “Stand There and Look Pretty Darlin’: Don’t You Worry Your Pretty Little Head ’bout Nothin'”. An important segment in her book was about losing her mother at age 9.

Back in my original grandmother’s childhoods in the early 1900s, mothers dying seems to have been a rather common phenomena – at least it happened to both of my grandmothers (one at age 3 mos and one at age 11). Also, my husband’s great-grandmother died after giving birth to her third child. That child was turned over to an unrelated couple to raise. His great-grandfather could barely manage the two older children he was left with in widowhood, one of whom was my husband’s grandfather.

Just after my older son was born, my mother-in-law made it her mission in life to get a memorial stone for Edith Morgan Yemm (my husband’s great-grandmother). Her husband was an impoverished coal miner when she died and so she was put into a pauper’s grave without a marker in the cemetery across from the church. He moved to another state after she died.

Not long ago, I read a book Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. The impact of losing one’s mother during childhood upon a daughter is profound.

The Loss of a Mother is Tragic

My Paternal Grandmother, Dolores, As A Baby

We don’t know who this woman was because my grandmother didn’t note it on the back of the photo. What we do know is that her mother died when my grandmother was only 3 months old, so the woman in this photo is not her mother but is likely some relation.

Her parents marriage appears to have been a fairy tale worthy romance. They both came from old line families that started in Connecticut and migrated to Long Island New York.

It feels to me that the family’s fortunes changed with the death of the oldest daughter (run over by a teenage driver at age 3) and then the mother. The Great Depression didn’t help things.

There is a difference between a motherless daughter whose mother died and a child growing up without their natural mother due to adoption. With death, we know the mother will never come back to us and she lives on as a kind of myth or legend – often larger than life would have had her otherwise.

With adoption, there is the knowledge that the natural mother is “out there” somewhere, even when the child doesn’t know her name or where she is. There is always that possibility that a reunion with her will take place and that causes a degree of yearning.

Unconscious Grief

I have felt guilty about the unhealed wound I carry,
but the emptiness is real.
The sense that I am alone,
that death is inevitable,
that I feel insecure in my mothering,
that I still search for her
in so many ways and faces –
these tell me the loss is real.

I have reflected on the loss of my mother
and tried to distance myself somewhat from the grief
by trying to gauge its effect on my life
as objectively as possible.
This is effective when I am in my conscious self,
but like most of us, I spend a good deal of my time
in unconscious thought and choice,
and there the grieving child reigns.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

I think my mom knew she had a good life. Yet, deep inside her there was this grief. This feeling that she wasn’t where she should be, that she really wasn’t like these people who she inhabited a house with.

And she tried to reach her mom but by that time, her mother had already died. This was devastating for her.

I don’t know how conscious her grieving actually was but it came up between us more than once, as her oldest daughter I guess she felt I was the best one to share such unacceptable feelings with.

She tried to justify them to me more than once –

“As a mother, I would just want to know what happened to my child” or “I needed an explanation for this mystifying problem I was having with my health” (that later one is often what adoptees indicate as a reason for their search).

It is interesting that she was less moved to search for the aunts and uncles on her mother’s side, or half-siblings on her father’s side.

I guess having been shut down and shut out in her initial attempt, she just gave up and accepted that the grief could not be relieved in her lifetime.

I do believe she did reunite with her mother after death and that everything was known between them at that point.

Family Dysfunction

I remember a long private Facebook chat with my nephew as I became aware of wounds that he was suffering from and trying to help him with the truth I knew at the time. I had not yet learned so much that I have learned in only the last year but I understood that somehow the family I was born into was broken.

This didn’t mean I had a bad childhood or that my parents didn’t love us or that they divorced. None of that is true of my own circumstances.

I believed stories about my parents’ origins that weren’t true. And now, armed with the true stories, I have yet learned about the wounds that happen when any child is separated from its mother – as both of my parents were – then adopted by strangers and forced to live false identities.

There were other elements too – my grandmothers grew up without their mothers who had died. All three of us – me and my two sisters – in one way or another lost custody of our own children – the same as our grandmothers (and by inference the fathers had lost their children too).

I am still trying to write this sad, romantic and true story in the best possible way. It is also a growth and healing process for me. I understand so much, so much better now. Eventually, it may come to pass that you are able to read my story too.

Unacknowledged Ghosts

Deborah Hempstead

In the book, It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn, he asks – Is there a person no one talks about ?

Deborah was run over and killed by a teenager driver, a member of the Doubleday publishing family, while crossing the road with her younger sister, Eleanor. Her story does survive or else I wouldn’t know this but did the family talk about her ?

The death of my paternal grandmother Dolores’ oldest sister would have certainly left behind grieving parents.

My grandmother is born only about a year after that tragic event. Then Dolores’ mother dies 3 mos after giving birth to her. There is just the heavy sorrow in that family including in Eleanor, the middle child. She would have been very young when this happened, perhaps pre-verbal and maybe didn’t receive very much comfort or attention due to the intensity of all that happened. I don’t really know. She is a sad person, never married, died alone of tuberculosis in a state hospital and cremated.

So, this “ghost” is a painful thing for everyone in the family but more conscious in Eleanor, more unconscious in Delores.

I wonder how Dolores dealt with all that grief, that sorrow ?

Did she reject her father ? I don’t know. He remarried. Men of that era were not heavily involved in child care but it seems rather certain from stories and from her stepmother’s will that Josephine was not very fond of her step-daughters. It is likely that, Raphael, Dolores’ father would have been in a terrible grief and depression for some time, if he ever truly got over those losses.

It is no surprise that I am fascinated by Deborah. I was given the same name as the oldest daughter of my father, even though he never knew of his aunt’s existence.

The author as a young child.

Grief

Mourning does not have a straightforward –
beginning, middle and end
Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons,
like the moon.

In the midst of the initial shock and numbness,
we grieve the best we can at the time.

~ Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman

There are many kinds of grief. The grief my adoptee mom felt when she learned there would be no reunion because her natural mother had died years before my mom knew she had gone. The grief I felt when I realized my mom believed a story about her adoption that simply wasn’t true. The grief my newly discovered cousin felt as first her mother, then her husband died.

Today, an online community friend openly expressed her grief about a debilitating illness with no hope of treatment and though she acknowledges that some acquaintances pity and some empathize, in reality grief is a path we each can only walk alone.

When my mom died, I was thrust into an intensity of huge responsibilities. When my maternal grandmother lost her mom at age 11, with four younger siblings that needed her care and attention, and who knows how her father responded but he never married again, I doubt she had much time to grieve at all.

Life doesn’t come with a guaranteed length for any of us. Some people never make it out of childhood. Others hold on until they are so old, their imminent death is clearly obvious, but the time of their leaving is not. What is certain is that I would suspect all of us will grieve at least once in our lifetime.

Be gentle with those who grieve. Their pain is real and time may or may not heal those wounds.

Mother loss is a great equalizer

I remember the woman whose mother died not long before my mother and the woman whose mother died after my mom. I never forget that is what connects us.

“You have to become that person who says –
Don’t worry, you’re doing fine.
You’re doing the best you can.”

I would hear this internally as I tried to adjust to my mother’s sudden departure and the
responsibilities that thrust upon me, especially when I used the toilet in the bathroom where she died in her jacuzzi tub.

She had some kind of blockage at her esophagus and had been prescribed a strong pain medication. She was scheduled to have a procedure to remove it only a few days after she already had died. She had passed a heart stress test in preparation for that procedure with flying colors.

But she had a massive heart attack. My dad was in woulda, coulda, shoulda mode (because he found her there the next morning) until the coroner ruled that he couldn’t have.

Her birthday falls on the last day of this month of January.

“A mother you perceive as really knowing you –
that is who you count on, the one you keep looking for.”

My mother was an adoptee and she yearned for her mother. By the time the scandal of the agency that she was adopted from (the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis under the supervision of the infamous Georgia Tann) came back into the national consciousness in the early 1990s with dramatic reunions of mothers and their children televised for all to see, not only would the state not give her her adoption records but they told her that her mother had died years before.

She was devastated. Though her adoptive mother had been over the moon to receive her as an infant, growing up, there were tensions. Her mother was never “mom” as my own mother was. She was very formal, somewhat strict and obsessed with body image. When I saw the photo of my natural maternal grandmother, I saw we came from strong farm stock, even though no one would have judged her “fat”. Fat is often more of a perception than a reality.

I remember during a troubled period in my own life going into the darkened kitchen at my parents’ house and my mother came looking for me. Intuitively, she sensed my distress.

“Mother loss is a great equalizer among women.”

~ the quotes centered above are from

Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman