Motherless Daughters

3 Pages 822 Words

In Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman tries to understand her own life in relation to the loss of her mother when she was seventeen years old and to understand why as she says, "she still has such a hold on me?" Her research included interviews of women who had lost their mothers, analyzing hundreds of letters from women who responded to articles which she had published, reading extensively about grief and loss of parents, and consulting with expert psychologists, psychiatrists, and other experts on grieving.

She shows how losing a mother through death or abandonment at any age has ramifications throughout a woman's life. She tells her own painful story and mixes it with those of many other women who lost their mothers both as children and as adults.

Edelman's was seventeen when her mother died of breast cancer. She was left to deal with a grief-stricken father and younger siblings as well as her own feelings. Although she left for college the following year and later led her life as a journalist, she discovered one day when she was twenty-four, she missed her mother so much that she was actually in physical pain.

Ms. Edelman recognized in motherless daughters a lot of similar and many diverse reactions to their mothers’ deaths. Factors affecting the reactions included the age of the daughter when her mother died, the cause of death, the birth order of the daughter, the personality traits of the daughter, and the support system available to the daughter after the loss and Ms. Edelman focuses on each of these issues.
It is obvious the younger and more dependent the daughter the more severely she was affected by the death in most cases. The most deeply felt losses were the loss of motherly nurturing and of female role modeling. Grandmothers or aunts were sometimes available to help with these losses, and those daughters fortunate enough to have nurturing fathers felt secure and got emotional strength from them. Some children...