Mother’s Day always fills me with pain
Now she has her own daughter, Fay Schopen grieves more for losing her mother as a child
Iam sitting in the library with my baby daughter; it’s Tuesday, Rhyme Time. In front of us, a morass of toddlers. We are working our way through The Wheels On The Bus – again – when it hits me: a great, smacking punch to the gut. I wish my mum were here. And the thought is so painful I want to cry. I wish she were here, so we could talk about this, the most mundane of activities on the most mundane of mornings.
It’s been over 30 years since my mother, Jane, died. I was 10, she was 35, and a single parent. It was abrupt – she kept her breast cancer a secret. One day she went into hospital and never came back. No chance to say goodbye, no time to say I love you. There one minute, gone the next.
It’s an event that has impacted my entire life. It’s what Hope Edelman, the American author of Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, a seminal book on the subject first published in 1994, calls the “long tail of grief ” – a loss in early life is always with you, she explains, trailing behind you like a tail.
And the mother-daughter relationship is, says Edelman, typically the closest parent-child relationship in adult years: “Missing out on that is a huge absence in a woman’s life. It’s not something we get over or move past, but instead something that gets folded into our development and carried forward.”
I met Edelman last April in London, when she, along with Mandy Gosling, a psychotherapist specialising in childhood trauma, relationships and grief, held the UK’S first motherless daughters symposium, a sold-out seminar that saw 80 participants discuss this life-shattering event.
Edelman, who was 17 when her own mother died, knows, as do I, that grief is not linear. It strikes at inopportune moments, and often reappears at points of transition in our lives – graduations, weddings, pregnancies and births. Anniversaries are especially precarious; her birthday, the anniversary of her death, and, of course, Mother’s Day.
Every year, around this time, a psychic disturbance takes place within me. I want to hide. My life feels off. Even now, at 43, it takes a while for the penny to drop, to acknowledge the looming spectre of the day. I have learnt to avert my eyes from displays of cards and gifts. On the day itself, I stay home. I do not want to be reminded of what I have lost.
Attending Edelman’s symposium was simultaneously unsettling and comforting. I felt exposed. But I was surrounded by women who were motherless, just like me – a unique and unprecedented experience.
That day, I was six months pregnant – a much longed-for and hard-won pregnancy – and I wondered if becoming a parent would make me miss my mother more, or differently.
Emotionally, I felt further away from her than ever – I only knew her for 10 short years. I didn’t know how I would feel when my own baby was born. Would I mourn her all over again, as my child’s grandmother?
After our daughter arrived, my partner and I named her Theodora Jane, Thea for short, Jane for my mother, and I waited for the hammer to come crashing down. It never did, until that day in the library, when Thea was six months old.
I have just one photograph of my mother as a baby, and I scan it carefully for signs of my daughter – now she is getting older, I see a
similarity around the mouth and the chin, the same broad smile.
I have always missed my mum, but with Thea growing and developing, the floodgates of yearning have opened. I want to talk to her about everyday things. I wonder what I was like as a baby; how she felt as a mother. Did she watch me sleeping, hold me close, listen to me breathing, and adore me with every cell of her being?
I tell myself she must have, but my inner child is bereft and abandoned. I feel churlish for feeling this way. I am
so lucky to have my daughter, so happy to be a mother. I have a wonderful dad, a fantastic stepmother, three siblings, a loving mother-in-law.
But Edelman has noted the phenomenon of “persisting loyalty” to your lost mother. No one else will really do in times of stress.
As a new mother you are at sea: vulnerable, emotional. I had a difficult birth, lost a lot of blood and became very ill with anaemia.
What I really wanted, but couldn’t articulate at the time, was someone to care just for me; to recognise what I needed without me asking and provide it. I wanted the unconditional love and care of a mother.
Of course, the reality, had mine lived, could have been different. Edelman notes that the idea of a loving, supportive mother, there by your side when you have your own children, is, in many ways, a rosetinted fantasy – clearly, not everyone who has a mother has a fantastic relationship with them.
But the logic of this knowledge doesn’t stop the grief for what has been lost.
Here in the UK, while there are charities working with bereaved children, support for adults who were bereaved in childhood is all too often lacking. “What happens for people with historical buried grief?” asks Gosling.
She uses the phrase “lost mourners” – those whose unresolved childhood grief affects them in adult life.
There are signs, though, that a shift is taking place. In February, the Office for National Statistics estimated that 7,000 children a year in England and Wales experience maternal bereavement, based on figures collated between 1971 and 2000.
Prince Harry has been notable in speaking out about the long-term affect his mother’s death had on him. And childhood bereavement charity Winston’s Wish is researching the long-term consequences for adults of bereavement in childhood.
This Sunday, my first Mother’s Day as a mother, will be momentous. Edelman has two daughters and found a new joy in the day when she became a parent. “After so many years of feeling there was no place where I fit on Mother’s Day, I had a reason to celebrate it again,” she says.
I hope I feel the same way.
‘I have learnt to avert my eyes from displays of cards and gifts. On the day itself, I stay home.
I do not want to be reminded of what I have lost’