MOTHERING

For Motherless Daughters

by Fern Kupfer

It was the serendipity of being in another city and running into mydaughter's friend in front of a bookstore that gave me pause. "Jill," Isaid, releasing her from a hug: "I was just thinking about you." I wasjust thinking, in fact, to remember to send a book I had bought for heras a college graduation gift. The book had been sitting on my desk for amonth. Why hadn't I sent it?

The book is "Motherless Daughters - The Legacy of Loss," by HopeEdelman. My daughter's friend, like the women interviewed for this bookand like the author herself, is a motherless daughter. Jill's mom diedof ovarian cancer 14 years ago.

I bought the book and read it first myself, seeing Jill on everypage. But I put off sending it to her. An odd gift, one that was sure tomake the recipient cry her eyes out.

Jill and I stood on the corner talking. Before we parted, I blurtedout: "I'm going home today and putting something in the mail for you,Sweetie." I knew that saying it would make me keep my promise.

Jill's friendship with my daughter over the years had sensitized meto a new understanding about differences in the family. While everyoneknows children whose parents are divorced, children raised by singlewomen, children whose families are realigned in unusual and modern ways -- hardly anyone knows a child who doesn't have a mother. We presumethat everyone has a mother.

In elementary school the teachers casually announce: "Take this hometo your mother; ask your mother to fill out this form to give youpermission for . . ." When Gabi and Jill were in junior high, theEnglish teacher gave a composition assignment: Write about adisagreement you've had with your mother. As part of the graduationceremony at a high school in Iowa, each girl filed out of the auditoriumand placed a single red rose in the lap of her mother.

Hope Edelman's startling book examines the consequences of motherloss on women. While Edelman admits that losing a mother is devastatingto a child of either sex, she also believes there are particularramifications for female children, who lose not only a parent, but arole model, someone who serves as a gender guide through the trickyrituals of womanhood.

Edelman, who was a teenager when her mother died of cancer,describes the rage and loneliness of her own loss. And in her movingprose she also tells the stories of more than a hundred other women whowere too young to lose a mother, other women who, no matter what theirage or occupation or lifestyle, define themselves by this loss. Ascolumnist Anna Quindlen once wrote: "I was 19 when my mother died. For along time, that was the only thing you needed to know about me."

What happens when a girl loses her mother is that the girl loses apiece of who she will become. And all the ordinary rites of passage thatyoung women go through -- from getting their periods to buying promdresses to getting married to having their own babies -- makemotherless daughters feel wounded all over again.

With a mother's death (or abandonment) it is not only the motherthat you lose, but it is also the idea of the mother you always wanted:the one whose face is riveted to yours during every school concert; theone who would give you the blouse off her back if you admired it; theone who taught you to write thank-you notes and how to walk in highheels; the one who loves you no matter what; the one whose love is sopure and fierce that she would give her life to save yours.

A few days ago I received a letter from Jill. She wrote: "I'm notsure how to say thank you for giving me a piece of my life. The book issomething that I have been wanting and needing for so long . . . it'sgood to feel that I am not alone and that it's okay to be suddenlythrown back into moments of complete pain and grief and to want nothingmore than to talk to my mother . . ."

Motherless daughters. One of the author's observations is that somewomen find strength and purpose not in spite of their loss but from it,because as girls become women they still turn to the mother they longfor, the mother whose shimmery presence, even in memory, continues toshape a daughter's life.

So Hope Edelman, still in her 20s, has written an important book,one that will help so many people. Now she is going on book tours andtalk shows and traveling all around the country to share what she haslearned from her research and her life.

And my daughter's good friend Jill plans to become a gynecologist.This summer, at 22 years of age, before she even begins medical schoolat the University of Iowa, she is doing research on the causes ofovarian cancer.

I look at these young women, so talented and bright, their wholeglorious futures before them, and I can only think: Oh, sweethearts,your mothers would be so proud.

Fern Kupfer is a novelist and writing professor at Iowa State University. She is a frequent contributor to Working Moms' Internet Refuge.

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