I watched Sesame Street on Saturday mornings in the 70s. Early, before anyone else was up. Legs crossed on burnt-orange shag carpet, a bowl of Lucky Charms with whole milk between my knees.
Lucky Charms was my favorite.
This segment always resonated with me. Because I was the only motherless one. Always. Not to mention the only orphan. I don’t recall ever meeting another kid who lost their mother at six.
At that point in my life, all my friends had parents. Which put me in a class by myself: the child who had no mother. One of these things is not like the others.
My dad, as you may recall, was a beatnik ski bum with no interest in taking responsibility for me. He may as well have been dead, too. Had I not had siblings who were significantly older and willing to take me in, I would have ended up in foster care.
Losing a parent is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a child. The world goes topsy-turvy. The psychologist Felix Brown reports that prisoners are two to three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than the population as a whole.
But for some people, Malcolm Gladwell points out in his new book, the death of a mother or father is a spur, a propellant that sends them catapulting into life. Because they are on their own, they are forced to persist, to invent, to chart their own way — into a curious category Gladwell dubs “eminent orphans.”1
I know motherless people now, though. Most of my friends are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and many of them have dead mothers, too. Losing a parent in these decades of life is far more common than childhood bereavement.2 Perhaps as traumatic in some cases, but not as fundamentally consequential.
A 50-something friend who lost her mother last year told me she wanted to start a support group for motherless women, prompted by her own fresh motherlessness and that of one of her friends.
“We could get together on Vashon,” she said. “You should come!”
As if I were being invited to join a book club or something. But how much support would I glean being around other motherless women at this point in my orphanhood, almost 50 years in? Fifty years after that monumental loss? That loss that upended my world, scattered my siblings, pivoted my life, and changed the synapses of my brain. While losing your mother at any age can be devastating, it is only when losing your mother as a child that it is fundamentally life altering. Not only have you lost that key person, you lost that part of yourself that could have only been developed in her presence. That view of yourself that could have only been reflected through her seeing, blinking eyes.
‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
What comfort would I have to offer them, or they me? My loss at this point is 50 years old. My grief, 50 years long. Were I to sit in a circle while women remembered their lost-while-adult mothers through stories, what stories would I tell? What memories would I recount? For the timing of my loss means I have few memories to conjure, no stories to tell. My “memories” of my mother are not memories at all, but rather, photographs. Vietnam-era chemicals and light reacting on photo paper.
My memories of her are meta: not of her, but of replications of her.3
In her book, Our Look, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power, and the Need to Be Seen, Nancy Friday writes:
Now I choose to imitate only those parts of my mother that I admire, to look in the mirror and see something of her that gives me pleasure, to hear my voice on a tape recorder and recognize her laugh.
While these women discussed the person they knew as their mothers, what would I say? What would I share? My loss is of a different category.4 I lost my mother. Actually lost her. All of her. I never got to know her. Never had her in the first place. Never got to go shoe shopping with her or Sunday brunching with her or share my children with her. Never got to hear her side of her story or my story or any story. Never got to ask those burning questions that no one but her can extinguish.
I cannot recall the sound of her voice when she talked or the way her body moved when she walked or the way her lips curved when she smiled or the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed. I cannot look in the mirror and recognize her traits and characteristics reflected in myself.
Can I really know myself, then? Because I lost that part of myself, too.
To be fair, I have never experienced losing a mother as an adult so cannot directly compare the two experiences. One involves knowing what you lost and the other, losing what you would never know. Whether one is worse than the other in terms of raw sadness and grief I cannot say. But I can say with 100% certainty that losing your mother as a child is in a different category altogether than losing your mother as an adult, despite the description being the same.5
I am a motherless daughter indeed. But I am also – 50 years in – a child still bereaved.
Things That Nourished My Writing: March - June 2023
FOOD
This rhubarb tart.
Le Pichet, as always. My favorite restaurant in Seattle.
LITERARY
Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout
Five Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life, by Bill Eddy (my therapist told me to read it, and so I did).
MUSIC
PLACES
Home. We are finally moved into our new house.
PEOPLE
Strong, opinionated women who don’t back down. Gloria Allred, FTW.
ACTIVITIES
Fighting. Fighting hard for this.
My smells of her are the musty folds of her green leather jacket, still hanging in my closet. My sounds of her the whir of pulleys on a chairlift. Ski boots clanking on icy metal. My touch of her the wood varnish on the carved handles of the dresser I inherited when she died.