Motherless Daughters Read Online Free PDF

thought about dying before, that night I asked to be taken as I slept, in exchange for letting my mother live. I knew the family needed her more. I’d missed out on all the intermediary steps, all the times when I might have prayed Please God, make my mother well, or I promise I’ll never talk back to her again because I’d never known she was dying, and now, in these final hours, I believed that only an act of great selflessness could still save her. Sunrise reminded me that such miracles are rare, but I later found small comfort in knowing that the attempt placed me firmly in the bargaining stage, already at midpoint along the emotional ruler of mourning.
    Seven years later, I’d reached the point where I no longer cried each time I talked about my mother, and when someone said, “I’m sorry,” after learning about her death, I could finally respond with a deferential smile and a nonadversarial nod. Time had worked its healing magic, as everyone had promised it would. And I’d proven I didn’t need a mother to survive. So I thought I’d done it properly; I thought I’d somehow won. Until that moment in the middle of the crosswalk, which left me wondering how it had all gone so horribly wrong.
    Here’s what I’ve learned about grief since then: It’s not linear. It’s not predictable. It’s anything but smooth and self-contained. Someone did us all a grave injustice by first implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. That’s the stuff of short fiction. It’s not real life.
    Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons, like the moon. No one is better created to understand this than a woman, whose bodily existence is marked by a monthly rhythm for more than half her life. For centuries, writers, aware of grief’s organic cadence, also have used
seasonal metaphors to describe a process that continually leads us from the deepest sorrow toward the peak of renewal, and back again.
    Mourning works like any series of cycles: One ends and a new one begins, slightly different from its predecessor, but with the same fundamental course. A daughter who loses a mother does pass through stages of denial, anger, confusion, and reorientation, but these responses repeat and circle back on themselves as each new developmental task reawakens her need for the parent. Say a girl of thirteen loses her mother to a heart attack. In the midst of the initial shock and numbness, she grieves to the best of her ability at that time. But five years later, at her high school graduation, she may find herself painfully missing her mother and grieving all over again. Years after this episode she may be back in the mourner’s role again, when she plans her wedding, or gives birth to her first child, or gets diagnosed with a serious illness, or reaches the age at which her mother died. At each milestone a daughter comes up against new challenges that make her long for a mother’s support, but when she reaches out for her, the mother isn’t there. The daughter’s old feelings of loss and abandonment return, and the cycle begins again.
    Seven years, as it turns out, wasn’t such a terribly long delay. I’ve since received letters and e-mails from women who say their grief was put on hold for twenty years, thirty years, or more. “Some individuals become conscious of the effects of the loss on them only midway through adulthood,” explains the Israeli psychologist Tamar Granot, the author of Without You. “At times, this belated awareness is sparked by a change in their lives, especially in the wake of a crisis during adulthood.” Vacillation over a career choice, difficulties in maintaining a relationship, or problems with one’s own children, she says, can suddenly make a woman aware of the connection between her present-day behavior and the trauma she experienced as a child.
    We’re an impatient culture, accustomed to gratifying most of our needs quickly. But mourning requires a certain resignation to the forces