Claire Bidwell Smith

I know I haven’t written here in a while. There are a lot of reasons for that.

Mostly I’m just overwhelmed, and nurturing this place has fallen to the bottom of my list of obligations. I keep a pretty active daily photo diary on Instagram, but carving out time for lengthy posts just hasn’t been possible lately.

I’m hoping that this won’t be the case for too much longer, but until then, I hope you’ll bear with me.

For now, here’s a video I took of Vera on Saturday after I busted her secretly cutting her own hair in the bathroom.

It’s been almost fifteen years since I first came across Hope Edelman’s book Motherless Daughters. I was twenty years old and living in New York. My mother had been dead for two years and I was more lost than ever. I can’t remember how I came across this book, whether someone told me about it, or whether I stumbled across it in a bookstore, but all I know is that the moment I was holding it in my hands I was in disbelief.

Someone wrote a book about my experience, is all I could think. Just the mere thought that there might be other women in the world, other girls, lost and lonely and desperate in their grief over their mothers…it was utterly overwhelming. It was also this defining moment in which I realized, perhaps for the first time ever, that I might actually survive this. Staring down at Hope’s photo on the back cover, seeing another woman who had experienced what I had, and gone on to tell about it, I realized that I might actually emerge from my mother’s death and one day find a way to feel whole again.

To say this book has had a profound effect on my journey of grief following my mother’s death, is an understatement.

Hope was literally the first person who ever gave me hope in the wake of my loss. I finally met her in person for the first time last year, at a little coffee shop in Santa Monica. I’ve met so many authors in the last decade but this was most awestruck I’d ever felt in the presence of one. We sat outside with our coffee and I could barely bring myself to speak, so instead I listened to Hope tell me that she had just read my book, and how much she loved it, and then I really couldn’t speak.

So instead, I gave my best attempt to tell Hope in a wobbly voice, tears in my eyes, just how much her book had meant to me, how much light and promise it had given to my poor, broken 20 year old self all those years ago, and how grateful I was to her because of it.

I’m sure you can imagine how honored I am to tell you that I’ve been asked to be the guest speaker this year at the annual Motherless Daughters Luncheon hosted by Hope Edelman and Irene Rubaum-Keller.

If you’re a motherless daughter or you know one who is, please join us! Here is a link to the official invitation. 

On Sunday I took the girls down to a writer friend’s house in Orange. It was way hell and gone, over near Riverside, and took over an hour to get to. Jules slept and V watched TV and I stared at the highway streaming ahead of me, and thought about my life.

It was nice to be with my friends, all of them writers. Samantha Dunn, Jillian Lauren and Mark Sarvas. All of our kids are the same age and they ran around the yard with a pig and a horse and some dogs, while we drank wine and talked writing, and it was warm and sunny, and even though Jules knocked over a wine glass and Vera was afraid of all the animals, for just a little while I stopped thinking about all the things I have to think about these days.

All my life I’ve wanted to be a writer. Seriously. Ever since I was like, 9 and really understood that to be an option. Like really understood it, not the way Vera thinks she understands it now. I was a voracious reader by then, devouring anything my bought for me, and then eventually even my Dad’s Dean Koontz books, just because I needed something more.

I was already writing by then too. Dumb stories about lizards, and a couple years later stories about girls who ran away with their dogs, thinly veiled autobiographies of a life desired. After that poems, for years poems. Long, sad, terrible poems about loneliness and heartbreak. Christina Haag once wrote that she thinks she was born nostalgic. I think the same of myself. It was almost like I was primed for tragedy; I was so ready to write about it.

I think I was fifteen when I knew that there was no turning back, that I was going to be a writer. I had to be. And so I just gave myself over to it then, really let myself believe and dream and desire that life. I read about other writers all the time, about their lives and deaths, and in general I read dozens of books, as many as I could. I was the girl who read every book on the suggested summer reading list, not just the required five.

Then when I was in my twenties and publishing a book seemed like something I might really pull off one day, I then let myself dream of afternoons just like Sunday. I dreamed of being friends with real writers, about getting together to drink wine and talk about our next books, bitching about the changing face of publishing, bemoaning our failures and laughing and toasting to our successes.

And you know what?

It was all that. And even better than I imagined.

It’s better because it’s real. And it’s better too, because we have little kids running around, and that was never part of what I pictured, but it’s so cool that they’re there. I think about when they’re grown up one day and how they’ll tell stories about the other writers’ kids they were friends with and how we all sat around drinking and telling stories while they were completely unaware of how cool it all was. I love that.

But most of all, I just love the camaraderie, the shared sense of knowing this world, of being friends with people who grew up feeling the same way I did about books and words and life.