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. 

You are nine months old now. You have officially lived outside of my body, just as long as you were inside of it.

There’s something about this nine month mark. I felt it with your sister too. There’s an independence that comes with it, an attachment that is less to me, and more to the world around you. You are here and you are part of it all, and this is something you have begun to grasp.

I already can’t quite remember a time when you weren’t part of my life. I mean, of course I can remember all those 33 years before you arrived, but what I mean is that I can’t imagine not knowing you. I can’t imagine not being your mama, not being a guide for your sweet little soul.

And Juliette? You are sweet. So incredibly sweet. You are a happy little thing. You laugh all the time, even when you’re uncomfortable. You just laugh. You are watchful and you are quick to smile. I’ve seen you look around a room, just waiting to catch someone’s eye so that the moment you do, you can give them one of your quiet little smiles.

Life has been complicated at home lately, your dad and I trying hard to figure out our careers and finances and the future. Things seem uncertain much of the time and sometimes the stress of it all makes me feel like I can’t breathe. But then I look at you and your sister and I find myself able to take another breath.

We could be anywhere, on an airplane, in our living room, in the car in the morning on the way to take Vera to school, and the two of you are looking at each other. Vera is making some weird face, with an even weirder noise to go along with it, and your eyes are on hers, riveted by whatever she is doing, a small smile edging across your lips. And I realize that no matter how sticky or stressful life may be, as long as it’s not that way for you or Vera, then everything will be okay.

That’s what parents do, I suppose. They shield us from the worries of the world, for as long as they can. And that’s why we, as adults, often bemoan how hard it is to be a grown-up. And it is hard. Oh, how I wish I could go back to being a kid, or even a teenager, when my biggest worries were what to wear to school, what boy to like, and which quiz not to study for. I mean, of course it all felt bigger than that at the time, but looking back? Those seem like simple things.

Life is big, my sweet girl. It’s bigger and longer and messier and more wonderful than you or I even really know. But here’s the thing. It’s also what you want it to be. Life is the story you tell yourself it is. It’s the dream you choose to believe is real. It’s the path you thought you shouldn’t take, but then did. It’s the heart, so full of love you’re blinded by it.

It’s you.

And me.

And everything that is to come.

Love,

Mom

Dear Girls,

I’ve been missing my mom a lot lately. So often during my days I find myself staring off into oblivion, wishing I could talk to her about all the things that are running through my head. I don’t know if she would have any answers for me, not the ones I’m looking for anyway (I don’t think anyone has those), but I know that she knew me, and that with just a few words she would be able to see right into the depths of what it is I’m feeling these days. She would be able to tell me where I am, even if she couldn’t explain why.

I hope that I get to know you girls like that too. That I come to understand who you are deep, deep down, even if you are very different from who I am. But I know that even if the three of us end up on completely different paths, you’ll still look to me over and over throughout your lives. I will become the inevitable barometer against which you measure your actions.

Just as I do with my own mother, you will find yourself evaluating your choices against mine. My mother did this. My mother did not do that. My mother was this age when she did this. My mother always reacted this way when that happened. And there will be no right or wrong ways of being, just measurements. There will be a thousand things I do that you will disagree with, and another thousand that you will want to copy word for word. There will be parts of who I am that will make you shake your head and swear up and down to yourself that you will never, ever be. There will be other things about me that you will envy or try to emulate for all of your days to come.

I am more aware than ever that this is beginning to unfold, that the ties between the three of us are winding around one another, threading into a larger cord that stretches back through my mother and hers, and the women who came before them, each of us weaving ourselves into something that holds us together no matter who we become.

My mother was forty when I was born. She had been married twice before my father, but I was her first (and only) child. Becoming a mother changed (enhanced?) everything about who she was. Long after she was gone my father used to shake his head and wonder what would have become of her had he not met and married and created a child with her. He would chuckle with mild scorn in his voice about “that damn walk up apartment” she was living in in Manhattan, all of her weird artist friends, her debt and her flailing career choices.

At times I chuckled with him, shaking my head. My silly mom, I’d agree. But now I think about her, living her life in New York, just being whoever she was. If my father hadn’t come along, if I had never been born, that would have been okay too, I think. Because she knew how to love. She loved people and moments and places and food and art and music. She loved really simple things, she knew how to sink down into the essence of something, how to be within a thing. Some of my most favorite moments in my own life I attribute to her, if only because she taught me how to take them in, how to lean back in the seat of a convertible to look up at the night sky, how to be quiet with my ear to the grass, listening to the earth move, and how to see myself even when I’m alone.

I don’t know what I will teach the two of you, what lasting lessons I will impart, but I hope that they will be as profound as the ones my mother left me with. I am a complicated woman, I know. I have so many faults, so many impulses and fears and soft sides, so many hard sides too. You will run up against them over and over, and maybe with time you’ll smooth down all the edges of me, like waves against stones. You’ll loosen me, undo me, create me, just as I did with my own mother.

With all my heart,

Mom