Becoming a Mother After Losing My Own

How one mother navigates parenthood without her own mom. Photo: Stephen Morris/Stocksy.

My mother died almost 22 years ago and yet I can’t walk past a mirror or window without being reminded of her. My rounded chin, high cheekbones, eyes, and widow’s peak — every time I catch a glimpse of myself, it’s like saying hello to a ghost.

For years, I have reveled in our similarities, but since becoming a mother myself eight years ago, it’s become much more profound.

My hand rested on my daughter’s looks just like hers. The same veins popping close to the surface. The same half moon curve to the whites in our fingernails. They bring back the memory of her fingers running through my hair when middle school made me cry. Or the way she tightened her fists in anger when I pushed her to her limits (as I often did).

My voice is the same as hers, too.

“Because I said so,” I bark at my kids when they ask why they can’t do something for the millionth time.

“I love you more than anything,” I say, pulling them close.

My children are 8, 6, and one. They will never know my mother — how clumsy she was or how she played the guitar or how her self-deprecating humor could make us laugh until tears spurted from our eyes. She died when I was 16.

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Parenting after losing your mother at a young age is like taking an epic road trip without a GPS. There are signs sure, and you can ask for directions, but for the most part, when you are behind the wheel, it’s just you and the road.

It can also open channels of grief a woman hadn’t experienced. “Mourning is a lifelong process,” psychotherapist Dr. Dana Dorfman tells Yahoo Parenting. “As women navigate new life stages (like motherhood), their relationship with the deceased mother changes. Often, a daughter’s grief is reignited.”

Sasha Brown-Worsham and her mother. Photo provided by Sasha Brown-Worsham

Hope Edelman, author Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, tells Yahoo Parenting that she had that experience after the birth of her first daughter 17 years ago.

Edelman, 50, just reached a major milestone for a motherless mother this past year: Her oldest child reached the age Edelman was when she lost her mother. “I was aware of it almost down to the day and week,” she says. “I was really concerned about it. I thought I’d be flying blind [parenting a child at that age because I lost my mother then] and at some level, do feel a little lost and sad because I didn’t have that myself.”

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Of course, she also knows her own child better than anyone. In other words, there is no one better equipped to parent her child. And that’s a fact the motherless mother knows all too well.

Katrina Shahan, a mother of four from Ohio, lost her father at 2 and her mother at 16. She tells Yahoo Parenting that it took seven years — and the birth of her first child — for the real grief to set in.

“My real longing for my mom was overbearing at times,” Shahan says. “I wanted to call her when I was pregnant. When my daughter was born I wanted her there. We named her Kassandra (my mom was Sandra and Ka for me). I cried out for her many times in those first few weeks of sleepless nights.”

Edelman says that while researching her book, she found most mothers felt the most acute grief right around the birth of their first child. This was especially true if that first child was a girl.

For me, that not exactly the way it worked.

My first daughter healed me in ways I never could have imagined. I pulled her to my chest after 13 hours of labor, looked into her eyes, and felt almost immediately like all those years of longing for family and stability had ended.

It was like that the entire first year. As a teen, I’d always felt like I was standing outside in the dark, looking in on other families in their well-lit homes. With the birth of my first child, I had my own illuminated space. It was magical. But it didn’t stay that way.

Seven years later, almost to the day, I gave birth to my third child, also a girl. I was 200 miles away from my home since we’d moved the year before. And this time, the grief was crippling.

My mother has been gone almost 22 years and I still find myself rolling my thumb over the numbers on my cell phone wanting to dial a number— any number — on the off-chance that she might be on the other line. I want to ask her about how I was as a baby and have her meet her newest granddaughter. She’s pretty amazing. I want my mom to hold her and kiss her blonde head and laugh at the way she calls everything — her bottle, her high chair, her food, me — “mama.”

Twenty-two years into this loss, I have finally accepted it’s not going away. No amount of children or husbands or best friends is ever going to fill this loss. But I can have a fulfilling life anyway. The grief has woven its way into the tapestry and has become a part of me. I can’t imagine what my life might look like without it.

I know how to parent my own children. I don’t believe in heaven or in some mystical land where my mother is watching my life from a distance. But I do believe that her love echoes at night when I rock my sick baby. Or when I call my kids 100 silly nicknames.

My mom did that stuff, too.

And, though she’s not here physically, there is some comfort in looking in the mirror and her staring back at me. Watching everything. Even if I don’t believe in an after-life, each one of my three children is a part of her. And I know she’d love them every bit as much as I do.

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