Motherless Daughter's Club - You don't really know what it feels like until you join the club. No one understands that this is a life altering loss that leaves a big hole in your heart&.forever. Regardless of what your age was when it happened.
I joined the club when I was 7 years old. My husband is amazed with all the memories I have of my mom. You would think a young child would not remember their mom, but I do.
The first awkward situations I remember was at school. I was in 2nd grade when my mom "passed" the summer prior. (She was a missing person, and police labeled her case as a homicide 8 years later.) Kids would ask me why I didn't have a mother. I would lie to them and say she died from smoking cigarettes. (She did smoke a lot, so that's where I got the idea from.)
At 7, I just didn't understand the situation, and I wanted to be able to say she died of something. Instead of the truth, which was her body was never found, and I didn't know how she was killed. It was like she disappeared out of thin air. And there was never a funeral to say "goodbye". I was robbed of that.
On top of that, my parents were divorced at the time. So my brothers and I went from being "divorced kids", bouncing back and forth between parents, to "kids who had no mom, and had to go live with father whom they hardly saw".
So kids at school thought it was weird that my parents were divorced. But they divorced when I was 3 years old, so that's all I knew growing up. Then kids thought it was weird when I'd say I didn't have a mom. You know, what kid doesn't have a mom? Everyone does....until they don't. You just don't expect to lose your mom that young.
Any daughter who lost their mother at a young age understands these things:
You cry during monumental moments because you wish your mom was there. I was a tomboy in school and had more guy friends than girlfriends. I don't like to do idol chat like normal girls. I've gotten a bit better with that over the years. But still. My personality and how I define myself is from losing my mom when I was a child. Good or bad, it's what I am forced to deal with the rest of my life.
Anyway, I wanted to share an amazing book I'm reading right now. I stumbled upon it in the self help section at the bookstore. It's called
"Motherless Daughters" by Hope Edelman. We are really not alone in the club, and it helps to know that everything we feel, and how we go through our lives is normal or as normal as can be.