What No One Tells You About Losing Your Mom

I lost my mom three weeks after my 20th birthday. She was 51 and it was the day after Christmas at the end of a long battle with breast cancer.

For more than three decades I did not talk about it. I went from caretaking her to caretaking her mother, went back to college, started my career, and told myself I had handled it. When someone said they were sorry I would say it was a long time ago. I am okay. Which I now understand was a way of managing their feelings so I did not have to deal with my own.

Three years ago someone recommended me Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. Reading it felt like someone had finally handed me the manual for my own psychology. I brought Hope onto The Tamsen Show and what she said is something I want every woman who has ever lost her mother to hear.

We never stop missing her.

This is what Hope hears most consistently from the thousands of women she has worked with over thirty years. Women in their 20s and women in their 70s. Women who lost their mothers young and women whose mothers lived into their 80s. Every single one says some version of the same thing. I never stop missing what she could have given me.

It does not get better in the sense of going away, you get better at carrying it, and those are very different things.

Your grief did not look wrong.

The most common thing Hope hears is “I never grieved my mother” or “I did not grieve her properly.” And her first question is always the same: “what did you expect your grief to look like?”

Because most of us are waiting for the Hollywood version. The tears, the wailing, the inability to function. And when that was not how our grief showed up we decided something must be wrong with us or that we did not loved her enough.

Grief in children and adolescents looks nothing like that. It looks like acting out, changing your friend group, throwing yourself into caretaking, or going immediately back to school or work and insisting you are fine. 

When Hope asks women to trace back through what was happening in the months and years after their mother died they almost always start to see it. The grief was there, they just did not recognize it because it did not look the way they expected. And most women feel an enormous rush of relief when they finally understand that.

The age you were when you lost her matters.

Hope has worked with women who lost mothers at six and women who lost them at sixty-five. There is no comparison, no better or worse, no easier or harder. But the age you were matters enormously because it tells you what developmental stage you were in, what you were capable of understanding, and what the adults around you were or were not equipped to help you with.

Losing a mother at twenty, which is my story, means losing her before you have had any real practice being an adult without her. And losing her at fifty means losing the person who knew you longer than anyone else and carried the history of your whole life. Different losses, but both real and lasting.

Crossing the silent threshold.

I turned 50 and felt nothing. But, fifty was not my number, fifty-one was.

My mother died at fifty-one and a half. When I crossed that age something broke open in me. There was suddenly no roadmap. She had not had the experiences I was now having. She had not gone through menopause. She had not navigated midlife relationships or aging parents. She could not tell me what this felt like because she never got here.

Hope calls it crossing the “silent threshold.” The moment you become older than your mother was when she died. The culture does not acknowledge what a profound transition this is and most women cross it completely alone.

The difference between guilt and regret.

Guilt is what we feel about choices we made, while regret is what we feel about outcomes we could not control. They feel similar but they are not the same and knowing the difference changes how you heal.

The woman who did not make it back to the hospital because her flight was canceled is not carrying guilt. She had no control over the plane. What she is carrying is deep regret about a series of events that were never in her hands. Being able to name that clearly can release years of carrying something that was never hers to carry.

So many women are holding guilt for things that were never their fault. That is suffering that does not have to continue.

What motherless daughters often become.

Over thirty years of working with women who lost mothers young Hope has watched them become deeply empathetic. Remarkable parents who are committed to giving their children what they did not have. Women who know that aging is a privilege because they have been living in years their mothers never reached.

Many of us feel we are living for two. That is not a burden, that is a form of love.

What I want you to know.

If you lost your mother and have ever felt like you should be further along in your grief, like something is wrong with you for still missing her, please know there is an entire community of women who understand exactly how you feel.

If your mother is still alive and getting older and you find yourself thinking about her more than you used to, that is anticipatory grief and it is real and it is allowed.

Hope has been building a space for this conversation for thirty years. Her retreats, her weekly online support groups, and her book Motherless Daughters are where to start.

The grief does not go away, but you do not have to carry it alone.

Listen to What No One Tells You About Grief After Losing Your Mother here or you can watch it here.

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