Motherless Daughters (50 page)

The following organizations offer support, social events, or both for motherless daughters. Additional resources and news about upcoming groups and events are added and updated frequently at
www.motherlessdaughters.net
and
www.motherlessmothers.com
.

 

P.O. Box 64373
Los Angeles, CA 90064
310-474-2208
www.motherlessdaughtersbiz.com
Contact: Irene Rubaum-Keller, MFT

 

9053 Suva St.
Downey, CA 90242
562-862-6653
[email protected]
www.motherlessdaughtersoc.com
Contact: Mary Felix

 

45333 Kensington
Utica, MI 48317
586-337-3110
[email protected]
www.metrodetroitmotherlessdaughters.net
Contact: Vicki Waldron

 

Chicago, IL
773-233-5460 (Chicago)
630-424-8081 (western suburbs)
[email protected]
Contacts: Ruta Grigola (Chicago); Dawn Klancic (western suburbs)

 

 

Boston, MA
[email protected]
http://motherlessdaughtersofnewengland.intranets.com
Contact: Linda Mills

 

 

4637 Ironwood Dr.
Hamburg, NY 14075 (Buffalo area)
716-627-4934
[email protected]
www.circleofdaughters.com
Contact: Day Cummings, CSW, RN

 

 

P.O. Box 494
Lionville, PA 19353
www.mommyslight.org
(for girls ages 3 to 18)

 

 

(Toechter ohne Muetter)
Winterthur, Switzerland
41 (0)52 243 18 40
[email protected]
www.geocities.com/prettyswiss/Toechter_ohne_Muetter.html
(in German)
Contact: Andrea Allen

 

(Imahot L’lo Imahot)
C/o Rahav
Grizim 7, Apt. 2
Tel Aviv, Israel
972 54 471-4044
972 54 442-5856
[email protected]
www.motherlessmother.org.il
(Hebrew and English)
Contacts: Julie Rahav; Shoshanit Lupo Feigenberg

 

To find a bereavement group near you for children, teens, or family members, contact:

The Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families
3909 SE 52nd Ave.
Portland, OR 97206
866-775-5683
[email protected]

Or use the “Center Locator” option at
www.dougy.org
, which lists more than three hundred bereavement centers in the United States, Canada, and seven other countries.

Over the years, many readers have asked me to write more about the circumstances surrounding their specific types of loss. Although an in-depth discussion of every type of mother loss is beyond the scope of a single book, many excellent memoirs and novels feature female protagonists who for many different reasons are motherless at various ages. These include such classics as
To Kill a Mockingbird, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Long-stocking, Emma, Persuasion,
and the entire Nancy Drew series. (For nineteenth-century motherless protagonists, pick up virtually anything by George Eliot or the Brontë sisters.)

What follows is a list—by no means comprehensive—of books published in the last twenty-five years that feature real-life and fictional motherless daughters. If one of your favorites isn’t listed here, please send the title, author, and a brief synopsis of the book to [email protected] for inclusion in an online list.

Cournos, Francine.
City of One
(2000). Fatherless at three, then motherless at eleven, the author grows up in foster homes, always looking for a place to belong. Now a psychoanalyst and happily married mother, she looks back at the feelings of abandonment and depression that she managed to overcome.

 

Di Mari, Christina.
Ocean Star
(2006). The daughter of a neglectful, depressed mother and a violent fater with a checkered past, Christina grows up in 1960s and 1970s San Francisco with help from her Italian-American
extended family and a strong connection to God. Close sibling relationships, lifelong friendships, and a stable, loving husband also help her find her way.

 

Epstein, Helen.
Where She Came From
(1997). After the death of her mother, a Holocaust survivor, the journalist Helen Epstein travels to the Czech Republic to uncover details of her family’s past. She weaves together a history of three generations of Jewish women, including the story of her grandmother Pepi, who, at age eight, lost her mother to suicide.

 

Hammer, Signe.
By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter
(1991). Hammer was nine when her mother committed suicide in the kitchen of the family home. Now an adult battling chronic depression, she plumbs family memory for the roots of her mother’s ailment as well as her own.

 

Felman, Jil Lynn.
Cravings
(1997). The author, the third daughter in a Jewish Midwestern family, writes of mother loss as an adult, and the cravings for food, love, and women that have shaped her life.

 

Fox, Paula.
Borrowed Finery
(reprinted 2002). Abandoned as a baby by her biological parents, Fox is raised by a constantly changing cast of eccentric relatives and strangers, including a kindly Congregational minister. At twenty-one, she surrenders her own daughter for adoption, to be reunited many years later.

 

Goodwin, Doris Kearns.
Wait Till Next Year
(1998). A young female Dodgers fan grows up in 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn. Her childhood is idyllic until her mother dies and her father—an early orphan himself—sinks into despair.

 

Harrison, Kathryn.
The Kiss
(1997). A few years after losing her mother, the author meets, and becomes sexually involved with, the biological father she never knew.

 

______.
The Mother Knot
(2004). The author, now a mother of three, comes to terms with her mother’s death and legacy in this slim, elegant memoir.

 

Karbo, Karen.
The Stuff of Life
(2003). Karbo was a teenager when her mother died of cancer. When her stoic, uncommunicative father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Karbo, now a mother of two, shuttles back and forth between her home in Oregon and his trailer in Nevada. He’s a terrible
patient and she’s a self-doubting nursemaid, but they find their own common ground.

 

Kraus, Caroline.
Borderlines
(2004). The narrator loses her mother to cancer and moves to San Francisco, where she falls under the influence of an unstable female coworker. A story of losing and finding oneself after grief.

Lauck, Jennifer.
Blackbird
(2000). Seven-year-old Jennifer loses her mother, then her father, and endures additional hardships in the custody of a stepmother who leaves her at a church commune in 1970s Los Angeles.

______.
Still Waters
(2001). As a teenager and young adult Jennifer investigates her brother’s suicide.

 

______. S
how Me the Way
(2004). A collection of essays about parenting as a motherless mother.

Lord, M. G.
Astroturf
(2005). The author, an eighth-grader when her mother dies of cancer, is raised through adolescence by an engineer father—one of the country’s first rocket scientists. The book is part memoir, part history of the male-dominated Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the characters who sent missions to Mars.

 

Lyden, Jacki.
Daughter of the Queen of Sheba
(1997). A National Public Radio journalist tells about her unpredictable childhood with a manic-depressive mother who had episodes of delusional grandeur.

Marin, Pamela.
Motherland
(2005). The author was fourteen when her mother died of cancer at a Christian Science retreat, 2,000 miles away from the family’s Illinois home. At age twenty-nine, Marin starts dreaming of her mother and embarks on a journalist’s odyssey to piece together the true story of her mother’s life and death.

O’Fallon, Ann, and Margaret Vaillancourt, eds.
Kiss Me Goodnight
(2005). A collection of stories, poems, and essays by fifty-one women, all of whom were young when their mothers died of various causes, including cancer, suicide, alcoholism, accidents, and the Holocaust.

Pogrebin, Letty.
Deborah, Golda, and Me.
(1991) An exploration of female Jewish identity, written by an author left motherless at age fifteen.

Saffian, Sarah.
Ithaka
(1998). Sarah’s adoptive mother dies when Sarah is six. Eighteen years later, she receives a phone call from a woman claiming to be her birth mother.

Schreiber Le Anne.
Midstream: The Story of a Mother’s Death and a Daughter’s Renewal
(1991). A forty-year-old Manhattan newspaper editor is about to leave New York to move to the country when her beloved mother is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she decides to move in with her instead.

 

Scofield, Sandra.
Occasions of Sin
(2004). Raised Catholic in West Texas in the 1950s and 1960s, the author finds her adolescence is disrupted by her mother’s death from kidney disease when she is sixteen.

 

Steiker, Valerie.
The Leopard Hat
(2003). The author, who at age twenty loses her mother to cancer, recounts her childhood as the daughter of a beautiful, cultured, and elegant woman, and the special relationship they shared. Set in Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Swander, Mary.
Out of This World: A Journey of Healing
(1995). The author, motherless since her early twenties, recovers from a near-fatal illness while living among the Amish of Kalona, Iowa.

 

______.
Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
(2003). While a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, the author learns about alternative forms of healing, reflects on her Catholic childhood, and remembers the mother who died of cancer many years ago.

 

Yen Mah, Adeline.
Falling Leaves
(1997). Yen Mah’s mother died during her birth, and the child is considered an ill omen in the family. Raised by her wealthy, indifferent father and his beautiful, cruel second wife in 1950s Shanghai, she endures crushing emotional abuse yet finds solace from a loving aunt. Eventually she immigrates to the United States, where she finds love and becomes a successful doctor.

Allende, Isabel.
Portrait in Sepia.
(2001). Aurora del Valle, motherless since birth, tells the story of her remarkable life in a wealthy, powerful Chilean family. A narrative that spans fifty years, picking up where 1999’s
Daughter of Fortune,
the story of Aurora’s grandmother Eliza, left off.

 

Berg, Elizabeth.
Durable Goods
(1993). Eleven-year-old Katie, recently motherless, comes of age with a violent father and older, rebellious sister in early 1960s Texas.

______.
Joy School
(1998). Katie, now on the cusp of thirteen and recently relocated to Missouri, struggles to make friends; falls in love for the first time; and learns about what holds people together.

 

Fitch, Janet.
White Oleander
(1999). Fifteen-year-old Astrid Magnussen endures a succession of Los Angeles foster homes after her single mother, a poet, is imprisoned for poisoning an ex-boyfriend. Made into a 2002 film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Alison Lohman.

 

Fletcher, Susan.
Eve Green
(2004). Eve Green was eight when her single mother overdosed in their apartment in Birmingham, England, leaving Eve to live with her grandparents in a remote Welsh town. Now twenty-nine and pregnant, Eve looks back at those years and the characters who helped her emotionally survive.

 

Gibbons, Kaye.
Ellen Foster
(1987). Eleven-year-old Ellen tragically loses her mother, survives an abusive father, and relies on her wits and courage to find herself a nurturing home. Set in the American South.

 

Godwin, Gail.
Father Melancholy’s Daughter
(1991). Margaret was six when her free-spirited mother took off with a girlhood friend for a vacation from which she never returned. One year later she died. Fifteen years later, Margaret is emotionally attached to her depressed, Episcopalian minister father and struggling to understand her mother’s choice.

 

Golden, Arthur.
Memoirs of a Geisha
(1997). An orphaned nine-year-old girl from a small fishing village in Japan, sold into slavery after her mother’s death, becomes a leading geisha of the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Gordimer, Nadine.
Burger’s Daughter
(1979). The orphaned daughter of two white South African activists searches for her own identity, while the government keeps her under watch.

 

Gordon, Mary.
Pearl
(2005). Maria Meyers was raised as a Catholic by her single, converted-Jewish father after her mother dies. She’s now a single mother trying to save her adult daughter, Pearl, a political activist in the midst of a hunger strike in Dublin.

 

Hobhouse, Janet.
The Furies
(reprinted 2004). Helen is born into a family of idiosyncratic women, all widowed or abandoned by their men. Her mother—lovely, unstable, girlish—sends her to boarding school and later
commits suicide in Helen’s home. Believed to be an autobiographical story, in novel form.