Motherless Daughters (52 page)

______.
When She Was Good
(reprinted 2000). Teenaged Em loses her mother and runs away with her emotionally troubled older sister. After her sister dies, Em must face her family’s legacy of abuse. Ages 12 and up.

 

Maynard, Joyce.
The Usual Rules
(2003). Thirteen-year-old Wendy moves to California to live with her father after her mother dies in the Twin Tower
attacks of September 11, 2001. But she must leave a beloved stepfather and half-brother behind. Ages 13 and up.

 

Penson, Mary E.
You’re An Orphan, Mollie Brown
(1993). After their mother dies, Mollie and her twin brother live with relatives while their father goes off in search of work. Set in 1870s Texas. Ages 8 and up.

 

Radley, Gail.
Nothing Stays the Same Forever
(1988). Twelve-year-old Carrie has a widowed father who plans to remarry, an older sister who just started dating, and an elderly friend in poor health. Ages 9 and up.

 

Snicket, Lemony.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
series (1999-2004). Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire lose their parents in a fire, inherit a fortune, and try to elude the evil Count Olaf while searching for a stable home in this eleven-book series. Made into a 2004 film with Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. Ages 9 and up.

 

Sones, Sonya.
One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies
(2004). Fifteen-year-old Ruby loses her mother and is sent to live with her father, a famous actor in Los Angeles whom she has never met. Written as a series of prose poems.

 

Whelan, Gloria.
A Time to Keep Silent
(1993). Thirteen-year-old Clair stops speaking after her mother dies. Then she befriends Dorrie, also thirteen and motherless, who lives alone because her father is in jail. Ages 11 and up.

 

Woodson, Jacqueline.
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
(1994). Marie, an African-American eighth-grader whose mother left two years ago, befriends a white girl at school who confides that she’s being molested by her father. Ages 12 and up.

 

Wyman, Andrea.
Red Sky at Morning
(1991). Callie Common and her older sister Katherine go to live with their aging grandfather after their father leaves for Oregon and their mother dies in childbirth. Set on a hardscrabble Indiana farm in 1909. Ages 9 and up.

Holmes, Margaret M.
Molly’s Mom Died
(1999). School-aged Molly talks about the emotional aftermath of her mother’s death from illness. Includes a special note for caregivers at the end. Ages 5 to 9.

Madonna.
The English Roses
(2003). Four little English girls are envious of their “perfect” classmate—until they learn she’s motherless and in need of a friend. Ages 4 to 8.

 

Moore Campbell, Bebe.
Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry
(2003). School-aged Annie lives with a mother who suffers from bipolar disorder that can make her ‘angry on the outside.’ A supportive grandmother and a pair of silly friends provide Annie with consistent acceptance and love. Ages 4 to 8.

 

Ruben Greenfield, Nancy.
When Mommy Had a Mastectomy
(2005). Coping with a mother’s breast cancer, from a young child’s point of view. Ages 4 to 8.

Altschul, Sol, ed.
Childhood Bereavement and Its Aftermath.
Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1988.

Bassoff, Evelyn.
Mothering Ourselves.
New York: NAL-Dutton, 1992. ______.
Mothers and Daughters
. New York: Plume, 1988.

Becker, Ernest.
The Denial of Death
. New York: Free Press, 1973.

Bowlby, John.
A Secure Base.
New York: Basic Books, 1988.

______.
Attachment and Loss
, Volume III: Loss. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Cahill, Susan, ed.
Mothers.
New York: Mentor-Penguin, 1988.

Carlson, Kathie.
In Her Image.
Boston: Shambhala, 1990.

Carter, Betty, and Monica McGoldrick, eds.
The Changing Family Life Cycle.
Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1989.

Chernin, Kim.
In My Mother’s House
. New York: HarperCollins, 1984.

Chodorow, Nancy.
The Reproduction of Mothering.
Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978.

Commins, Patricia.
Remembering Mother, Finding Myself.
Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications, Inc., 1999.

Cowan, Carolyn Pape, and Philip A. Cowan.
When Partners Become Parents.
New York: Basic Books, 1992.

De Beauvoir, Simone.
A Very Easy Death.
New York: Pantheon, 1985.

______.
The Second Sex.
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972.

DeSpelder, Lynne Ann, and Albert Lee Strickland.
The Last Dance.
Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1992.

Dunne, Edward J., John L. McIntosh, and Karen Dunne-Maxim, eds.
Suicide and Its Aftermath.
New York: Norton, 1987.

Eisenstadt, Marvin, Andre Haynal, Pierre Rentchnick, and Pierre de Senarclens.
Parental Loss and Achievement.
Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1989.

Emswiler, Mary Ann, and James Emswiler.
Guiding Your Child Through Grief.
New York: Bantam Books, 2000.

Ernaux, Annie.
A Woman’s Story.
New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. “Warming the Stone Child.” Boulder, Colo.: Sounds True Recordings. Tape no. A104, 1990.

Friday, Nancy.
My Mother/My Self.
New York: Dell, 1987.

Furman, Erna.
A Child’s Parent Dies.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

Granot, Tamar.
Without You.
Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005.

Grollman, Earl A.
Explaining Death to Children.
Boston: Beacon, 1967.

Gundlach, Julie Kettle.
My Mother Before Me.
Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1986.

Hammer, Signe.
By Her Own Hand.
New York: Vintage, 1992.

Harris, Maxine.
The Loss That Is Forever.
New York: Plume, 1995.

Kennedy, Alexandra.
Losing a Parent.
New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Klaus, Marshall H., John H. Kennell, and Phyllis H. Klaus.
Mothering the Mother.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth.
On Death and Dying.
New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Lauck, Jennifer.
Blackbird.
New York: Pocket, 2000.

Lowinsky, Naomi Ruth.
The Motherline.
Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1993.

Miller, Alice.
The Untouched Key.
New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1990.

______.
The Drama of the Gifted Child.
New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Minot, Susan.
Monkeys.
New York: Washington Square Press, 1987.

Moffat, Mary Jane, ed.
In the Midst of Winter.
New York: Vintage, 1992.

Myers, Edward.
When Parents Die.
New York: Penguin, 1986.

O’Fallon, Margaret, and Margaret Vaillancourt, eds.
Kiss Me Goodnight.
St. Paul, Minn.: Syren, 2005.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin.
Deborah, Golda, and Me.
New York: Crown, 1991.

Quindlen, Anna.
Living Out Loud.
New York: Ivy Books, 1988.

Rando, Therese A.
Treatment of Complicated Mourning.
Champaign, Ill.: Research Press, 1993.

______.
How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies
. New York: Bantam, 1991.

______.
Grief, Dying, and Death.
Champaign, Ill.: Research Press, 1984.

Rich, Adrienne.
Of Woman Born.
New York: Norton, 1986. ______.
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.
New York: Norton, 1979.

Secunda, Victoria.
Women and Their Fathers.
New York: Delacorte, 1992.

______.
When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends
. New York: Delta, 1991.

Sheehy, Gail.
Passages.
New York: Bantam, 1977.

Silverman, Phyllis Rolfe.
Never Too Young to Know.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Smiley, Jane.
A Thousand Acres.
New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992.

Viorst, Judith.
Necessary Losses.
New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1987.

Vozenilek, Helen, ed.
Loss of the Ground-Note.
Los Angeles: Clothespin Fever Press, 1992.

Walsh, Froma, and Monica McGoldrick, eds.
Living Beyond Loss.
New York: Norton, 1991.

Worden, J. William.
Children and Grief.
New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.

“It is the image in the mind . . . ”: Colette,
My Mother’s House
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953), cited in Mary Jane Moffatt, ed.,
In the Midst of Winter
(New York: Vintage, 1992 edition), 193.

xx “My mother died when I was nineteen . . . ”: Anna Quindlen, “Mothers,”
Living Out Loud
(New York: Ivy Books, 1988), 210.

xxii The Dougy Center Web site . . . :
http://www.dougy.org

xxiii As Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D. . . . : Phyllis Rolfe Silverman,
Never Too Young to Know
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15-16.

xxiii At least 2,990 children and teenagers . . . : Andrea Elliot, “Growing Up Grieving, With Constant Reminders of 9/11,”
New York Times,
September 11, 2004.

xxiii Six years earlier, more than 200 . . . : Personal correspondence, Jane Thomas, Collections Manager, Oklahoma City National Memorial, January 25, 2005; backed up by personal correspondence with Betty Pfefferbaum, Director, Terrorism and Disaster Branch of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, February 11, 2005.

xxiii Accidents and cancer are . . . : Table 1, “Deaths, percent of total deaths, and death rates for the 10 leading causes of death in selected age groups, by race and sex: United States, 2002,”
National Vital Statistics Reports
53, no. 17 (March 7, 2005): 18.

xxiii But the U.S. cancer rate among women . . . : Table No. 109, “Death Rates from Malignant Neoplasms, by Race, Sex and Age: 1950 to
2000,” U.S. Census Bureau,
Statistical Abstract of the United States 2004-2005
,
www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/vitstat.pdf
.

xxiii The AIDS epidemic in the United States . . . : Hope Edelman,
Motherless Daughters
(New York: Delta, 1995), xxii; “Estimates of the Number of Motherless Youth Orphaned by AIDS in the United States,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
268 (December 23-30 1992): 3456-3461.

xxiv As of March 2005, seven American . . . : Jerry Adler, “Children of the Fallen.”
Newsweek,
March 21, 2005, 27-32; Lisa Hoffman, “Six Moms Have Been Killed in Iraq,” Scripps Howard News Service, December 15, 2004,
www.shns.com/shns/warkids/warkids-moms.cfm
.

xxiv Among some of its findings are . . . : J. William Worden,
Children and Grief
(New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 95-96.

xxvi In every racial group in America . . . : D. L. Hoyert, H. C. Kung, and B. L. Smith, “Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2003
,
”
National Vital Statistics Reports
, 53, no. 15 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 2005), Table A, 3.

xxvi Today, the average twenty-year-old Caucasian male . . . : Table No. 93, “Selected Life Table Values: 1979 to 2001,” U.S. Census Bureau,
Statistical Abstract of the United States 2004-2005
, 71,
www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/vitstat.pdf
.

xxvi Among African Americans . . . : Ibid.

xxvi American men of all races . . . : Hoyert, Kung, and Smith, “Deaths,” 7.

xxvi In 2003 alone: Ibid.; Table 1, “Deaths and death rates by age, sex, and race and Hispanic origin and age-adjusted death rates, by sex and race and Hispanic origin: United States, final 2002 and preliminary 2003,” 7; and Table 2, “Deaths, death rates, and age-adjusted death rates for 113 selected causes, injury by firearms, drug-induced deaths, alcohol-induced deaths, and injury at work: United States, final 2002 and preliminary 2003,” 15.

xxvi More than 676,000 American children . . . : Calculated from statistics printed in Neil Kalter, et al., “The Adjustment of Parentally Bereaved Children,
Omega
46 (2002-2003), 15-34; Katherine Porterfield et al., “The Impact of Early Loss History on Parenting of Bereaved Children: A Qualitative Study,”
Omega
47 (2003), 203-220; U.S. Census Bureau, Table No. 11, “Resident Population by Age and Sex:
1980 to 2003,”
www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/pop.pdf
; U.S. Census Bureau, Table No. 12, “Resident Population Projections by Sex and Age: 2005 to 2050,”
www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/pop.pdf
.

xxvi Nearly 25,000 girls have . . . : Ibid.

xxvi I calculate that there are . . . : Ibid.

xxvi Fn: More than 532,000 children . . . : The AFCARS Report: Preliminary FY 2002 Estimates as of August 2004, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families,
www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb
.

xxvi Fn: Approximately 126,000 children have mothers . . . : Christopoher J. Mumola, “Incarcerated Parents and Their Children,” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 2000, NCJ 182335, 2; J. Poehlmann, “Incarcerated Mothers’ Contact with Children, Perceived Family Relationships, and Depressive Symptoms,”
Journal of Family Psychology
19 (Sept. 2005), 350-357.

xxvii When a parent dies young . . . : Maxine Harris,
The Loss That Is Forever
(New York: Plume, 1996), 48.