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Authors: Hope Edelman
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move forward, there’s a wish to regress. And when you regress, you watch for the parent to be there. If you look back and there’s nobody there, it’s really scary.” Evelyn Bassoff, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, and the author of Mothering Ourselves, adds, “In those times of transition, our psychic systems are not in harmony. There’s a lot of inner conflict. We cling to protective figures or memories of protective figures. There’s a longing to be safe.”
When we reach these milestones, a mother’s absence is painfully obvious. Either consciously or subconsciously, we once imagined these occasions and expected her to be there. When she isn’t, our assumptions clash with reality in the most dissonant of ways. The daughter mourns not only what was lost, but what will never be—and, if her mother didn’t offer protection and support when alive, the daughter also grieves for what she once needed but never had.
I missed my mother, terribly, when I graduated from college and no one from my family was there. I missed her when I got my first job promotion and wanted to share the news with someone who’d be proud. I missed her when both my daughters were born, I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the obstetrician’s office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she
were alive isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.
The Resolution Hoax
I wish I believed that mourning ends one day or that grief eventually disappears for good. The word resolution dangles before us like a piñata filled with promise, telling us we need only to approach it from the right angle to obtain its prize. But if grieving truly did have an attainable, ultimate goal, more of us would feel we were reaching it. Of the 154 motherless women surveyed for this book, more than 80 percent said they were still mourning their mothers, even though their losses occurred an average of twenty-four years ago.
Full resolution of mourning is a state of consciousness so difficult—if not impossible—to reach that most of our attempts will inevitably fall short and leave us feeling inept. Some losses you truly don’t get over. Instead, you get around them, and past. “Resolution? I hate that word,” Therese Rando says. “I use the term accommodate, because at different points in time you can have accommodated the loss, made room for it in your life, and have come to a relative peace with it, but then something else can bring it up again later on. Grief is something that continues to get reworked. Even if you lose a parent after childhood, in your teenage years or later in life, you’re still going to have to rework it, and rework it. The notion of ‘forever-after resolved, never going to come up again’ is one I don’t buy at all.” Says fifty-three-year-old Caroline, who was eleven when her mother died of heart disease, “I still miss my mother. If I were someone listening to me, I’d be surprised that someone can miss somebody for forty-two years. Like, Why don’t you get over it? I used to think grieving was like going through a tunnel, and after you get through it, somehow at the other end the pain and feeling of loss would be gone. When I realized that I didn’t have to get over the loss, and that if I didn’t get over it I was still okay, then it took the pressure off me. I could just sort of embrace it and say, ‘Well, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.’”
Sigmund Freud believed that true mourning involved a slow and total psychic detachment from the loved object, with an ultimate goal of later reattachment to someone else. His theory served as the basis for decades of mourning research, but more recent scholars of bereavement have seriously
When we reach these milestones, a mother’s absence is painfully obvious. Either consciously or subconsciously, we once imagined these occasions and expected her to be there. When she isn’t, our assumptions clash with reality in the most dissonant of ways. The daughter mourns not only what was lost, but what will never be—and, if her mother didn’t offer protection and support when alive, the daughter also grieves for what she once needed but never had.
I missed my mother, terribly, when I graduated from college and no one from my family was there. I missed her when I got my first job promotion and wanted to share the news with someone who’d be proud. I missed her when both my daughters were born, I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the obstetrician’s office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she
were alive isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.
The Resolution Hoax
I wish I believed that mourning ends one day or that grief eventually disappears for good. The word resolution dangles before us like a piñata filled with promise, telling us we need only to approach it from the right angle to obtain its prize. But if grieving truly did have an attainable, ultimate goal, more of us would feel we were reaching it. Of the 154 motherless women surveyed for this book, more than 80 percent said they were still mourning their mothers, even though their losses occurred an average of twenty-four years ago.
Full resolution of mourning is a state of consciousness so difficult—if not impossible—to reach that most of our attempts will inevitably fall short and leave us feeling inept. Some losses you truly don’t get over. Instead, you get around them, and past. “Resolution? I hate that word,” Therese Rando says. “I use the term accommodate, because at different points in time you can have accommodated the loss, made room for it in your life, and have come to a relative peace with it, but then something else can bring it up again later on. Grief is something that continues to get reworked. Even if you lose a parent after childhood, in your teenage years or later in life, you’re still going to have to rework it, and rework it. The notion of ‘forever-after resolved, never going to come up again’ is one I don’t buy at all.” Says fifty-three-year-old Caroline, who was eleven when her mother died of heart disease, “I still miss my mother. If I were someone listening to me, I’d be surprised that someone can miss somebody for forty-two years. Like, Why don’t you get over it? I used to think grieving was like going through a tunnel, and after you get through it, somehow at the other end the pain and feeling of loss would be gone. When I realized that I didn’t have to get over the loss, and that if I didn’t get over it I was still okay, then it took the pressure off me. I could just sort of embrace it and say, ‘Well, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.’”
Sigmund Freud believed that true mourning involved a slow and total psychic detachment from the loved object, with an ultimate goal of later reattachment to someone else. His theory served as the basis for decades of mourning research, but more recent scholars of bereavement have seriously
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