Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother

What happens when a young woman loses her mother— and why the question isn't settled

It’s time for a brief update on Hope Edelman’s groundbreaking Motherless Daughters, though the New York Times review from 1994 still stands: “This book remains a moving and valuable treatment of a neglected subject, jolting us into awareness of the profound problems mother loss leaves in its wake.”

— The New York Times Book Review, 1994

I just saw the trailer for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a film coming this fall — big stars, a plot kept deliberately under wraps — built around a single mesmerizing phrase that turns over and over in the clip. The words come from an old hadith, in which a man asks the Prophet who deserves his devotion most, and the answer comes back three times before any other person is named.

I couldn’t stop thinking about my own mother — and about Hope Edelman, who understood more than thirty years ago that this is how mother loss speaks: not once, but again and again — at a high school graduation, at a wedding, at the birth of a child, at family holidays — a refrain that returns for the rest of a daughter’s life. I know, because I’ve been hearing it since I was fourteen, when my mother died of lupus.

Hope Edelman was seventeen when her mother died of breast cancer. After college, she went into journalism, but at twenty-four she found herself missing her mother so intensely it registered as physical pain. The experience spurred her to write a magazine article, and when she went looking for a book that might explain what she was feeling, she couldn’t find one.

So, she wrote it herself.

Motherless Daughters was built on interviews, correspondence, and conversations with hundreds of women who had lost their mothers to death or estrangement — women Edelman, while in a master’s program in non-fiction writing, found through classified advertisements and word of mouth. Her subjects were self-selected rather than drawn from a controlled study. Edelman double-checked her observations by interviewing grief experts. So, this was testimony and careful journalism — not epidemiology. Motherless Daughters became a New York Times bestseller and has been published in more than a dozen countries. But it has taken many decades for researchers to — for the most part — verify Edelman’s important conclusions.

A 2022 qualitative study [1] of women who lost their mothers in adolescence found almost exactly what Edelman describes: grief that didn’t resolve on a timeline but resurfaced across the lifespan, tied to disrupted development and what researchers called complicated grief, along with a lasting undercurrent of insecurity in relationships. Edelman’s central conclusion — that grieving isn’t a linear process with an endpoint but a cyclical one that changes shape over time — was ahead of where grief science stood in 1994. The field has since mostly reinforced her finding.

But the story has more twists. Edelman’s later book on a related subject, Motherless Mothers, argues that early mother loss echoes into the next generation: that women who lost their mothers young parent differently, with consequences for their own children.

Here the evidence is contested. One small study [2] compared thirty “motherless mothers” to twenty-six matched controls, looking at their firstborn children. The motherless mothers reported significantly lower maternal identity — but their children were no more likely to show psychological symptoms than children of the comparison mothers. A 2023 qualitative study [3] of ten new mothers who had grown up without meaningful mothering of their own asked essentially Edelman’s question directly — how the absence of a mother shapes the parent a woman becomes — but as a small, interview-based study, it describes lived experience without establishing whether the pattern holds broadly.

An even more basic question also remains unsettled: does losing a parent in childhood reliably predict depression or other mental health struggles in adulthood, before we even get to the next generation? Some well-matched studies have found no clear association; others have found lasting effects. Researchers who have reviewed the whole body of evidence describe it as inconsistent enough that the field has shifted away from asking “does this cause harm” toward asking which circumstances and support systems matter most in promoting resilience.

In my years of clinical practice, I’ve seen why the picture might be so muddled: the impact of losing a mother in childhood depends on many other factors besides the loss itself. How present, steady, and attuned is the surviving father, a grandmother, even a beloved teacher? A daughter who loses her mother, and then effectively loses her remaining parent too — to grief, to absence, to simply not knowing how to help — carries a double burden. Studies that measure only the loss itself, without accounting for the quality of a daughter’s supports before and afterward, will keep producing the inconsistent picture the literature shows.

None of this erases what Edelman documented in the women she interviewed — or what I have lived. The science is still working out how far the pattern travels: what predicts a lifetime of disrupted mourning, and what enables resilient recovery.

That question — how a woman is impacted by and sometimes recovers from this loss — is one I eventually found myself exploring in fiction. Julia, the protagonist of my debut novel, A Hidden Fate, loses her mother twice: first to psychotic illness when Julia is six, then to death from a neurological disease when she turns fourteen. Edelman’s work shaped my understanding of myself early on, and it helped me portray Julia’s struggles, her intense longing for a child, and the way she finally comes to terms with her loss.

My novel joins a long line of books that have given motherless daughters their voice: novels like The Secret Life of Bees, Animal Dreams, and To Kill a Mockingbird, and memoirs like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. I labored for years to do justice to that lineage. Whether you are a motherless daughter or love someone who is, I hope Julia’s story will resonate with you.

Your mother, your mother, your mother — the refrain keeps coming back, long after she’s gone.

References

1. Women’s experiences of adolescent maternal loss: grief, attachment and adolescent development. Mortality, 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13576275.2022.2107423

2. Mireault, G.C., Thomas, T. & Bearor, K. (2002). Maternal identity among motherless mothers and psychological symptoms in their firstborn children. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 11, 287–297. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016868022570

3. Walsh A, Tiernan B, Thompson B, McCormack D, Adair P. ‘Nobody taught her how to be a mother’: The lived experience of mothering without a mother. Infant Ment Health J. 2023 Jul;44(4):554-571. doi: 10.1002/imhj.22059. Epub 2023 Apr 27. PMID: 37103970. https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.22059