Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become » (Reprint)

Hope Edelman is a writer whose work has appeared nationally. She graduated from the University of Iowa Writing Program and lives in New York City. Her mother died when she was seventeen.

When Hope Edelman, author of the New York Times bestseller Motherless Daughters, became a parent, she found herself revisiting the loss of her mother in ways she had never anticipated. Now the mother of two young girls, Edelman set out to learn how the loss of a mother to death or abandonment can affect the ways women raise their own children.

In Motherless Mothers, Edelman uses her own story as a prism to reveal the unique anxieties and desires that these women experience as they raise their children without the help of a living maternal guide. In an impeccably researched, luminously written book enriched by the voices of the mothers themselves—and filled with practical insight and advice from experienced professionals—she examines their parenting choices, their triumphs, and their fears, and offers motherless mothers the guidance and support they want and need.

Publishers Weekly

Edelman first undertook this painful topic in 1994 (Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss), drawing from her own experience of losing her mother at 17. Now a mother herself, she considers how her mother's absence has shaped her seven years of parenting. Through interviews, anecdotes and psychological research, Edelman discusses the challenge of mothering in the shadow of someone gone, which often triggers a resurgence of childhood grief and confusion. But this is less a book on mourning than a supportive guide for mothers who may feel overwhelmed and alone, bereft of their own mothers' presence, advice and support. Chapters address general child-rearing topics for each age group with focuses specific to the reader: the void of the absent grandmother, the urge to overcompensate and the perpetual impulse to protect one's family from the specter of loss. Bereavement counselors examine the process of revisiting a traumatic youth through one's children, which affords the opportunity to heal. Edelman's voice, suffused with fierce maternal love, joins the candid recollections from motherless mothers of all ages and backgrounds. She presents emotionally charged concepts in clear, memorable terms (e.g., reaching the "neon number" of a mother's age of death) to encourage frank, cathartic discussion. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.