Motherless Mothers Quotes

“With my mother, I felt helpless all the time. Sometimes I feel helpless as a mother, but I know it’ll pass. And this time, there are things I can do to make it better. For example, Rose cries whenever I put her in the stroller, but once I start pushing the stroller, she’s happy. I remind myself that crying is her way of expressing herself, because she can’t speak, whereas my mom cried because she felt pain, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become

“Strange, now, how after so many years my mother’s model is starting to recede. Before I became a mother, I was a motherless daughter, and “motherless” always overshadowed “daughter” in that phrase. Now I’m a motherless mother, and “mother” is the word that carries most of the weight. Early loss influences me, daily, but it doesn’t define me anymore.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become

“Motherless mothers with a history of caretaking experience, usually for sick mothers or younger siblings when they were still children themselves, said that the round-the-clock nature of infant and toddler care sometimes brought up familiar emotions from the past.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become