for the daughters and families of absent mothers in London
for the daughters and families of absent mothers in London
Mum died just after her 42nd birthday and my 13th. Ten years later my father also passed on, not long followed by my grandparents.
We started this project because it offers, or hopes to, what we needed ourselves when we were younger; a space where outsiderhood from acceptable family norms is ok. And a space where the early loss of mothering – however it happens, is also ok, because it’s not actually uncommon, nor is it unlucky, nor is it a thing of shame. Losing a mother or mothering early is a facet of life we all have to rally around in community, not just behind closed doors, because collectively we all play an enormous role in shaping how affected children see themselves after an adversity like motherloss.
WHAT HAPPENED
My mum, was beautiful inside and out. She was sweet-hearted and strong and she carried a well of emotional depth and warmth about her. She was also mischievous and playful and she was clever. She’d always question the true reason behind things and she’d never take things at face value. She had integrity in everything she did; as a mother, as a teacher, as a friend, as a woman of faith. She was glamorous too, she loved to wear colour and she loved pink roses.
She’d first had breast cancer when I was around 11 and was supposed to be in remission. Nobody told me she was ill again, but when I realised something was wrong I thought she’d get better like she had before. Dad stopped working to care for her and he tried to shield us from her illness so somehow mum slid out of my view. Then one morning I awoke with a terrible feeling and didn’t want to go to school. By the time my dad picked me up she had died without warning. She’d slipped through my fingers and we hadn’t said goodbye.
Afterwards she was never spoken of again – not ever. Not at home nor with friends nor with relatives, nor at school. When I returned to school after mum’s funeral I discovered my teachers had told my classmates not to mention her. This was one London’s top performing girls grammar schools but it lacked the feminine wisdom to acknowledge the passing of a mother.
Dad stepped heroically after she died. He and my grandparents did everything right based on what they knew. They kept us safe, maintained the house, sent us off to school and kept our routines. My grandmother cooked the weekday meals, dad made the breakfasts and most incredible Sunday lunches which were the envy of all my friends. Their love was dispensed through food and safety, but they weren’t emotionally available because they hadn’t been taught how to be.
My father had lost his own mother tragically young when a bomb fell on her house during wartime Cyprus. The trauma was never grieved nor resolved. His own father, my grandfather, also lost his mother as a toddler and would not have grieved her either. So early motherloss was ancestral in our family and emotional denial was conditioned.
The silence over mum’s death and life continued for the next decade until dad died, then it enveloped him too. Dad’s death was a robbery. One morning he wasn’t feeling well. Three days later he died unexpectedly of multiple organ failure. Without warning my devoted father had gone as well. Then the same thing happened – his name was never again mentioned by anybody that knew him and no stories or memories of him were ever recalled, not for years. Like mum he’d had become unmentionable because he died.
LOOKING BACK
Looking back every message I received told me to put the past behind me and move forward, but every area of my life was impacted; my education (the signs weren’t spotted at school), my career, my friendships and the way I navigated relationships – everything.
But I know now that it wasn’t mum’s early death or dad’s that really impacted my life. It was the way those disconnections were received outside and the messages I absorbed afterwards.
Beyond the loss of unconditional love and natural belonging that comes with mothering, as if not great enough, I realise now there were so many things that happened after mum died, which are still deemed as ‘normal’ that made everything worse. There were omissions following her death that were socially prescribed. Then there were add-ons. Learnings I wish I’d never absorbed that made things harder.
Loosing mum early was not just a lack of a mother, but a social experience of stigma and disenfranchisement. The blanket silencing around it, not just at home but by everyone handed me a sense of outsiderhood as a teen. It took me years to understand how much shame and self-blame I carried around her loss just because it couldn’t be spoken about. The taboo of death spoke volumes when I was 13. The early learning was that her death was something so terrible and dark it had to remain hidden – I internalised it into a belief that it is I who is wrong and must hide.
Mum’s death was an event not an identity but the silencing around it handed me a limited identity and a requirement for inauthenticity, borne by the collective fear we hold around death and the loss of mothering.
Then there were other cultural norms which influenced how I navigated life without my parents.
Messages born of individualism which said I had to be strong and independent prescribed extreme self-reliance. I thought I was supposed to do everything on my own.
Messages which told me that I was ‘unfortunate’ in my circumstances and couldn’t expose my vulnarability created periods of isolation and running away in attempts to ‘fix’ myself on my own before I could emerge as though nothing had happened. Messages which said that my fulfillment was conditional upon my performance prescribed struggle, perfectionism and the perpetual delay of the things I really wanted. I’d dance with attachments and I’d walk tightropes of conditionality. My worth and my happiness became conditional, predicated on my perfection (which was never achieved).
I realise now that we all live in the current of these beliefs; that we have to compete for the things we want, that we’re not enough as we are, that there exist conditions around happiness and belonging.
The problem is though, that for young person who has experienced a major disconnection and isn’t supported, those mandates get magnified way out of proportion. If there’s no balancing or soothing of those directives anywhere they get amplified to the point where they build enormous defences to navigate life.
REFLECTIONS
Our disconnections still aren’t really recognised even today, they’re reserved for special containers; therapists or other services but always in enclosed spaces behind closed doors, not embedded into everyday life, as if death and adversity are fates which don’t befall us all. But we participate in the impacts for young people because by silencing them of their disconnects we shape behaviours and identities around them.
How a young person adapts to life’s adversities doesn’t happen in a social vacuum so therapists can’t really fix an experience when the world outside continues to shun it. Motherloss in particular is also a chronic experience so it can’t be band-aided behind closed doors.
To silence a child of the loss of their mother is to negate their expression and sense of entitlement through life. They cut a part of themselves off to survive the disconnection. To pity that child is to disempower them and build fortresses of defences. Then we load them with crappy values of competition and control and independence that prevent them from dismantling them.
A lot since I was growing up; it’s now recognised that the role of cultural norms like the death taboo and individualism, set up faulty blueprints for how communities and families raise and respond to children. So the responsibility to heal it isn’t squarely on the remaining parent or even a school; it’s a collective one.
But things haven’t come nearly far enough. Bereavement policies still aren’t mandatory in schools and most teachers don’t feel their equipped or even allowed to address a child after a major disconnection.
A friend of mine working in children services describes them as pursuing more of a therapy model for early adversity -as if it’s an illness to be dealt with at the time of crisis. Young people referred receive a set period of time for support. When it finishes they’re invited to drop-in sessions but they tend to stop going at that point because their ‘affliction’, she says, isn’t relevant to their daily lives. It’s not normalised outside of those containers. Meanwhile the demand for those services increases because the underlying causes of childhood adversity, such as poverty, are rising. So it’s not feasible to leave those disconnects to special services to deal with.
Last year a school friend died leaving two daughters aged 6 and 12. They’d had the benefit of therapy I was told, but when I suggested the older daughter meets other girls who can relate, her father was against it because he said she wanted to be ‘normal’. So she’d already absorbed the message that she isn’t normal. How could his daughters not be affected if the message is that their mother’s fate was so unfortunate it can’t be shared openly?
GUIDANCE
I write all this, of course, through the narrowed lens of what I know went wrong – because much in my life also went right and throughout it all I know I’ve been sustained and that my connection with my mother and my father has endured inspite of their deaths.
But if I had to surmise my experience, it was of a severance of connection to myself as well as to the world around. That can happen for young people in so many ways other than though the death of a mother. It can happen when a child goes into care or through a mother’s own generational trauma or a father’s which is usually not intended.
And so this community project is meant for girls and their families that are experiencing the early loss of mothering, however it may have happened. And it’s intention is to connect them locally so they meet their peers and know that they’re not alone, have fun, and get a bit of guidance from those of us with the ‘lived-experience’.
When I finally started tending to my experiences, I recovered fragments of myself I’d forgotten about. I remembered my essential nature, who I was outside of the limited identity I was handed. That’s the transformational potential of this experience. But it can’t be the responsibility of one mother alone to heal or a father or a therapist. Its a collective responsibility because we all play a huge role in shaping the identity kids build around the experience for themselves.
If I had any advice to give a young daughter or son without mothering, above all I would tell them that there’s strength in numbers –that they should seek their peers, that sharing their inner world with people who ‘get it’ isn’t something special, that it’s actually integral to their future because they will seek reconnection throughout their lives.
They need to know that they belong to a greater whole even though they haven’t got their mum or family around. That the answers aren’t outside of themselves, that they don’t have to grasp for things or abandon themselves to prove themselves worthy. That they have an entitlement to the things they want and a right to the life they want.
That message can only really come from those of us who have already walked that path and understand it.
If I could advise any father or carer of an unmothered child, I’d tell them how much the experience needs to be normalised for their kids. That no matter how it’s being dealt with at home their child’s self-concept is being shaped by the world around them, whether they like it or not. That it’s not a weakness of theirs to connect their children with others in the same boat, it’s one of the best things they actually can do for them. If they ask any adult who lost mothering early, hands down the one thing they will all say is that they wish they’d known others growing up.
I don’t know why my mum died so young. I wish I knew more of her ways. I wonder what we would have been like as women together and who I’d have become had she lived. But sharing a bit of my own experience is already bringing me reward because there’s power in it. And if shedding a bit of light on the experience is helpful to someone else, it would mean that the difficulties of navigating life without her and my dad, weren’t without meaning and purpose after all.
