Motherless MOTHERS

By SAMANTHA CRITCHELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- There are plenty of places a young mother can turn to for advice -- scores of books, Web sites and blogs, among them -- but most likely she'll also ask for and rely heavily on tips from her own mom.
Grandma might be the one to oversee a baby's first bath, or she might be in charge of a couple's older children when their parents are at the hospital having another baby. She might be the one to give children their first doughnut for breakfast (probably when Mom and Dad aren't looking) and she might be the one to make the first deposit into a college savings account.
So, what happens when a mom doesn't have a mother to turn to for these milestones?
She'll likely do her best to fill both roles and be so in tune to all of her children's needs that she risks becoming a little bit of a control freak, says Hope Edelman, author of "Motherless Mothers" (HarperCollins) and herself a motherless mother.
The differences
On the surface, mothers with mothers and mothers without them are pretty similar, according to Edelman, but if you pay attention, you'll see the motherless mothers have a heightened awareness -- especially in issues of loss and separation, safety, and emotional welfare. "Motherless mothers tend to like having control over situations to eliminate surprise," she says.
They're the women who pay attention to details, even over the little things, and they're also much more worried about their own death, Edelman says.
Edelman compared motherless mothers, women who were still childless when their mothers either died or for some other reason were no longer a part of their lives, with a control group of other mothers in her research. She also conducted a survey of 1,322 motherless mothers between October 2002 and June 2005; 80 percent were younger than 24 when they became motherless and the largest group -- 23 percent -- were younger than 6. Eighty-six percent of respondents lost mothers to death.
"The motherless mothers were more likely to rush in and try to fix their children's emotional problems immediately or try to minimize the child's stress, but sometimes they would've been better off allowing children to work it out," says Edelman.
"They're also the most committed and devoted group of mothers. They are so focused on giving what they didn't get: a very present mother."
But because their own childhood is often the elephant in the room, they end up parenting younger versions of themselves instead of the children they've got, she explains, caught up in events and dilemmas that they faced without a mother, not the events and dilemmas that are foremost in their kids' lives.
Gender issue
This is an issue more with mothers of girls than boys, Edelman notes. Yet, in interviews, motherless mothers during pregnancy expressed a preference for daughters. They thought they wanted the mother-daughter relationship they felt they missed out on, she says. The mothers said they wanted to be by the sides of their daughters as they experienced dating, weddings and motherhood.
Edelman certainly wants that with her girls, Eden, 4, and Maya, 8.
"I cry at every single school concert that I go to. I cry because I wish my mother had been there and at how happy I am that I can go. It embarrasses my daughter, so I explained it to her and now she just says to bring my tissues."
Edelman, who lives in the Los Angeles suburbs and previously wrote the book "Motherless Daughters," also says she makes a point of talking to her girls about her late mother -- but she usually only highlights the happy memories.
"I want my girls to have a relationship with my mother. It's a way for me to let her be the woman she always wanted to be. It's a gift I can give to her."
Discussing death
It's also more common in these families to introduce the idea of death at an earlier age, Edelman says. A preschooler will start to ask about the mysterious woman in a photograph, and then the mother has to explain not only who she was but that she died, too.
Most of the women Edelman talked to remembered their mothers as good parenting models but they also expressed concern about being able to parent their own children beyond the age they were when their mother died.
Motherless mothers' relationships with their own fathers and their children's fathers also can be complicated because they depend on what happened in the past.
These women tend to be their family's caregiver and minimize the role of the father because they feel their dads dropped the ball when their mothers died, Edelman says. In their defense, though, fathers simply weren't that involved in their children's lives back in the 1960s and '70s, she adds.
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