An Open Letter to Motherless Daughters on Mother's Day

I’m sitting here at my kitchen table just a few hours before Mother’s Day officially begins. Motherless Daughters Day – the day designated by motherless women nationwide to honor mother’s who are no longer with us – is about to draw to a close.

Today I spoke to a group of forty women in West Los Angeles where Irene Rubaum-Keller, the therapist who leads Motherless Daughters of Los Angeles, has been organizing annual Motherless Daughters Day luncheons for sixteen years. At the end all the women joined hands to create a Circle of Remembrance and we went around, one by one, and said our names and our mothers’ names out loud.

“Hope, daughter of Marcia.”

It’s been thirty one years since my mother died, and a lot of life stepped in to start filling the void. I’m married now, with two daughters of my own, and I don’t get to say my mother’s name out loud nearly as much as I’d like to. I very rarely say it in the same sentence as mine. Except, once a year, the Circle of Remembrance presents the opportunity again and I’m so thankful it does.

My mother died of breast cancer in 1981, when I was seventeen and she was 41. Ten years later I started writing Motherless Daughters, the kind of book I’d gone looking for when she first died. Since its publication in ‘94 I’ve traveled around the world speaking with groups of motherless women and hearing their stories. I’ve met extraordinary women, and heard phenomenal stories of loss, recovery and rebirth. This year, more than any other year—though I’m not sure why—I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve learned these past eighteen years, especially from the women I’ve met, and three truisms quickly come to mind:

1. Mourning takes a lifetime. This is hardly groundbreaking news today, but in 1994 when MD was first released it was a revelation to many readers who didn’t realize that Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief had been developed for those who had terminal illnesses rather than those who were grieving their deaths.
I remember saying to my editor when I first started writing Motherless Daughters, “I can’t tell readers that mourning lasts a lifetime. Nobody wants to hear that.” But then I thought, “Many of these women, as children, were denied the truths about their mother’s death, and about grieving. Even if they wind up resenting me for it, they deserve to be told the truth as adults.” What happened was exactly the opposite: readers appreciated learning that they weren’t abnormal. They thanked me for validating their feelings and giving them the facts. After a mother dies a new kind of “normal” settles in, one in which the mother is always missing and forever missed, and that’s okay. Only when we accept and make peace with this we will find this new equilibrium.

2. Healing comes through community and from sharing our stories with others. In 1995, the Motherless Daughters non-profit organization started to field the flood of requests for support groups for motherless women. To our knowledge, no such groups had ever been held before. We ran some trial groups in New York City before sending the template out to other sites. Today, dozens of groups are being led around the country, both therapeutic and social, including Motherless Daughters of Chicago; Motherless Daughters of Orange County, California; and Metro Detroit Motherless Daughters, as well as many others organized through Meetup.com, including Motherless Daughters of Washington, D.C., New York City, Denver, Miami, Charlotte, North Carolina; and the more than 200 women who belong to the Mamma Mia Sisterhood in Atlanta, Georgia. The long-term survival of these groups reveals that through community we can regain the very comfort, courage, and strength we once lost.

3. When bad things happen to good people, good things can nonetheless result. It’s so much easier to focus on what we don’t have than on what we do. But as individuals, we always have the power to reframe an experiences so that something negative can be seen as positive. A very smart therapist (who also happens to be my mother’s sister) once told me, “If you believe, ‘My life is difficult because my mother died,’ then your life is always going to be difficult, because your mother is always going to be dead.” But once we let that initial belief start to thaw, to melt down to “My life is difficult right now, but it won’t always be that way,” and then to “Not everything in my life is difficult” eventually leading to “Good things have come my way because my mother died,”—as unlikely as that may sound to some of you at the moment-- our perceptions start to take on a different hue. I would venture to bet that any motherless woman can identify three or four things in her life that make her feel fortunate, or that bring her joy, and if she traces them backwards through the series of life choices and events that made them possible, like a flow chart in reverse, I’d bet that at least one or two of them would relate back to circumstances surrounding a mother’s death.

In my case, my husband, my children, and my community all date back to that pivotal event when I was seventeen, because if I hadn’t felt the need to write Motherless Daughters I never would have joined with other women to start a national organization, which wouldn’t have needed to rent cheap office space in New York City, and then I never would have met the man who rented us a piece of his office suite in Times Square, the man who became my husband and whose job moved us out to Los Angeles, and who became the father of my two daughters, whom I can’t imagine living without. I could say it was the book brought them all into my life, but I never would have written the book if my mother hadn’t died.

All of this has taught me…well, what, exactly? Something so simple it feels almost glaringly obvious. It’s that I’ve learned how to practice gratitude for my loss. This may sound impossible to anyone who’s still actively grieving—and who is right where she should be, right now-- but over time it becomes apparent that the death of a mothers does, eventually, lead to blessings in a daughter’s life. She will be stronger, more empathetic, and more resilient than she otherwise may have been. She will find joy, often in unexpected places. Over time, she will help younger women cope with their losses as role model and mentor.

When I first saw the “It Gets Better” project for LBGT teens I wondered if we all should do something similar for motherless girls. Because I receive emails every week from teens whose losses are still very recent. They wonder how long this feeling will last and if it will ever go away, and ask me if they will ever be happy again.

It gets better. Truly, it does.

And so today, on Mother’s Day, I encourage everyone to take a moment to practice gratitude, and to identify just one thing in your life that is good, and that you can trace back to your early loss. Just one thing.
What I choose to be grateful for today is the opportunity to have been the one who got to write the book I needed to find so badly myself when I was seventeen. And also for all the readers (that’s two things to be grateful for, but who’s counting?) who’ve supported the book, and the motherless daughters movement, for the past eighteen years. You, more than anyone, have taught me that from shared experience comes solidarity, and from solidarity comes community, and from community comes a unique and special form of strength.

Many blessings to you all on this Mother’s Day, 2012.

With thanks and all best everything,
Hope

(adapted from a talk presented to Motherless Daughters of Los Angeles, May 21, 2012)

New Survey for Motherless Daughters Online

Are you a woman who lost her mother before age 16? Would you be willing to help a psychology trainee in Surrey, England, with her research? This quick online survey will help further research in parental bereavement. I took a look at it and it's designed very sensitively. I'd take it myself except I was 17 when my mother died. Please participate if you're interested!

Motherhood and Writing: Thoughts from AWP

I just spent the weekend in Chicago at the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) annual convention, where 10,000 writers, teachers of writing, and students of writing packed into two Loop hotels listening to panels and readings for two and a half days.

It was fabulous fun.

The AWP conference is a once-a-year opportunity to reconnect with far-flung friends from graduate school and the writing and teaching worlds. It’s also the way to stay current on developments in the field and hear writers I admire read from and talk about their work. I usually sit on one or two panels each year and this year’s was a highlight. Kate St. Vincent Vogl, author of the memoir Lost and Found, brought together five women writers—including Kate Hopper, Katy Read, and Jill McCorkle--to talk about motherhood and writing. Two hundred audience members filled the room, indicating this is a subject writers want, even need, to hear more about.

Several writers came up to me afterward to say how much they’d enjoyed what we each had to say, so I thought I’d post a slightly edited version of my eight-minute talk here for those who couldn’t make it. The title of the panel was “Barefoot, Pregnant, and at the Writer’s Desk.” Try to imagine me at a podium in a cream sweater, a long black skirt, black boots, still battling slight jet-lag, as you read:

“Like some of my fellow panelists, I was already a working writer when my kids came along, and so instead of finding a way to fit writing into family life, my writing life needed to expand to include room for a child. At first, I’d thought it would be possible to step sideways and create a natural space for a family, and then we’d all happily coexist on the same plane. It didn’t take me long to discover the naivete of this plan. Two weeks with a colicky infant, to be exact.

Before motherhood, my days were largely unstructured. I ate when I was hungry, sped out the door to literary events on short notice, and wrote until late in the night. My subject matter was mainly mother-daughter relationships from the perspective of a daughter, specifically a daughter without a mother. After my own two daughters came along, I still wrote about mother-daughter relationships, only now mainly from the perspective of a mother.

Now my daughters are ages 14 and 10, and on a day-to-day basis I have very little separation between my life as a writer and my life as a mother. I write about family life, in the midst of family life, not at a critical remove from it. I have an office outside of the house to give me some physical distance from the constant flood of requests that would otherwise fill my waking hours, but I try to fit my writing hours, which are usually flexible, into the family schedule, which is not always so flexible, given school schedules, babysitter availability, and my husband’s work and travel. In an ideal world, my writing hours would be my daughters’ school hours, from 8:30 to 3. With the help of a babysitter twice a week I have a thirty-six hour work week, which certainly sounds reasonable for a writer.

It’s just too bad I can hardly craft a usable paragraph during daylight hours.

If you’re a born and raised New Yorker like me, it’s always easier to focus on what you don’t have than what you do, so I’ll share that list first.

Because I’m a mother and a writer, usually in that order, here is the list of things I absolutely cannot do:

1. Spend three months, or two, or even one, at a writer’s colony starting, working on, or finishing a book. (Thirty whole days? Seriously?)

2. Shower every day.

3. Take a visiting professor job, or any teaching job, anywhere but in our hometown.

4. Be a travel writer. Unless it’s possible to make a living off one assignment per year that just happens to fall over Christmas or Spring Break.

5. Be a foreign correspondent. Unless Pasadena counts.

6. Be a mom who can volunteer in the classroom on the same day and time every week and still hope to get work done by deadline. Instead, I’m the mom who goes on random field trips and takes over at the last minute when others can’t make their shifts.

7. Stay at literary events past 9 p.m. on a weeknight (not with a chronic 6:15 a.m. wake-up call to get the kids to school).

8. Write every day during my peak creative hours, which are between 5 p.m. and midnight.

9. Be the kind of wife who feels nothing but gratitude when my husband spontaneously says, “I’ll take the kids for the next half-hour, honey, so you can sit down and write.”

10. Expect with any semblance of reason that when I wake up on any given morning, my work day won’t be interrupted by a forgotten lunchbox; an urgent need for violin rosin; a book report left on the kitchen table; a half-day of school I forgot about; an emergency trip to Michael’s Art Supply store to buy numerous tiny, expensive items to build a California mission; a headache; a stomach ache; a broken retainer; or a case of head lice. Again. And all I can say about that is -- if you’ve never been pulled away from a crushing book deadline, the kind where the editor is tugging on your pages all the way from New York, by a call from the elementary school nurse at 10 a.m. saying that ¼ of your daughter’s fourth-grade class has lice, including her, and that every member of your family needs to be checked since you probably all have it, and every piece of bedding in the house needs to be washed in hot water, and all the stuffed animals quarantined in garbage bags, and all the mattresses vacuumed, today, then … you weren’t living in my house last month.

Now, having gotten all that out of the way -- here's the list of things I can do precisely because I’m a writer and a mother:

1. Fully appreciate the importance of detail. As in, “What exactly did Mr. Cott say when you were sent to his office? I need to know the exact dialogue before I call the school.”

2. Budget my time very efficiently. Because my writing time is so pre-circumscribed, I have to get as much done in six hours as I possibly can. This is where setting realistic expectations is essential. Thinking I can accomplish ten hours of work in six only sets me up for disappointment. Most of us simply can’t produce as much work after children as we could before them, except for the select and enviable few who find motherhood jumpstarts their creative writing energies and inspires them to produce.

3. Write from first-hand knowledge about pre-natal tests, complicated deliveries, home birth, the Tooth Fairy, and the week my 11-year-old daughter had to bring a flour-sack baby to school and pretend to be its mother.

4. Help my kids ace their spelling tests and edit ninth-grade English essays. Algebra II, however, is a lost cause.

5. Bring a nineteen-month-old on a book tour, which was a whole lot more fun than I thought it would be.

6. Write a comic essay with my teenage daughter and perform it together (Look for us on stage March 12 at Spark Off Rose in Pacific Palisades!)

7. Take my kids to see where Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Anne Frank once lived, as well as drag them to all the former log homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

8. Discover a whole new list of vocabulary words and idioms I can now use in essays and stories. Like “Chill,” “Bro,” “and “Epic Fail.”

9. Recognize the ironies, the metaphors, the character arcs, the turning points, and the dramatic high points of everyday life as they occur.

10. Discover a whole range of emotions I never knew existed, and wouldn’t have otherwise experienced.


I’ve long thought that as a mother writer (or a writing mother) – it’s a very good thing that I’m creative. Because creativity, flexibility, and adaptability are the three main prerequisites for this job. My biggest challenge in the workplace has been finding a way to carve out enough consecutive hours, on a regular basis, to produce quality work. The gift of a quiet, solitary half-hour, while greatly appreciated, is only long enough to start clearing the mind of clutter and barely starting to sink into the work. On a good day for me, a half-hour’s worth of writing can produce one decent paragraph.

Long before I was married, when I was still in graduate school and working on my first book, I discovered that my natural Cicadian rhythm makes me most creative between five and midnight. After my first daughter was born I tried to shift my writing hours to daytime, with very mixed results. Daylight and I do very well together for administrative tasks and teaching, but my creative hat won’t stay on my head until 5 p.m., no matter how hard I try to make it stick. And for parents, those key hours between five and midnight mean dinner, dishes, homework, bath time, bedtime, and first feedings – events that can’t be skipped over or ignored in favor of crafting a perfect page.

My solution, when I’m on deadline, is to function as a binge writer. That means every third or fourth weekend my husband takes the kids from a Friday school pick-up through Sunday night and I check into a hotel up in Ventura, California – strategically chosen because it’s an hour and fifteen minute drive from our house, close enough to get home quickly in an emergency but far enough away that I won’t get any surprise dinner guests.

I stay in the hotel room for three days straight, leaving only for meals – and sometimes not even then – and crank out as many pages as I can. The immersion in the work, without interruption, allows me to write better and faster than I can during a regular day. I produce more pages in that one weekend than I normally do in two weeks of weekday writing. It’s not an ideal situation, and it sometimes extends my deadlines, but it’s worked moderately well so far: I’ve written three books this way since 2004. Not a book a year like some writers can produce, not even close, but it’s a pace that allows me to be both mother and writer and – at least some of the time – allows me to feel that I’m doing both pretty well.

And so for me, writing and motherhood are neither a balancing act nor a juggle, but more of a pendulum that swings from one extreme to the other. I’m either working very hard on a book (some of the time) and making that my primary focus, or deliberately reducing my work load (as often as I can afford to) to spend time exclusively with my husband and kids. It makes for a feast-or-famine family life to be sure, and I’ve often wondered if or how it adversely affects my kids to have me so fully present much of the time but so lightly available some of the time. It’s all they’ve ever known, since I’ve been writing for as long as they’ve existed, and I imagine that to them while it’s not always preferable it’s a certain kind of normal. I’ll have to wait until they’re older and can tell me, to know for sure.

I once read an interview with the Israeli author Savyon Liebrecht, in which she said that every child a woman has is a book she doesn’t write. And although that sounded awfully harsh to me the first time I heard it, I thought about it a great deal and would say that for me, it’s been pretty true. The first two years of each of my daughter’s lives—about the time it takes me to write a book—were years when newborn care and sleep deprivation and the awe of having an infant and toddler in the house made it impossible for me to work full time. I did sell a book proposal when my second daughter was six months old, but it took four years for me to finish it. So while it’s true that I probably would have been more prolific if I didn’t have two children to care for, that equation begs the question: would I rather have eight books and no children, or six books and two children? As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t any question there."


For a series of postings about the AWP Conference, check out the Minneapolis StarTribune blog. Here's a link to the final installment by writer and teacher Barrie Jean Borich.

Free Teleseminar About Writing!

Please join me on February 14 at 11:30 AM PST for a one-hour discussion about the writing life, hosted by New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lauck, author of the memoirs Blackbird, Still Waters, and the recent Found, as well as the essay collection Show Me the Way. Read about all of Jen's books here.


When: Valentine's Day, Tues, 2/14 @ 11:30 AM PST

How: Call (218) 632-0550 & enter access code: 854364#
Announce your name, where you hail from and then mute your
end of the call by hitting *6.

Questions: If you have a question for me or Jen, send it to Jen at jclauck@gmail.com
and she'll open the call live so you can speak.

And check out Jen's memoir writing site and her list of fabulous upcoming classes at her writing web site.

Hope to be speaking with you soon,

Hope

Come Write the Story of Your Life

Please join me and other instructors on November 11-13 in Ojai, California for the Ojai Writers' Conference, where I'll be speaking at the Saturday luncheon and leading a one-day workshop on Sunday for memoir writers of all levels.

My Sunday workshop, “Transforming Real-Life Events into Story,” will help guide your anecdotes from entertaining dinner-party stories to actual, publishable products. You'll receive information about the four basic elements of successful memoirs, including structure, detail and description, characterization, and scene versus summary. Short writing exercises will be incorporated into the day to help you flex your memoir muscles, and brief excerpts of published works will be handed out as examples. By the end of this workshop you’ll have tools to start a 750- to 1500-word short memoir, and maybe even a few first-draft pages.

Cost is $149 Times: 9am-Noon (break for lunch) and 1:30-4:30pm. Mention "Hope sent me" when you register and receive a free, signed copy of The Possibility of Everything!

For more info and registration details, go to the Ojai Writers' Conference web site.

And check back for information about memoir workshops next July at the Iowa Summer Writers Festival in Iowa City, and October in Paris!!

Ojai Writers Conference Next Weekend--June 3-5, 2011

For all aspiring and practicing writers out there: next weekend (June 3-5) is the first Ojai Writers Conference in beautiful Ojai, CA. It features Friday pre-conference workshops in memoir, screenwriting, essay writing, and myth, a Saturday VIP luncheon, and workshops and talks all day Saturday and Sunday morning as well. It's limited to only 100 participants but as of today there are still spaces left. Come for one day or all three!

I'll be teaching a personal essay workshop on Friday from 1-4, speaking at the luncheon on Saturday, and talking about the distinction between memoir and personal essay--and which one is best for your unique story--on Saturday late afternoon.

Click here for more info.

Hope to see some of you there!!

On the Occasion of Mother's Day

Wishing you all a most beautiful and peaceful Mother's Day, in recognition of those of you whose continuous and loving efforts will create our next citizens of the world. And with thanks to you for sharing the steps of your journey with the rest of us who so benefit from your experiences and stories.

I know this is a solemn day for those of us who've lost mothers, and I'd like to recognize those who have passed as well. This July will mark the 30th anniversary of my mother's death, and there hasn't been a Mother's Day since then when I haven't thought of her, missed her, and been grateful for what she did give me in our short time together. So on this day I'd also like to honor the mothers who are no longer with us, and acknowledging that we are all part of the strong and varied chain of female experience.

With gratitude and admiration for us who are doing the work, and all who have done it in the past,

Hope