My mother died in 1981, I was 15 years old.
I have tried over and over to post something to share some insight with everyone as to what that was like. Each time I do, I am overwhelmed by emotions and unable to clear my thoughts enough to write them down.
It's not something that you can explain to someone. A survivor of the titanic can tell you what happened because everything that happened was a physical event. Grief is an internal emotional event and very hard to explain how each individual relates to it. There is a Phenomena that happens to teenage girls that lose their mothers, it's not a normal emotional event because teenagers have immature emotions that are all over the place to begin with, then you add the loss of the primary nurturer and something very strange happens to a young girl that must learn to become her own mother. I have seen it happen to boys who have lost their mother when they were teens too (my husband's mother committed suicide when he was 16).
There is a book that addresses the subject of women who lost their mothers when they were teenagers, it's called "Motherless Daughters". The book was written because it's a very different kind of grief that affects your entire life.
I will try to add some insight to some of the thoughts that have been posted.
---Losing a mother can cause someone to be more dependent on men.
The answer is yes it can but it depends on the situation. My sister is 4 years older than me and very dependent on men. She is currently in an abusive relationship that she refuses to leave because she is afraid she cannot make it on her own without a man. She was closer to my mother than I was. After my mom died, my father became a drunk and basically left me an orphan. At 16 I quit school, got my GED, went to work full time and got my own apartment (I was legally emancipated at the age of 16). I know I can make it without a man.
--parenting
My daughter and I are very close...in fact she lives in the basement apartment of my house. Experiencing her teenage years was a unique experience for me...it was like experiencing it for the first time myself. I can still remember her first broken heart, I cuddled her and told her that he was just a dumb guy that was to blind to see how wonderful she was. Part of that comes from it being true but part of it comes from wishing I had a mother that would have said something like that to me when my heart was broken. I think a lot of my parenting skills came more from what I wished I would have had from my mother rather than from what I had actually experienced.
--grieving
I can certainly understand why Deborah would state that they are grieving. If she hasn't completely healed from her mother's death, any significant loss will open up those scars and you experience those original feelings from your mother's death all over again...on top of the new feelings of loss. I was 30 years old before I had finally completely healed. Most of the emotions I feel on the subject of my mother's death now are overwhelming feelings of gratitude and faith.
--I do specifically remember when I was around the age of 24, I felt like I had completely lost my own identity. I was a stay at home mom and I was mother and wife. I was no longer me and really had no idea who I was anymore. I had to start spending some time being me and I would guess that is what Deborah considers to be her adult time. For me, I chose to get a job outside the home and to also do some volunteer work in the community.
About 6 years ago I went and got my first tattoo on my back. It's a broken wreath of 3 roses and one rose bud. The roses for my grandmother, my mother and me and the rose bud for my daughter. Inside the wreath it says Laugh, Love, Live. A year later I added a mirror image of that tattoo with the words Hope, Faith, Serenity. Three years ago I got my last tattoo of a single yellow rose above my thumb in memory of my mother (she belonged to a sorority and the yellow rose was their flower, I always remembered a single yellow rose in a vase on our kitchen table). I tell you this because I swore I would never ever get a tattoo and yet, the memory of my mother and the affect her death had on my life is so powerful....that putting a permanent scar on my flesh where I could see it and own it was part of the process of healing the scars on my soul that I could only feel.
I do have to totally agree with what Abby Normal has to say when it comes to parenting.
