Who is a Motherless Daughter?

By: Mary Ellen Collins

When I talk about the Motherless Daughters Ministry, people often ask who is a motherless daughter? As I give them the definition of the women who come to this ministry, they are often surprised.  I have even had some say, “That’s me!”  We have ministered to women as young as 15 up to 75+.

It does not matter how we become mother less, we hold common things that bind us together. Our common bonds include:

1. A keen sense of isolation from family.
2. Sharp awareness of our own mortality.
3. Overall feeling of being “stuck” in our emotional development.
4. The tendency to look for nurturing in relationships with partners who can’t possibly meet our needs.
5. The strong desire to give our children the kind of mothering we lost or never had.
6. An intense anxiety about losing other loved ones.
7. A gratitude for the “small moments” in each day.
8. The awareness that loss has shaped, toughened, and even freed us so we can make changes and decisions we might not have made otherwise.

Let me give you the definition of a motherless daughter.  There are basically 3 groups of women who fit this definition. A motherless daughter can be a woman who has experienced mother loss through death of her mother; this can be early loss, which is 0 – mid 20s.  Or it could be later loss after the mid 20’s through the 60’s plus.  This definition does not speak to the relationship between the mother and daughter, only if the time of loss was early or late.

A motherless daughter might be a woman who has a living mother but has never experienced her mother’s nurturing care.  These women often do not realize they are motherless daughters.  But believe me, it is very real, more on this in later blogs. They may have a living person called “mother” present in their life, but they did not receive the emotional, psychological and sometimes physical care, nurturing, love, and mothering.

A motherless daughter could be a woman who had a mother who may have quit nurturing her at an earlier age and then later loses her through death.  The reasons why the mother quit nurturing her could have been because of mental or physical health issues. It may have been drugs or alcohol that kept her from nurturing her daughter.  However, the daughter was not emotionally or psychologically equipped to manage this and had to nurture herself.  Many times she had to nurture siblings also. Then the daughter grows up and she loses her mother again through death as an adult. This is defined as a double loss.

Which one best defines you?  Let’s talk about it.