Letter from the Founder: Motherless Daughters Retreat with Hope Edelman!

While I hate to mention the weather, things at the New Orleans Grief Center have really been heating up.

I’ve got exciting news to share with you! This fall, I will be co-facilitating a retreat with Hope Edelman!!  

For those of you who do not know who Hope Edelman is, well… she is pretty close to my hero.  In 1994, she published the book Motherless Daughters because her mother died when she was 17, and she couldn’t find a book that talked about losing your mother at an early age. This book became a New York Times bestseller and is still the handbook for many of us who experienced early childhood loss. She later wrote Motherless Mothers. Ugh, tough one. I had to read it in small chunks. To be honest, I had to read both in small chunks.

Losing a mother young made me feel like a freak. Everyone I knew had their mother. Some of my friends still have their mothers. In 2011, my friend’s sister-in-law died. She had 2 daughters and a son. Two were in college and one was just out. It hit me hard and awoke a desire to connect with them. To let them know they weren’t alone– that I wasn’t alone.

This propelled me to form a Motherless Daughters group - girls and women who lost their mother before the age of 26. We gathered every other week, reading from Hope’s book and having discussions. This time together was invaluable. While early motherloss brought us together, we bonded in ways that are difficult to explain. There was an underlying understanding of how our thinking and feeling may not be “normal,” but it was all normal to us.

In 2014, I had an opportunity to attend a retreat with Hope Edelman and the author of Parentless Parents, Alison Gilbert. I met 15 other women, none of whom I had met before, in Peru. The plan was to trek through the Andes (Trekking for Kids was the organization heading up the retreat), doing service work in an orphanage, climbing Machu Picchu, all while working through motherless daughters' “stuff”. 

Climbing to 15,000 feet, unable to really breathe, much less speak, we overcame physical challenges and openly discussed the challenges we faced and what our fears were while feeling the love and support of the group. Machu Picchu was a sight to see but I have to say the most rewarding part of the trip was giving back to the orphanage. We took them shopping for school supplies, helped make their beds with new, fresh linens, cooked a feast, and built a greenhouse.

Hope Edelman, Allison and Claire Bidwell Smith, Ojai, California, August 2016

In 2016, I attended the first Motherless Daughters retreat in Ojai, California with Hope and Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance and Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. I had just completed treatment for breast cancer and found solace and connection with a group of women who understood what it felt like to have fears of dying young, leaving children motherless, and navigating intense situations without that person who we would like to hope could have made us believe everything would be alright. 

Gathering with those who understand my stories and my distorted or delusional thoughts  brought a sense of calm, normalcy, and acceptance to my life. These retreats were impactful in that they provided space for me to spend time focusing on the deeper parts of me that felt the loss, often by hearing others stories and realizing they resonated with me.  

Learn more and register for the retreat!