In this 2023 open letter, Hope Edelman reflects on two decades of writing annual Mother’s Day letters to women who have lost their mothers. She describes how those letters have tracked the evolving nature of grief, the shifting relationship to her own mother, and the broader changes in how loss is understood. Using the metaphor of a Russian nesting doll, she explains that each present self contains earlier versions of herself, and that moments of sudden grief can surface unexpectedly. Edelman critiques the language of "losing" a mother, preferring the factual term "died," and shares how storytelling with other bereaved women helped revive her sense of connection. The core of the letter offers concrete, compassionate advice for women facing their first Mother’s Day without a mom or navigating complex feelings: trust ambivalence, set personal boundaries, practice self‑care (including stepping away from social media), and recognize that each year’s experience will differ. She cites Brené Brown on boundaries as a compassionate gift and emphasizes that avoidance can be healthy. Ultimately, she encourages readers to act, build resilience, and know they are not alone, ending with solidarity and love.
Chapters
Dear motherless daughters, every year for the past 20 or so years, I've written an open letter to motherless daughters for Mother's Day. It's been an annual occasion to collect my thoughts and share them at a time of year that can be such a pain point for any woman who's lost a mother. 20 years, it's a lot of time. It's also a lot of letters. These letters have witnessed my daughters growing up. And moving on. They've continued as my marriage began and continued and continued, and then ended as multiple books were written, as services and programs for the mother loss community have been developed and grown. 20 years' worth of letters have said a lot about how to help a mother be a presence rather than an absence on Mother's Day, about how to form an inner relationship with her that lasts throughout the year. And about how ideas about grief and mourning have changed over time, and about how our grief and mourning is likely to change over time. They've charted how my relationship to mother loss and to my mother Marsha has evolved over the years, because that's what happens on the long arc of grief. As we collect new experiences and insights, the past starts to look different. Our stories aren't static— anything but. Every time we talk about the past, our perspective on it changes just a little bit. And so does the way we tell our stories. I've spent this past week wondering what can be said about Mother's Day this year that I haven't said in the 19 letters that came before this one. I've never been comfortable in the position of expert. I've always thought of myself as just one of you, a woman who lost her mother too soon and too young, and is figuring things out as she muddled along. A woman who is still in some very fundamental ways Still that 17-year-old girl who faced the first Mother's Day without her mom with apprehension and ambivalence and something that felt very much like dread. Every woman, I believe, is like a Russian nesting doll. Who you are today contains every previous version of yourself, with each new iteration growing out of the previous— the prior ones. The you that just lost your mom is still in there, and I would bet sometimes she can rise up to the surface very quickly. More quickly than you're prepared for, I suspect. And in those moments you may be tempted to say, it feels like I lost her just yesterday. Lost her. It's a funny term to use, isn't it? Grief centers avoid it. When I trained to lead groups for children and teenagers here in Los Angeles, we were forbidden from using it. It's a confusing metaphor for children who take things very literally. Their mothers weren't lost. Their mothers had died. And that's the language we were instructed to use. And I get it. I haven't lost my mother, strictly speaking. My mother died, but I did for a long while lose my sense of connection to her. She became lost in time, suspended in the past. Only when I met other women whose mothers had died and we began sharing our stories did she start to come back to 3-dimensional life. That's my hope for all of you this year, that your mother finds life after death through you. So tomorrow is Mother's Day again. It has this maddening habit of coming round on the calendar every year, and I know some of you have big feelings or mixed feelings about how to spend the day. If you're in that category, I would like to dedicate the rest of this letter to you, to the women who are spending their first Mother's Day. Without their moms, to the daughters who had complicated or estranged relationships with their moms, to the mothers who have complicated or estranged relationships with a child, to mothers who have lost a baby or a child, to women for whom this weekend contains additional reminders of loss or absence, whether it's the anniversary of your mother's death or also her birthday or your parents' wedding anniversary or your father's death date, or any other landmine on the calendar. If you're feeling ambivalent about Mother's Day this year, I encourage you to trust your instincts. Feel your way through the day. Game time it. If you want to spend Sunday with friends or family, with a stepmother or mother-in-law, that doesn't mean you're dishonoring your mother. And if you want to stay in bed for much of the day or pretend it's a Sunday like any other Sunday, that's good too. Sometimes avoidance is a necessary and helpful form of self-care. You don't have to meet anyone else's expectations this weekend. Don't be afraid to set boundaries for yourself. Brené Brown reframes boundaries as a compassionate gift to others. Setting them can model self-care behavior for other people, especially young ones who will benefit from learning this sooner rather than later. And for God's sakes, stay off social media. You don't need to spend a day sad scrolling through photos of your friends and relatives having brunch with their moms. This doesn't make you avoidant. It doesn't make you a bad person to not want to see them celebrating. It makes you a thinking, feeling human who knows how to protect herself from a predictable distress. And please trust that every year will be different. It will. What exists now won't necessarily exist next year or next month, or maybe not next week. A difficult Mother's Day this year doesn't mean you'll have a difficult one next year. Next year may, may not be harder, may not be easier, but you can count on it being different. If you allow it to be. Finally, if this is your first Mother's Day without your mom, it's okay to feel lost. It's okay to not know what to do. As I say to my coaching clients, how are you supposed to know how to do something you've never done before? Doing it is how you figure out how to do it. Doing it is how you build resilience. Doing it is how you learn you can do hard things. You've already done a really hard thing. A really big, hard thing. You've got it this year, sister. You've got it. You do. With love and solidarity, Hope.
