What She Said

I’m reading The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman. It’s a memoir I would have never picked up but there it was, sitting on the "free books" table at work.

And so I began reading it last night, bored and exhausted on the cold, black, commute home.

The book Edelman became famous for is Motherless Daughters, which I started reading while my mother was dying. I sobbed through most of the book, a large portion of which includes women in their own words, talking about losing their mothers, many at very young ages.

I came away from the book mostly feeling like an ass for having such insurmountable, life-changing grief that I lost my mother at the comparatively geriatric age of newly turned 26, when there were so many sad souls out there who lost moms as preteens or teens or worse, just infants or toddlers.

But in Edelman's current book, I came across a passage that hit me to my core and summed up so eloquently what I feel, when I do allow myself to go there, to the grief (which isn’t often and really, who has the time?).

It’s at a point in the story where Edelman is consulting child development books on how to best handle her thee-year-old daughter’s imaginary friend. Edelman’s mother died when she was in high school, so she has no mom to turn to for parenting advice. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Edelman writes, “I like to think that my mother, as a grandmother, would have been eager to share stories about her own early foibles to save me from making the same mistakes thirty years later, but really, who knows…

Probably my mother, whom I remember as gentle with her opinions, would have stepped back and allowed me to forge my own parenting path. Probably. Maybe? The truth is, I don’t know, and sometimes this not knowing makes me so sad I can forget how to swallow.”

Yes. Oh, yes.