By Book Author Denise Turney

Growing up a motherless child leaves a lasting imprint. It doesn’t matter how or why your mother left. Lose your mother and you just lost an entire half of the coupling that helped to bring you into physical being. Even if you are emotionally or psychologically detached, the loss of your mother will leave a lasting and powerful impact on you. How do I know? My mother exited this world before I turned eight years old.

Struggles Motherless Children Face

Abandonment issues are just the start. Should you not receive sufficient nurturing from your father and other women (e.g. aunt, grandmother), you may spend the rest of your physical days seeking approval and validation. Months after your mother exits her body, you might identify someone (an entertainer, athlete, schoolteacher, neighbor, another adult or peer) to transfer your nurturing needs onto.

Signs that you have transferred the need for nurturing from your deceased mother to someone else include thinking that this person has been sent to you from God. Other signs of this transference include idealizing the person, overlooking or mentally erasing the person’s mistakes or wrongs and telling yourself that your life would be perfect or at least much, much better if this person were in it.

Unfortunately, even if this magical person came into your life, you wouldn’t feel whole or complete. You would still be a motherless child. Path away from the pain of being a motherless child could come through detachment.

Moving Away from Motherless Child Pain

If you detach, you may not feel sadness, anger or afraid. Detachment could last a lifetime. For example, you might struggle to feel deep, raw emotion if your father, grandparent, sibling or child exits her or his body. But that doesn’t mean that the pain of being in the world without your mother is gone. All you have done in this case is to push the pain down, to repress the pain.

This type of avoidance will show up in future relationships. You might have a difficult time connecting with lovers or a spouse. Your ability to deeply nurture your own children could also be hampered. Trouble developing deep, authentic friendships is another challenge that you may face as a motherless child who has detached from the pain of losing your mother.

The road to opening your heart may take you down even more painful pathways. These pathways could come in the form of a job layoff, a divorce, a broken friendship or the loss of someone you have developed a strong psychological or emotional attachment to.

Revisiting Your Mother’s Exit

Let this happen and you may have no choice except to revisit the day that your mother exited her body. You might have to work through that early trauma in a way that you never have before. This work might be done in a group setting, individual therapy sessions or during focused, internal work (as a tip, working and talking with others can be tremendously powerful). If you don’t work through the early trauma of losing your mother, you might not move forward when the next unexpected loss occurs.

Some actions that might help you to work through the trauma of being a motherless child include writing a list of the top 10 things that you love about your mother, slowly looking at pictures of your mother, listing five ways your mother made you laugh and re-reading letters that your mother wrote.

If your mother kept a journal, it may also prove therapeutic to read her journal. Talking with family members about your mother, asking relatives questions about your mother and writing a letter to your mother may also prove beneficial.

Road Toward Healing as a Motherless Child Could Take a Lifetime to Complete

Take your time. Complete one activity at a time. See if you don’t start to feel more connected to your mother. Go slowly. If it feels traumatic when you look at your mother’s picture, do a few other activities around your mother before you start putting pictures of her up around your house. The same applies for young children.

Be patient with yourself and others. Take your time. Everyone processes loss differently and at a different pace.

At the least, don’t expect to return to the way that you felt before your mother exited her body. Be kind to yourself. You experienced a major life change. It is going to do just that — change you. What it can’t take away is your ability to love yourself, love your mother, love your surviving father and love others. It’s these truths that Raymond Clarke learns in the book, Love Pour Over Me.