When my friends began having children, I noticed a pattern. Their mothers, it seemed, were always there: a phone call away for advice, on a plane before the due date, instinctively knowing how and when to help as soon as the baby arrived. They folded tiny onesies and took shifts rocking newborns to sleep, somehow finding that perfect bounce new parents spend weeks trying to learn while my friends, their daughters, took showers. The handoff between generations looked seamless, almost rehearsed.
The defining role of my early adulthood was being my mother’s primary caregiver, until I lost her to cancer when I was 26. I filled pillboxes, scheduled appointments, and rushed home from my job in the city to make it to her blood transfusions. When she died, I grieved the obvious things—her empty chair at family dinners, the quiet where our nightly phone calls once were, and the fact that she’d never help me choose a wedding dress.
I knew having a baby without her would be hard; I’d thought about it a lot while she was sick. But I didn’t realize how profoundly her absence would shape my path to motherhood.
At first, I told myself I wasn’t ready for kids. My husband and I had time, I reasoned. We could travel, indulge in slow weekends, and enjoy stretches where no one needed anything from us. But beneath those excuses was a quieter fear that I didn’t share with many: How could I step into motherhood without the person who was supposed to help me through it? If I didn’t have her, did I even want it at all?
For a long time, I stayed suspended in the in-between, too uncertain to move forward, too scared to stay still. But avoidance was its own kind of grief, and it breaks my heart a little to realize I wasn’t waiting to feel ready—I was just waiting for my mom.
I kept most of my feelings to myself, not really by choice, but because I didn’t yet have the language for them. Grief can be profoundly private, convincing you that what you’re feeling is yours alone. But it isn’t. Women who lose their mothers young often experience a form of anticipatory grief, where you’re not just mourning the parent you lost, but also the guidance from mom that you’ll never receive.
That grief can, in turn, shape the way that daughters approach motherhood. As Hope Edelman writes in her 1994 book Motherless Daughters, “Some individuals might choose to be childfree as a way to cope with grief.… Others may feel a strong urge to have children to honor their mother’s memory.” I had been both at once, paralyzed by grief and then propelled by it.
It took years, but eventually my grief softened. It would never leave, but it grew quieter and I started to understand that moving forward didn’t mean leaving her behind. I could carry my mom’s presence into the family my husband and I hoped to create.
When our son was born, I cried not just because he was here, but because she wasn’t. The grief of that truth was searing. But as the days unfolded, I found myself mothering in ways I recognized; in the rhythm of my voice as I soothed him, in the way I tucked his blanket, and in the fierce protectiveness that seemed to arrive out of nowhere.
There are still moments that break me open—watching friends’ moms swoop in to babysit, or overhearing them swap stories about how their moms saved them in those blurry newborn weeks. My mom isn’t here to cradle my child, but he’ll know her in other ways: in the garden we tend, in her famous cookie recipes, in the photos on his bedroom wall, in the stories that make her real to him. Now that he can talk, he tells me that, “Mommy’s mommy, Omi, lives in the sky.”
The truth is, none of us are doing this with all the support we wish we had. A 2024 Ohio State University survey found that 66% of parents feel lonely and 38% of them “feel they have no one to support them.” Modern parenting can feel isolating, with frayed community networks and the quiet comparison of social media. Some of us are missing mothers, some partners, some communities. All of us are cobbling together what we need, hoping it’s enough.
Motherhood without a mother isn’t lesser; it just looks different. I’m supported by my incredible husband; I lean on friends, my extraordinary dad, and the endless sprawl of the internet; and I find reassurance from within. We like to imagine motherhood as a continuum—a passing of wisdom from one generation to the next. When that chain is broken, it feels like building something without a blueprint. But absence, I’ve found, can be its own kind of teacher. In the constant awareness of what’s missing, I’ve learned to cherish what’s here—to hold close what matters, and to remember just how fragile and fleeting all of this is. My mom may never meet my son, but her fingerprints are all over the way I mother him—and how lucky is he for that?