{ Motherless Daughters } uniting those experiencing motherloss

Our Stories

Elizabeth's Story

My beautiful mother, born Grace Mildred ___, on April 18, 1941, in Victoria BC, Canada. She was the second born child to George and Joan ___. She had one older brother, George Jr. and two younger sisters, Becky and Joanne.

Her father was away at war when Grace was born. By the time he returned several years later to his wife, he observed much animosity between his wife and young daughter. Her mother would punish little Grace by pouring vinegar down her throat, locking her in dark closets for hours, and forcing her to where diapers to school with notes pinned to her dress saying she must keep the diaper on because she wets the bed at night. These are the punishments that I know of, God only knows what kinds of things Joan never admitted to.

By the time Grace was 9, she was placed in foster care. A year later, her family moved to the states, abandoning young Grace yet again. I grew up innocent of most of this, occasionally hearing cobwebs of rumors from her foster family, but never really made the connection that these were the same grandparents that I saw once a year, and loved dearly.

Grace was moved from one foster home after another, sometimes finding herself in juvenile detention homes. For the most part though, she lived with one family who wanted to adopt her. Joan would have nothing of this, it was as if she refused my mother any happiness.

My mom married quite young to escape foster care, and for the first time in her life seemed happy. Something went terribly wrong, causing her to spiral downward between that time, 1959, and November 1972. My parents had spit up in 1970. I was terrified of my father's temper, and so was relieved when he left, moving two doors down to where grampa and gramma lived, (his mother and father).

My mom was seeing a man named Steve for several years ( including the final year of her marriage). We had great times together, camping, fishing, hiking and bottle digging. My mom learned to ride a motorcycle, and even raced a bit. She adored Steve, and wanted desperately to get married. Having been through two failed marriages himself, both involving violent women, he was less enthusiastic about the whole subject.

November 24, 1972, my mother was still inside arguing with her boyfriend Steve. I could hear shouting, and could tell by the sound of her voice that she was crying. She had told my little sister and I to wait in the car. We were all supposed to be going to dinner at our gramma's house. Friday night dinner, Gramma's fried chicken. We were to pick up frozen french fries from the store on the way over.

Dusk was falling, and we wondered when mommy was going to finally come out. Our tummies growled with hunger. Finally she emerged in near darkness, red faced and swollen from crying. She stopped at the store, then over to Grandma's.

As we drove up the long driveway, I remember seeing the warm and merry light glowing from grandma's kitchen window.

Two days later, once again I found myself riding in the red Acadian Station-wagon. My sister was sitting on the front seat next to daddy who was driving, I was leaning forward against the back of the bench seat, between the two of them. All the while I am thinking to myself, " if anything has happened to mommy, I'm going to kill myself".

Daddy had just picked me up from my overnight babysitting job, and was heading back to Grandma's house. It is the moment I remembered most vividly from my childhood, perhaps from my entire life. Even now if I close my eyes, I am there, in that terrible room, my Grandfathers bedroom, with the door shut tight.

We had just arrived at the house, my Grandmother avoiding my eyes as my father ushered my little sister and I through the kitchen and into that room. That room where my life would change forever, that room I would later emerge from in a state of "reverse living" as it were.

My father sat us on the edge of the bed, myself on his left, my sister on his right. I stared at the brown, carpeted floor, at the cherry dresser, the patchwork quilt bedspread…my feet, anything but my father. I just knew I wasn't going to like what he was about to say.

My mother had been missing for 48 hours since dropping us off at this very same house. Having changed her plans at the last moment, she’d opted not to join my father and gramma for dinner that night. Due to the lengthy argument with her boyfriend, one in which he was trying to end the relationship, she instead decided to drop Susie and I off, and return to try and convince him otherwise.

She had apparently been unsuccessful. As I sat on my Grandfathers bed, filled with more than the dread of his dying of emphysema only one month before , my Father proceeded to tell us that "Mommy isn't coming back". This announcement thoroughly confused my sister and I. Our heads filled with visions of our Mother in some faraway tropical place, traveling the world, free at last. I was devastated that she would leave us behind. What could she be thinking, why didn't she love us anymore? My father could see that we were confounded, and set about rephrasing his shabby attempt at telling his little girls that their mother was in fact dead, and never coming back.

"Mommy has passed away". In that dreadful moment I understood. A roaring silence filled my head. I heard my still confused sister ask, when our Mother was coming back. Tears spilled down my cheeks as Daddy told Susie, "Mommy died".

I remember Susie asking if she could have Mommy's guitar, and Daddy saying that the guitar had always been hers. His words sounded hollow, he just didn't know what else to say. I don't remember leaving that room, and in many ways, for more than 20 years I didn't.

It would be inaccurate of me to say that "life was just passing me by", more precisely, life was dragging me kicking a screaming, further and further away from November 24, 1972, the last moment I saw my Mother alive.

We were sitting in the red Acadian station-wagon. My mother had been careful not to pull up too close to the house, for fear of alerting anyone of our arrival. Parked, idling in the driveway of my Grandparents, her face was veiled by the darkness. When she made no move to turn the car off, nor get out, I remember asking her if she wasn't coming in too. In answer to my query, she tearfully said "no, you girls go on". It would be the last thing she would ever say to me. No hug goodbye, no "I love you", (although that I would read 11 years later, in a short suicide note she had left us). I would spend many years wondering "if only", if only I had got her into the house that night, she'd still be alive, if only.

My father sat on that bed, also looking at the floor, while he continued to explain that Mommy had died of kidney disease, even going as far as to remind us of an upcoming appointment she had with the doctor. It would be several years before I would piece together the fact that it was suicide, not disease that stole my mother. It would be another 23 years before I began to figured out why.

She had driven to a favorite parking spot down a secluded forest road, and had taken an overdose of a barbiturate, Seconal. She was found the next day by a man who was out walking his dog. I was 12 at the time. As the oldest of two daughters, I immediately took on the role of substitute mother to my 9 year old sister, leaving my childhood behind forever.

The short suicide note, which I would read 10 years later said simply,
"I'm sorry, I just can't go on, I'm so damn sick inside, I love your girls, I'm so sorry, Grace." It was written on the back of scrap of paper she found in the car, this same car my dad drove us home in to deliver the terrible news. The note answered nothing to me at the time about why.

When I turned 36 I started a quest to answer one of the most painful and mysterious questions of all. Who was my mother the woman? I had only ever known her from a 12 year olds point of view. It weighed heavily upon my heart that I would never know her as an adult…I would never know her as a friend. In the process of this quest, I uncovered more than I could have ever imagined possible, leaving me shattered anew.

When I had been 3 years old, my little sister no more than a few months old, my mother received terrible news. Her mother was very ill, and in hospital. Grace immediately rushed to the states to be with her family. They had been on their way up to Victoria from Portland, Oregon, when they had stopped at a restaurant in Port Angeles for lunch. My grandmother had tripped over a sill on the way in the door of the restaurant, and had fallen and broken her hip.

Once at the hospital, the doctors discovered that her bones were riddled with cancer. Within hours Grace was at her mothers side. After visiting time was over, my mothers sisters and brother had gone off shopping, while my grandfather took my mom back to the hotel to drop off her luggage. Once inside, he raped my mother, his own daughter.

When she returned to Victoria, she confided in my father, her doctor, and her closest girl-friend at the time. Then, as a result of all her abandonment issues, now combined with the pain of this terrible assault, she was forced to come up with an explanation; sanity insisted upon it. Her explanations became, "finally someone in my family loves me", and this "finally my father was able to show me how much he loves me" These fragile rationalizations helped to keep her going for the last few years of her life.

This new found information pushed me far too close to the edge, I cried and cried for days, laying on my bed, unable to do much of anything, my poor little girls would hug me, and rub my shoulders, crying in confusion. After some time, I came to terms with this information.

I have now come to see Grace as a broken little bird, or a lost little child. After reading "Motherless Daughters", I have accepted that I will just have to "accommodate a place in my heart for the loss of my mother". I can now feel at peace with this pain. I no longer suspect something is wrong with me for the times that anguish reappears. It's all right for me to feel sad after all these years. Grief is quite simply, an ever-changing presence in my life.

It's not constant and blinding as when it was all so fresh, but I am also never entirely free of it. I no longer have the urge to introduce myself, "hello my name is Elizabeth, my mother committed suicide when I was 12", as I did until I was about 35 years old. Having lost her at such a young age, I have integrated this loss into my emerging personality; it is as much a part of me as my love of the ocean, and my fear of spiders.

Someone once asked me if I ever had moments where I felt like I was my mother… I had to say no. For me, I feel more like the scene left after a 747 goes down, like the confusing and unrecognizable debris left in the wake of her crash.

It is a strange and lonely life to live, as motherless daughter. Never really feeling like you fit in, ever the outsider. My heart holds a huge canyon of abandonment, at times there is hardly room for anything else. I sometimes get so tired, tired of having to be so strong, tired of doing things alone, tired of having no mentor, tired of taking care of everyone. Every once in a while, I long for someone to take care of me, just for awhile...

© Elizabeth Morgan

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