The Club
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Like Mother, Like Daughter

The doctor cuts the umbilical cord at birth, but I believe it remains an invisible connection throughout the lives of both mother and child. In utero, the cord that joined my mother and me flowed with blood, rich in food and oxygen. After birth, my mother provided me with emotional and spiritual sustenance. When my mother died and our connection was severed by her removal from the physical world, I floundered. I felt displaced and disoriented. There are still times, years later, when I feel deprived and bewildered without that invisible cord in place to nurture and nourish me.


I recall the day my mother joined the club. I was eleven and had come home from school for lunch. That day, as with many days that preceded it, I had been followed home by two girls who teased and taunted me every step of the way. I was crying by the time I reached my door and I needed my mother. I rushed blindly into the kitchen and fell into her arms, sobbing and trying desperately to tell her how hurt I was. I saw my father and wondered why he was home in the middle of the day. I then looked up into my mother’s face and saw it streaked with tears and contorted with her own misery. I thought, Wow, she is really upset about the teasing, too!

My father broke the silence and announced, “Your grandmother died this morning.�?Only after I joined the club years later did I begin to comprehend the wrench she was feeling that day at lunch. The cord to her mother had been cut, and she was struggling to breathe on her own for the first time.

I have heard that time heals all wounds. I do not believe this. The person who has lost a limb never stops missing the arm or leg that is gone, but somehow time permits that person to cope eventually with the loss. The cloud of grief that isolates, suffocates and blinds us will lift.

I was a mother of two when my mother died. There have been three babies born since, and sometimes the pain of not being able to share the smallest and most insignificant moments that I know she would understand paralyzes me briefly, and I feel angry and cheated.

My mother is physically gone, but she still sustains me. A glance at an old photograph, the sight of her handwriting on a recipe card or the remembrance of a moment long ago can evoke a memory so powerful and vivid, I swear sometimes I can hear her calling my name. Her obvious presence in my five children continues to inspire and motivate me even when I am tired, lonely and scared. One’s meticulous attention to detail, another’s smile and another’s unflagging optimism resurrect her when I need her the most.

My mother has not left me, even though the cord has finally been cut, and I have joined the club I never knew existed.