On joining the Left-Behind Daughters Club

Who are we anyway?

<Welcome to Sandwich Season, where I explore the burdens and blessings of life in the sandwich generation—in the hopes of encouraging others in similar seasons.>

Hi friends—

Twenty-one months have passed since I lost my mom, and I feel as if I’ve been absorbed into the ranks of a rather amorphous group: the Left-Behind Daughters Club.

As many of my sister members know, we don’t have meetings or by-laws or anything like that. But it seems our left-behind status exerts some sort of gravitational pull. This Something In Common is a strong quality, even though for each of us it means something slightly different.

After hearing that an old friend had lost her mom, I got in touch to say how sorry I was and to offer hugs and a listening ear. As Tammy and I texted back and forth looking for a time to have coffee or tea, I mentioned how “identity-shifting” I have found the loss of my mom to be. She wrote back in agreement.

“Who am I,” she asked, “if not Margaret’s baby daughter?”

A couple of weeks later we met up at a quiet Starbucks. Over cups of coffee and tea, Tammy drew me out about the identity shift I felt after losing my mom.

I found myself drawing circles and squiggles with my finger on the wooden tabletop. If I’d used a pen, it would have looked something like this:

On the left is what life was like when my mom, Eleanor, was alive. I started life with her, and even as I grew older and developed my own interests and habits and beliefs and relationships, I was always circling her, sometimes orbiting her more closely, other times pulling away.

This is to say she was, in many ways, my gravitational center—the person I was drawn to and the person I pushed away from as long as I had her in my life, until she was 81 and I was 54.

I wonder if part of the reason our relationship always felt so mother-and-daughter-ish, that my mom always felt so Mom-ish, was that I never caught up to her, size-wise, at least not until her final months of life when she dropped weight and height. Until then, I had always looked up to her, literally.

At Jon’s and my wedding in 2000, Mom and I appeared the same height—because I was wearing heels.

Sizes aside, even though we were both adults, she living her own life and I living mine, she seemed like a fixed point in my world, one I was drawn to and resistant to, all at once.

Now her absence leaves me with questions. Who should I tell when something good or bad happens to me or to my family? Who should I tell about the flowering trees? Who should I ask for that goulash recipe? Who will give me an opinion on whether these colors go together? Whose buttons should I press? Whose skin should I get under? Because that was all part of our closeness, part of our dysfunction, part of our love.

What about Dad?

Of course my dad is another person I’ve circled my whole life—and I’m not just saying that because he’s probably reading this (hi Dad!). But it’s been different with him.

My dad, Jim, has always been the easy parent. I didn’t have to work to impress him as I did with my mom. I didn’t so easily disappoint him. Plus, we have always understood each other in ways my mom and I couldn’t—and not just because we have matching messy desks and drawers.

Where my mom liked to curl up with a good book or spend a day making a fancy, well-planned meal for friends and family, admonishing us to Eat it like a symphony!, my dad and I have always tended to be more on the move, thinking about and doing “career-type” work and getting our workouts in.

During my childhood, Mom wanted to teach me how to garden and cook and clean and decorate, but almost any chance I got, I would escape the house for time with Dad at his office, at the college where he taught. There I could grab a stack of white paper, and write stories and draw pictures. I could play with the purple-printing ditto machine, and the staplers and the paper punchers. The latter were my favorite toys, ones that Santa left in my Christmas stocking, much to my delight.

By going to the office I could get away from Mom’s efforts to train up Little Eleanor, her mythical daughter who would keep a clean house, and sit still and listen while Mom taught her how to bake a cake. With Dad, I could work on becoming Little Jim—writer, educator, fitness buff.

Neither my mom nor I fully succeeded—or failed—in our goals. I did not become Little Jim or Little Eleanor. But along the way, as I resisted many of her efforts, my mom became my Muse.

What it’s like without Mom

Now look at the sketch on right side of the index card. This is how I tried to convey to my friend what my emotional life is like with Mom out of the earthly picture.

(Note: I’ve successfully drawn angel wings before, but no matter how many times I attempted to do so for this post, they came out as butterfly wings ... which kind of makes sense. Butterflies have been a theme for me ever since Mom died in the midst of the 2023 butterfly season.)

The squiggly line below Angel Mom is my depiction of the emotional life I’ve been experiencing since she passed two Augusts ago. Without my mom to run to and pull away from, to emulate and to avoid, to spar with and to hug, I have felt my identity in some ways unravel.

It is taking a while for me to find my post-Mom footing, and I suspect that in some ways I never quite will.

Adding to the challenge of my re-rooting is that Jon and I now live in her and my dad’s former house—along with a fair amount of their furniture and things that didn’t sell when I was clearing out the place, intending to help my dad put it on the market.

As I type, I’m sitting at my mom’s antique desk looking up at a framed print of Albrecht Dürer’s 1502 watercolor Young Hare. Family lore says Mom cut the image out of a magazine and inserted it in this gold-embossed leather frame. It hung over her desk for my entire childhood and then some. I found it in the basement during the Great House Cleanout and returned it to its rightful place, over her desk, which (thankfully) did not sell during the consignment phase of the process.

Now, as I sit where my mom sat, looking at what she saw, knowing that later I’ll be cooking in her kitchen, vacuuming her basement and weeding her garden—doing so many of the things she wanted to teach me and that I ended up learning by observation and osmosis—it could be easy to believe that Mom finally won, that, as she had hoped, I finally became Little Eleanor.

But that’s not what has happened.

Nor am I still the same pushing-pulling, circling Sarah I once was.

Although I feel a bit lost, I also in some ways feel new and improved. I have more grace for Mom and for myself. And I have more clarity about the life we lived, together and apart.

I have learned that working through a change like this—losing a loved one so familiar that I could distinguish the sound of her “s” in a crowd and use it to guide me back to her side—is not a particularly orderly process, and it doesn’t come with a set timeline.

The more I think about it, the more I see that Tammy’s question—Who am I, if not Margaret’s baby daughter?—might help explain the squiggly sense I have of my current emotional state.

Maybe this is the question my heart has been asking—simultaneously longing for and resisting the answer to—my entire life.

Who am I, if not Eleanor’s little girl?

Take care,

Sarah

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Are you a member of the Left-Behind Daughters—or Sons—Club? What has it been like for you?

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Registration for the June obit workshop is open!

We’ll be writing an obituary—either for you or a loved one—in this two-session workshop June 16 and 23, 2025. More information here:

Let's write an obit!

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Near Grand Forks, ND? Join us today!

If you happen to be near Grand Forks, North Dakota, today—Thursday, May 22, 2025—stop by the Empire Arts Center for a celebration of Japanese culture.

I’ll be there to help you play the koto (Japanese zither) and will be doing a very short reading from my Japan memoir. And you can try your hand at anime drawing or pose wearing a yukata (summer kimono) and more.

Then, we’ll enjoy a screening of Perfect Days, a 2023 movie about the thoughtful life and routines of a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. (Highly recommended!) We’ll have time for a Q & A afterward.

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The Same Moon drawing is in June

Reminder: Everyone who becomes a paid subscriber by June 16, 2025, will be entered in a drawing to win one of two (or more) copies of my Japan memoir, The Same Moon. (Why this? Why now? It’s a 5-year book-iversary!)

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