Chapter 1: What challenges do motherless daughters face on Mother's Day?
Hello, thanks for joining me for this bonus episode of The Briefing. I'm Sasha Barber-Gatt. If you're lucky enough to have your mum or a mother-like figure in your life, chances are you'll be spending today celebrating them for Mother's Day. But across Australia, there are millions of girls and women who will be grieving the loss of that person in their life.
and there are concerns society isn't doing enough to support them. A new study by Deakin University and Motherless Daughters Australia has found the difficulties this group experiences in trying to cope with their grief, even revealing that their pain is often dismissed when they do seek help. So what is it like to mark Mother's Day without your mum?
Chapter 2: How does grief impact mental health for motherless daughters?
And what can we do to better support the motherless daughters in our own lives? Today, I'm joined by Danielle Snelling. She's the co-founder of the not-for-profit group Motherless Daughters Australia. Danielle, thanks for being here. Tell us more about what your research uncovered about what motherless daughters are going through.
Thank you so much for having me.
Chapter 3: Why is the medical community dismissing the grief of motherless daughters?
Our research was really important for us to conduct as a growing and emerging organisation so we could learn so much more about our community of 25,000 plus women.
And what it revealed to us was kind of what we already knew through an anecdotal perspective, but we lacked the evidence-based research for, and that was that mother loss has a significant impact on the quality of life of adult daughters and and also can have a significant impact on mental health and physical health.
So many experiencing things like anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, stress, and even physical pain.
What about the response from the medical field, GPs, and the finding that some women are having their kind of trauma and their grief dismissed?
Chapter 4: What unique struggles do adult women face after losing their mothers?
How did you find that out?
We know that through hundreds of women sharing their story in our support group and through that anecdotal evidence, we can draw lots of conclusions around that, that women are having their grief pathologised very early on. And by that, I mean they're being diagnosed with depression where there is no pre-existing or co-existing condition. mental illness at play.
So we really feel that that is just a reflection of society and Western culture's inability to hold conversation and accept what grief might look like, that there's no right or wrong and that we're so uncomfortable with it. So we want to diagnose people and fix them by putting them in a box and getting them to hurry it up or move it on.
Chapter 5: Why does the mother-daughter bond require special attention in grief support?
And that's just not how it works. You know, it's a normal, natural response and it needs to be embraced and nurtured and felt.
Tell us more about the impact of losing your mum as a woman, as an adult. Help us better understand how that feels.
It's incredibly life-changing and I can speak from both personal perspective and from thousands of women in our community. Many of us describe it as feeling totally untethered, lost out at sea, no anchor. For someone who's had their mum and then she's just ripped away, it's It's just so debilitating at times. For many women, their mum is their greatest cheerleader and their supporter.
Chapter 6: How can society better support motherless daughters during significant times?
And the grief that we feel as a result of her loss, it's huge. And we know that mother loss is so much more than grief. So we know that loss under the age of 25, for example, we know that that can cause social isolation, loneliness, it can significantly disrupt and impact a daughter's sense of identity. So forming that identity and maintaining that identity.
And then we know that mother loss later on in life as an adult also poses significant challenges as well because there's a greater adjustment issue at play.
Can you tell me why with your group that you helped co-found, you chose to focus on daughters and not boys or sons as well? What is it about the mother-daughter bond that you felt needed this group to better support women who were going through it?
Mothers and daughters have this unique special bond and we know through research also that the same sex or same gender parent-child relationship is so powerful and profound and unique and we know also that daughters tend to gravitate towards their mums more so as we get older in life we look to you know familiarise ourselves with her and be like her in many cases and
Whereas sons look to differentiate from their mums as they get older.
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Chapter 7: What practical steps can friends take to support someone who has lost their mother?
As women, we experience wonderful milestones in life that we often share with our mums. And when that's taken from us, those milestones are incredibly bittersweet. So, you know, when we have children or when we go wedding dress shopping or when we get married,
They're all things that we share with our mum and it is significant for sons too, but we just know that there's something so special about that relationship as we grow older that just makes life so hard to be without her.
So the research talked a bit about how some respondents in the survey felt that they were dismissed by society for experiencing their grief and, as you mentioned a bit before earlier, were kind of told ā there's the expectation to, oh, come on, like she died a year ago, get over it or whatever. I want to ask you though, are things getting a little bit better in this space?
I've noticed over the last maybe five years, I get emails from about late April, rather, in the lead up to Mother's Day from all of the millions of companies I'm unfortunately subscribed to saying, would you like to unsubscribe from upcoming Mother's Day promotion emails? And that move is designed so that women who have lost their mother...
don't have to be bombarded with constant Mother's Day messaging in the lead up to Mother's Day. So my question around that then is, are we getting better as a society at recognising just how tough it is to have to go through life without your mum?
Look, I think it's a great start. I mean, we have to start somewhere and offering, you know, the opportunity or the option to opt out of those emails is a great way to begin, you know, having better conversations or holding space for those people. But again, we've heard from...
so many that opt out is fantastic, but then it's kind of go over there and we'll forget about you until this time is over and then we'll bring you back in. Instead, we really want to encourage everyone to be having conversations. We want Mother's Day to be a day to celebrate all mums, including those who have died.
And it's not only those significant times of year that are really hard, it's also the everyday. So disenfranchised grief does make grief in general really all the more difficult.
People need to lean into conversations and push past that discomfort, you know, ask about their mum or allow them the opportunity to talk without thinking they're a bit weird or a bit strange because mum died two years ago and you should be over it. I mean... That's really quite a naive way to look at grief.
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