There are times when I find myself sitting on the floor, with my legs pressed against my chest and arms wrapped around my shins, when I look down at my bare feet and think, “God, there is nothing more I need right now than a pedicure and a mother.” Yes, a pedicure and a mother. The two are of course not equal in importance. The former takes precedence in immediacy, while the latter possesses an element of a timelessness endurance — it is always the suffix to any of my pragmatic requests. “God, there is nothing more I need right now than a haircut and a mother.” A sandwich, a pen, any thought involving a need never ceases to remind me of the primary void that lingers behind every petty desire: my mother’s absence. Each time something goes missing from my life, my grief is in the shape of my mother’s face. I am a motherless daughter, and yes, I still need a pedicure.

The interesting thing about my mother was that she too was a woman defined by the premature loss of her mother. When my sister and I were young, she would consistently remind us that she never had a mother to teach her about bras, periods or shaving her legs. We were raised to be well aware of her impermanence. We knew what it meant to die nearly before we knew what it meant to be alive. Mothers, we thought, were temporary figures. “We must learn to fly from the coop,” ours told us. We learned we had to break away and lead our own lives.

There is an aspect of tragic independence in the motherless daughter that I have grown to cherish in myself, yet simultaneously despise and resent. My mother lost her mother at 12 — I, mine at 14 — so we both walked alone down the same misguided path, secretly grasping at any lessons of womanhood we could catch along the way: the smell of my second grade teacher’s perfume, the rows of handmade barrettes my mother clipped to her eyelet curtains, days and days and days of dirty dishes, the way my aunt called everybody ‘’honey.” I started collecting these memories long before my mother died because she made it clear, very early, that she would never be able to give me everything I needed to know.

My entire childhood was devoted to mirroring the ways of a self-taught caretaker, who after every misstep repeated the infamous phrase: “Nobody ever showed me how to do that.” When my sister and I were young, our hair was always braided neatly and tight, with two hairbands and lots of hairspray. My mother took pride in the way she had learned on her dolls to polish her daughters. But the laundry baskets were constantly overflowing. Our house was a colorful mess, freckled with the decorating tastes of unsupervised children. Nothing was ever off limits. The walls were always covered in some form of tomato sauce or fruit juice. We were an entire home of motherless daughters, or daughterless mothers, each one of us contributing in our own way to an arts-’n-crafts notion of ‘’mommy’’ — a collage we created together of what we thought mothering was really about.

My sister and I would compare notes over what our friends had had for dinner. After sleepovers, we came home with new characteristics of functional households — like Sarah’s family had a chore chart or Debra’s mother gave her an allowance. Our mother embraced our search for normalcy, accepting necessities like Tupperware and Velcro shoes. Yet other times, the vibrant, practical, swift actions of well seasoned parents only revealed how much more difficult it was for my mother to raise us. Somewhat irrationally, she rejected the ideas of Lunchables and carpooling — arbitrary conventions that seem a staple in the lives of normal children, yet were spurned by my mother as “ordinary” or “boring.”

Aside from the ins and outs of domestic life that eluded our family, there was a less tangible but more essential piece of the puzzle missing. For the motherless daughter, the concept of womanhood is framed in an ethereal mystery — a place seen somewhere off in the horizon.

I suspect that following my mother’s death I have settled for less than I deserve in the area of mothering, because the idea of embracing a surrogate, a stepmother or a therapist is bloated with guilt and fear. It contains the knowledge that the replacement may be better than the mother I actually had. I am faced with a bittersweet range of emotions each time a maternal influence reaches into my life and steers me in a direction I would have otherwise missed. My friends’ mothers, my teachers and aunts all mothered me as much as I allowed them to, but not nearly as much as they wanted.

I may never feel comfortable in the presence of an older woman. Her company only illuminates all the mothering I should have received but didn’t, making me question the woman I once called Mom and doubting the mother I will one day become. When I think of my mother, I see her barefoot, struggling to navigate around the kitchen Her clothes were stained and torn.