Excerpted from Remembering Mother, Finding Myself : A Journey of Love and Self-Acceptance by Patricia B. Commins.

It began with a whiff of perfume, the lyrics to a song and a search for a photograph. These commonplace things triggered memories deep within myself that started me on a journey to get to know the woman who was my mother for twenty-six years and who, on a spiritual level, is with me still. My desire to understand her went beyond our relationship as mother and daughter. Indeed, I had to step outside the parent-child relationship to see her in a new light as the woman who came before me. From this perspective minus all the emotional baggage and conflicts that so often burden the mother-daughter relationship I gained a clearer view of the woman who gave birth to me and, through triumphs and failures, tried to get me ready for the world.
Issues with our mothers do not end with their deaths. Throughout our lives we continue to seek their praise, find their favor, work to please them. And, to be honest, we still hear their critical voices ringing in our ears when we fail to live up to our own expectations. Whatever the emotional state of our relationships with our mothers warm and nurturing or cold and distant it echoes in our lives. Whether we miss our mothers' companionship or harbor unresolved anger and resentment toward them, these key issues will resurface throughout our lives.
Sometimes these issues seem to sneak up on us, triggered by life-cycle events a marriage or birth of a child, a divorce or serious illness or the death of a loved one. We miss our mothers when we celebrate, wishing they could share our joy. We feel abandoned by them when they are not here to comfort us in our distress. Our mothers are madonnas one moment and bitch-queens the next. We love them; we hate them.
Then I found a way to understand my mother and, in the process, to accept myself. I call it the Path of Understanding, a lifelong journey to remember, heal, continue and nurture our relationships with our deceased mothers. We find ways to resolve the mother-daughter issues and conflicts that remain. By delving into memories and seeking a connection through our own lives, we can experience a positive, ongoing relationship with our deceased mothers. Through meditation or simple life rituals, such as cooking from family recipes or wearing a piece of our mothers' jewelry, we daughters can bring the spirit, or essence, of our mothers into our present-day lives. We are released from the sorority of sorrow that entraps so many of us daughters whose mothers have died.
The focus of this book is not on our mothers' deaths, but rather on the opportunity to get to know them in a new way as the women who came before us. We learn to nurture the positive relationship that can exist between mother and daughter when we accept them for the women they were, as human beings with all the faults and frailties that come with the territory. We do not turn our mothers into saints, nor our lives into living monuments to them. Rather, we take an honest look at our mothers as a means to understand them and connect with them once again. That is the journey of this book...

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