Motherless on Mother’s Day? There’s a club for you

A day dedicated to people grieving the loss of their mothers is taking place in Winnipeg this weekend.

Katrina Zborowsky used to dread Mother’s Day.

The annual observance on the second Sunday of May, rife with cards and flowers and price-fixed brunches, served as a reminder of what, or who, was missing.

“I start to feel it when the May flowers come out,” she told CTV News from her Winnipeg, Man., home.

“It’s a very hard thing to know it’s going on. Everyone’s talking about it and posting about it, and it’s just a constant reminder that she’s gone.”

On a cruelly unsuspecting September day in 2020, Katrina’s mother, Doris, was hit by a car while out for a bike ride.

The dinner she had made for Katrina and the rest of her family was still in the oven when they all gathered at her home a few short hours later as they tried to digest the devastatingly undigestible news.

“We all sat and ate a meal that she cooked for us. It was just a very strange feeling,” she recalled.

Katrina has spent many Mother’s Days since avoiding social media and binge-watching forgettable TV shows and generally trying to block it all out.

That changed in 2024, Katrina’s fourth without her mother.

She was in Toronto for a friend’s bachelorette party when she happened upon an Instagram post for an event near her hotel.

“It had a very beautiful graphic image that drew me in, and I just kept coming across it — Motherless Day,” she recalled.

It was billed as a pity party you want to attend, a space to celebrate, commemorate and honour the women who had made you, the women you were now living without.

While nervous to go, Katrina thought it a kind of kismet that she was in Toronto on Mother’s Day, geographically able to brunch alongside this particular group of strangers, all connected by a lost connection, passengers aboard the same grief-addled boat.

“It was really nice,” she recalled.

“I immediately connected with some amazing people, and it was just cool to see something so light, community-building on a day that was very dark or that I had wanted to distance myself from. It actually kind of drew me to appreciating the day.”

‘The club nobody wants to be a part of’

The annual event is hosted by The Parentless Club — a group co-founded by Amanda Katz and Nikki Lewis.

They met as children at camp but reconnected as adults over shared loss.

Katz’s mother Jocelyn died in 2017 from mental health challenges. Lewis lost her mother Linda to leukemia in 2013.

When Katz threw the first Motherless Day brunch in 2024 as a fundraiser for the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), Lewis reached out from her home in Vancouver, B.C., heartened by the community her camp buddy was moulding out of her grief.

The two eventually partnered to launch The Parentless Club.

“We often say when people find this club, the one that nobody wants to be a part of, is that we’re sorry you need us, but we’re glad that you found us,” Katz explained.

The club offers events on both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the founders’ respective cities, plus meetups in between, meant to help in the moments and days that feel equally as tough as the greeting card holidays.

“Sometimes your best friends can’t show up for you in the way that you would hope, despite them being super empathetic,” Lewis explained.

“The people in this community have this underlying knowledge and feeling that we all share, even if our experiences are different.”

Whether collaging, making bracelets, brunching, or writing tributes to the parents whose absences feel colossal, each event is aimed at helping the motherless and fatherless connect, however that happens.

“It’s space for all of us, in whichever version of ourselves and our space that we want to lean into,” Katz said.

The mother of the motherless daughters

While The Parentless Club has been at it for two years now, Hope Edelman has been the mother to the motherless for decades, a sort of early pioneer of the parentless.

Edelman lost her mother to breast cancer as a teenager in the ‘80s, a time when death and loss were barely mentioned after the funeral deli spread had been eaten and the black clothes put away.

Grief was treated as something to weather silently, stoically, Edelman recalled.

“There wasn’t even hospice in our community, yet the messages were very much, ‘You need to get over it. You need to get past it. You need to move on, and you need to do it yourself,’” she said.

“That’s what I internalized as a 17-year-old, as so many of these women had.”

Edelman went to the bookstore in her suburban New York town, searching for any sort of written guidance for teenage girls whose lives were upended by parental loss. She found only a picture book geared towards young children.

A decade later, Edelman graduated from a nonfiction writing graduate program and decided to write the book she had searched for as a grieving teen – “Motherless Daughters.”

Released in 1994, it became a New York Times Bestseller.

“I was not expecting that,” Edelman recalled.

She also didn’t expect the book to transmit a sort of siren call to her fellow motherless who walk amongst us.

In those pre-Internet days, Edelman started to receive mailbags stuffed to the seams with letters from women and girls who were similarly grieving. Her readers reached out by phone, too, before the flood of calls eventually forced Edelman to unlist her New York number.

“They felt that for the first time, they had permission to write or talk about what had happened when they were young and how it was handled and how they felt,” Edelman explained.

“It was still affecting them today, which is at the heart of the work that I do.”

Over 30 years later, Edelman has written seven more books and is a certified grief and loss coach. She offers workshops, retreats, support groups and free events to those in need.

Perhaps her most popular offering — the Mother’s Day Circle of Remembrance event. It started as a luncheon in 1996.

Attendees packed the room to grieve, support and honour. They simultaneously said the names of the mothers they had lost — a tradition that continues today in the circle’s free, online iteration.

“It brings people to tears. We have women who come year after year. They look forward to it, and it’s completely free.”

Higher rates of isolation among adults who have lost parents: study

The community offered by the Parentless Club and Edelman before them is one so many who have lost parents go without.

A February 2023 study published in the Oxford University Press finds adults who experience the death of a parent report higher levels of social isolation compared with adults with a living parent.

“The death of a parent may also be a catalyst for lifelong relationship strain and detachment, thereby increasing the risk of isolation,” the study reads.

“This process can begin early in life as we find that the death of a mother or a father before age 30 is associated with higher levels of isolation in mid to later life.”

Conversely, community and support, both of which The Parentless Club offers, can help those who are grieving connect with others navigating the same choppy waters.

“I think people who are in that grief often feel like they’re all alone, like nobody else has these experiences,” explained Stephen Sutherland, CMHA Manitoba’s director of philanthropy and corporate partnerships.

“When people are able to meet in a group like this, they see a shared experience. They feel a sense of connection, which is incredible. There’s an emotional validation.”

CMHA offers a number of mental health services throughout Manitoba, like courses to help with depression, anxiety and building resilience in times of sorrow.

“These courses, not only are they free, but they’re also for people with lived experience, so people who are coming into these courses are like-minded,” Sullivan said.

Motherless Day comes to Winnipeg

As for Katrina, the community she found at that first Motherless Day event two years ago became a touchstone.

She stayed in touch with Katz and even returned to Toronto the next year to attend her second Motherless Day.

This year, she has partnered with The Parentless Club to bring the event to Winnipeg. Tickets sold out quickly.

Katrina hopes it will be the first of many Motherless Days to come.

“It’s really special. I hope that this community will provide a lot for these other people, that they don’t feel alone on a day that can feel very, very lonely.”