1.) “‘Poor Daddy,’ Margaret sighed...Usually when he got this gloomy only Margaret could make him smile, but now even she wasn’t succeeding. Thomas knew to keep out of his way best as he could, but the tent seemed to shrink up even smaller with his father here. Hands behind his head his father would lay on his cot with his eyes closed. Just when they thought he was asleep there’d come a rubbly groan, like rocks be scraped up from deep in his chest” (page 42).
Parents seldom realize the impact their mood can have on their children not only in the moment but in the future as well. Discuss how the Margaret and Thomas’s impression of their parents’ current mood influences the decisions they make and the actions they take.
2.) Margaret says that “When I have little kids I’ll never leave them alone” (page 31). At the end of the book, we get the sense that she seems to have succeeded.
In life, it is rare that a person succeeds in overcoming the past. The sins of the fathers are passed down to the children and they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes that their parents make. How is it that some people, like Margaret, are able to escape the trap of the past? Do you find any clues or explanations in Morris’s novel?
3.) In the title, Morris indicates that the book is about a ‘lost mother.’ Clearly, the most obvious candidate for the title character would be Thomas and Margaret’s mother Irene.
However, the children never really refer to their mother as lost, in their minds, she left to find a way to help make money. Obviously, Gladys is not a mother. Yet both women qualify as lost mothers and in the end of the novel one mother is found. Discuss what it means to be a mother and how some can be lose themselves in the role and how others can find themselves. How is Irene lost? How is Gladys found?
4.) There is a great deal of loss and emptiness portrayed in the characters of the novel and Morris never fills her empty characters. They move through the story and their lives with a dull, aching void in their middle. They never seem to find what they want.
Is that the way life is? Do we want what we cannot have? Is it the wanting that leaves us empty or the not appreciating what we have that leaves us empty? Discuss examples of the desires of the characters in the novel. Do the character’s desire something at the expense of what they have? Is the object their desire going to make them happy?
5.) Morris explains that she wrote The Lost Mother
‘because the idea of abandoning one's children seems such an unnatural thing for a mother to do. And yet it happens more often than we realize. Emotional abandonment is the most inexplicable of all. It is one thing to walk away when there are issues of poverty, addiction, or abuse, but to stop caring is the hardest to comprehend. All parenting requires sacrifice, especially motherhood. Because love is the giving over of one's self to another, there must be sacrifice or else the love is depthless and self-serving.’
Are there examples of self-serving love in the novel The Lost Mother? Are there examples of sacrificial love? Compare sacrificial mothering as seen in the novel to self-serving mothering.
To learn more about the novel The Lost Mother, read The Lost Mother-Book Review.
