Verlee Bond Young
Verlee Bond Young is a educational conference speaker and retired clinical social worker living in Florence, Alabama with her dog Jack. She shares her own personal journey and the insights she gained as a motherless daughter in her new book, Mother Bond: Memories of a Motherless Daughter and its sequel, Leaving Virgil Road: Legacy of a Motherless Daughter.
Verlee has over 40 years of experience in counseling. Many of her clients have experienced mother loss through death, abandonment, addiction, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and mental illness. She has also worked to help adult daughters and their mothers establish new relationships and counseled numerous couples coping with the communication challenges great loss can create. By sharing her own story of growing up without a mother and its impact on her adult life, it is her hope that you will also be able to find the gifts in the shadows of your own life’s journey. Her books are inspirational to both women and men alike, demonstrating how resiliance and a willingness to self-reflect can help anyone identify the strengths that life’s challenges gives us — strengths that can help us build authentic, happy, and productive lives.
On Virgil Road
Verlee’s childhood home on Virgil Road.
“I know now that in the shadows of my life was this motherless daughter, seeking more than I knew and more than I understood.”
“I remember the day I was sitting on the front porch on Virgil Road trying to make a decision. It was September 27, 1968.
It was the last day to register for college. It seemed my answer would change as quickly as the swing would rock back and forth. I held on tightly to the old rusty chains that held me up and to the strong bond that kept me on Virgil Road. For a moment it seemed as if I could never let go.
The decision to leave created a whole new direction for my life, and I am happy that I took the opportunity to write Mother Bond: Memories of a Motherless Daughter and look back on those first eighteen years of my life on Virgil Road and how being motherless impacted me.
Along the first journey of my life, there were people who helped me and those that brought me harm, and I can see the impact that each of these have had on my life: my spiritual growth has been linked to both. I understand now and accept that loss, pain, and betrayal—and all the other unwanted things that had happened to me—were not in my control. But they have all created in me the desire to go deeper within myself to find a greater meaning.”
“I always believed that I had a memory of my mother holding and rocking me on our front porch, but it probably was just a dream because I grew up without knowing her.”
— Verlee Bond Young