Editor’s Note: Diane Clehane is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist who has richly detailed the lives of some of the world’s most intriguing people in books, magazines, newspapers and on television. Diane has written about celebrities, business tycoons, the fashion industry and the entertainment world for The New York Times, Variety, People and many other national publications. Her ability to elicit deeply personal revelations from her subjects has resulted in many headline-making interviews. Outlets ranging from the New York Post to Huffington Post have spotlighted her work. As a contributing editor to mediabistro.com, Diane’s wildly popular “Lunch” column chronicling the weekly goings-on at Michael’s, a mecca for the hotshots of publishing, entertainment and fashion, is a must-read for the media elite, fashionistas and bold-faced names.

For a long time, I considered my mother’s death after a long painful battle with cancer to be the line in the sand between my quasi-adulthood and the moment I became a full-fledged grown-up. No matter that I was closer to 40 than 30 at the time. To me, it seemed that it was the moment that I realized that the woman that had been there for me every day of my life was no longer a phone call or a car ride away that was a defining moment. I was on my own.

Then at 45, I became a mother to another motherless daughter.

In 2005, my husband, Jim, and I traveled to China to adopt a nine-month-old baby who had been left on the steps of an orphanage. The day before we left, I was gripped with a huge wave of fear and anxiety. Could I really do this? I’d never even changed a diaper – how could I be a mother? Standing in my dining room strewn with half-packed luggage I began to cry. I missed my own mother desperately. She would know exactly what to say to me. In the ten years since her death I had needed her many times but never more than I did at that moment. “That’s why you need each other. You’ve lost a mother and so has she,” my Jim said gently while I sobbed. “You’re like two peas in a pod. She’s waiting for you.”

Throughout the adoption process I found myself constantly offering silent prayers to my mother asking her for some sign that everything would turn out okay. Then, one day the call finally came from our social worker that we had been matched with a child. “We have the pictures,” said our social worker. “Her name is Jing-Mei and she was born on February 8.” Although it is rare in China to have any information on an orphan, this baby had been left with a note indicating her birth date. I was stunned. I ask her to repeat the news.  When she did, I began to cry. My new daughter was born on my parents’ wedding anniversary. During one of the last conversations I had with my mother, I asked her to please let me know she was "there" when she reached heaven. She told me she would. Ten years later, to learn that my daughter was born on the same day that my life first became a possibility was as powerful a sign I could ever have hoped for.

There have been many times since we brought Madeline Jing-Mei home that I find myself wishing that I could call my mother to ask her advice – particularly in those early days when the simplest things like how much formula is too much were enough to stop me in my tracks. Often, in those early days, I was overwhelmed with emotion thinking about how much my mother would have loved to be "Nana" to my daughter. It has been almost three years since I became a mother and it is the rare day when my thoughts don’t wander back to my own childhood and some memory of my mother doing something that I now find myself doing doesn’t come flooding back. Now, I find that my thoughts of my mother are more joyful than wistful (although there are still plenty of them, too) as I see how very present she is in my daughter’s life. She is there every time I reassure her after a scrape on the playground or return to her bedroom at night after tucking her in when she calls out for “one more kiss! One more hug!” What I learned about mothering, I learned from her.