In Love Medicine, what is the relationship like between LuLu and her mother?

In Louise Erdrich's novel Love
Medicine, there are many characters introduced to the reader. Lulu Nanapush
makes her first appearance in Chapter Four.

Lulu has come
to live with her uncle, Nanapush, and his wife Margaret Kashpaw, called Rushes Bear (for
attacking a bear, head-on). Lulu very much loves her uncle; for the most part, there is
no love lost between her and Rushes Bear.

Lulu has recently
come from the government school. As Chapter Four begins, she says that she "never grew
from the curve of my mother's arms." And as much as Lulu has tried to stay physically
connected to her mother in some way, her mother had left her to grow up
alone.

Lulu goes on to
say,

Following
my mother, I ran away from the government school...so often that my dress was always the
hot-orange shame dress and my furious scrubbing thinned sidewalks the matrons forced me
to wash.

Lulu continues to
run away, and is continually punished. However, her connection to her mother remains
strong. Surrounded by a foreign world of "rough English," Lulu misses her native
language as her mother used to speak it, and during very difficult times, she can hear
her mother's voice comforting her in her native tongue.

It
is this voice, which Lulu describes as coming from all around her, that keeps Lulu "from
inner harm." Her mother's voice is a living thing to
her:

[My
mother's] voice was the struck match. Her voice was the steady
flame.

Eventually, though her
mother is not there, her uncle writes the words in letters that she needs to hear, words
that bring her home. And as she gets older, Lulu admits she becomes more like her
mother, needing her all the more as this happens: for Lulu grows to be a wild and
passionate young woman.

Strangely, though they are not
together as Lulu grows up, mother and daughter are very close—not physically, but in
spirit. Lulu can hear her voice comforting her, and that voice never loses its ability
to strengthen her. That voice is what pulls Lulu's "pieces" together, so that she can
move on with a wholeness that might be missing from other girls growing up without their
mother.