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I
knew that the reason I missed my mother so much was because of the same thing I was experiencing right there in the nursery with my own infant: that primal mother-daughter relationship. I
realized that this is a love and a bond that runs so deep that no woman could ever deny th...
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But as Kelly illustrates, the experience of yearning for a mother affects women on such deep levels that it is often carried not just throughout a woman’s lifetime but even passed down through generations.
We carry one another’s pain so deeply, the women in my family. It is like an extra organ, a broken chamber of our hearts that none of us knows how to make work, blocking the normal things that other people’s hearts do.1
legacy of ancestral heartbreak.
even a life of privilege can’t protect someone from Mother Hunger.
It’s a letter from me to you—from one daughter to another—about the legacy of living with a heartbreak that is part biological, part psychological, part cultural, and part spiritual.
In spite of diverse stories, what I’ve found is that each woman with Mother Hunger yearns for the same thing: a certain quality of love—a nurturing, safe, inspiring love—the kind of love we think of as maternal love. It is the love that we need for a firm start in life. It is an unconditional love that no romantic relationship, friendship, or birthday cake can replace.
to help you identify what the essential elements of maternal care are so you can recognize what you lost and reclaim what you need.
Mother Hunger is less about who actually raised you than it is about which developmental needs were missing during your formative years.
Mother Hunger names the longing that you live with; the yearning for a certain quality of love.
Whether your mother is alive or not, healing involves replacing what was lost during your formative years.
Giving yourself permission to learn and talk about this relational injury is radical. It is a brave step toward reclaiming the love you need.
When a woman feels “less than” for choosing mothering over other types of work or is judged for placing her career aspirations on hold, something is very wrong with our collective thinking.
Maternal love is our first experience of what love feels like, and the maternal care we receive informs how we feel about ourselves throughout life.
mothering requires three essential elements: nurturance, protection, and guidance.
without early maternal nurturance, we grow up hungry for touch and belonging. Without early maternal protection, we are constantly anxious and afraid. Without maternal guidance, we lack an internal compass directing our choices. These are the symptoms of Mother Hunger. Mother Hunger may sound like another excuse
When we understand that mothers love us the best way they can and the only way they know how, blame has no place. A mother can only give her child what she has.
“Our denial of the very specific and special physical and emotional role of a mother to her child, particularly in our attempts to be modern, is not in the best interest of children and their needs.”
She is home.
This is biology.
“Nature is a strict taskmaster: neither the best intentions nor the noblest justifications can rewrite her laws of neurophysiology.”2
Compassionate care for the separation trauma, loss, and grief suffered by a newborn under any circumstances—adoption, surrogacy, NICU care—needn’t wait a moment; it can and should begin immediately.4
early maternal separation is a hardship.
Mother Hunger is a term I created to describe what it feels like to grow up without a quality of mothering that imprints emotional worth and relational security.
Many of us mistake Mother Hunger for a craving for romantic love. But in truth, we are longing for the love we didn’t receive during our formative moments, months, and years.
And yet there is significant evidence that biology has an impact on the different ways men and women nurture, and the most recent research has shown that a mother’s unique presence is
critical to the emotional development and mental health of her children in their early years.”5
Mother Hunger isn’t a disorder, it’s an injury—
Injury aptly describes Mother Hunger, because living with it hurts—all the time. It’s like grief—complicated grief that comes from carrying an unacknowledged, invisible burden all by yourself.
As a child, if essential elements of maternal nurturance and protection were missing, you didn’t stop loving your mother—you simply didn’t learn to love yourself.
insecure attachment.
But insecure attachment is not a character weakness. It’s a term, created for research purposes, that categorizes how you attach to others, which is a direct result of how you were nurtured and protected as a child. At
Nature’s design is for her to stay close so that your development goes smoothly.
If for whatever reason your mother was not ready to be a mother, or if, like many, she was unaware of the concepts we will cover here, science suggests that you may carry the ambivalence, fear, or anger that she felt.
When essential elements of maternal care were absent, the result is an attachment injury that becomes the foundation of future thinking and feeling.
when “thinking” isn’t thinking at all—it’s feeling. Infant
and toddler “thought” is a body-based, emotional experience informed by the early environment.8
Emotions are stored in the body and create a certain reality or belief system: The world is safe and so am I or The world is scary and I’m all alone. Stored sensations like these become implicit memories. Unlike explicit memory that is conscious and has language, implicit memory is unconscious and has none. Implicit memories reside deep within the limbic structures of the brain, silently whispering messages of safety or danger to the rest of the body.
“remembering” things from your early years is more of a sensation than a conscious awareness.
When fear isn’t soothed and happens regularly, a baby stores the fearful sensations in her cells, building a body and brain poised for danger—hungry for love but wary of human connection.
Dr. Daniel J. Siegel talks about the importance of integrating implicit and explicit memory so that you gain insight into how your past is impacting you.
We know that the largest predictor of human health and happiness isn’t wealth or status; it’s the number of loving relationships we have.
Neuroscience informs us that the brain doesn’t differentiate emotional pain from physical pain.
The science is irrefutable: children need nurturance, protection, and guidance from their early caregivers in order to develop the necessary brain processes for optimal living. The
Over time, without maternal comfort, we do learn to bury the need.
Toxic stress creates physiological inflammation, weakening the immune system. In this way, lack of early nurturance or protection is a form of adversity and creates an attachment injury. The frightened or lonely toddler within follows us into adulthood, wreaking havoc on our bodies, relationships, and careers.17 This early broken heart is the root of Mother Hunger.
Truly, what I’ve found is that having an unkind or neglectful mother can be as damaging as having no mother at all.
The absence of maternal emotional availability directly impacts the quality of her care.
