Mother Hunger
I'm not sure if I'll ever be satiated, but at least I know what I'm craving.
Context: I started writing this on a whim—and then the tears started flowing and didn’t stop until I was done. This essay cracked me wide open. It’s for anyone who feels like they’re quietly imploding as the calendar edges closer to mother’s day. 🥀
As Mother's Day approaches, I feel the familiar knot of dread forming in my chest—a smaller knot this year, one I can breathe around, one that's allowed me to finally inhabit my own skin rather than just survive in it.
Our culture struggles to acknowledge the shadow side of motherhood—the absence, the insufficiency, the harm that can occur in this most primal relationship. We’ve also lacked vocabulary for this particular wound.
A few years ago Kelly McDaniel offered a term, which became the title of her brilliant book that captures this specific deprivation: Mother Hunger, describing "the pain of missing the nurturing, protection, and guidance that are supposed to come from having a good mother." This concept has become crucial to understanding my own relationship with my mother and why this time of year prompts agitation and dissociation.
My mother was a herculean force until I was about nine years old, shaping the fundamental core of who I am. She taught me how to be present in my body; I have the most vivid memories of us sitting together bare on my bed as she patiently showed me how to put lotion on my skin. She guided me through the intimacies of self-care, explaining how to care for my body, wipe front-to-back, draw a bath, keep my nails clean, maintain proper hygiene. She also showed me practical life skills, crucial for a child as neurodiverse as I was, like laying out my clothes the night before school, creating a sense of calm preparedness before the raging sensory and cognitive flood of school.
She taught me how to cook—encouraging me to watch her glide through our kitchen, chopping, baking, soaking, until I had enough confidence to lunge in and successfully attempt to french toast on my own, under her gentle gaze when I was six or maybe seven.
She enthusiastically nurtured my interests—music, drama, and even enrolled me in cotillion—taking pride in my curiosity and growth.
She equally enthusiastically nurtured my deficits, and when I was diagnosed with ADHD, dysgraphia and dyscalculia at around six and developed conduct issues which landed me in detention and the principal's office more times than I could count, she made sure I got the Occupational Therapy I needed, which meant I learned how to write with a Stetro Pencil Grip, and instead of medicating me, my mother decided that giving me more time to develop would be a gentler path, albeit to her detriment—because lord knows I was handful, and in some ways I still am—just a little too much.
Yet despite this deep love, deep bond and exacting dedication, my home environment was profoundly unsafe, organized around addiction and domestic violence propelled by my father.
Home and safety could not coexist in my childhood.
Witnessing my father's violence toward my mother and her punitive but rational retaliations instilled this paradoxical notion in me.
It never got better; in fact, it got worse after my brother was born, and as the years wore on, my mother's mental health drastically deteriorated.
My parents officially separated when I was 9 years old.
My father, a gifted internist and endocrinologist, pursued a research opportunity studying HIV/AIDA in South Africa, which led to him leaving. He decided that we should stay with my mom initially, not sure what his landing there might look like, hoping to send for us once he'd scoped things out. He'd hoped my mom would come too, but my mom vowed not to go, fearing that she may not survive it. Shortly after my dad emigrated, my mom re-entered the workforce, not for money—my dad was still supporting us—but I think to reinstate her autonomy, shattered from years of him refusing to let her work. As she tried to rediscover working nights as a Registered Nurse, my brother and I floundered. She couldn't keep up with us–and who she was hoping to become. I know how hard she tried, to pay the bills on time, or to pick us up from school on time. The strengths I idolized and loved about her, slowly disappeared–consumed by her pain.
One afternoon, exhaustion had finally cracked my mother's facade. After picking us up from school following a brutal night shift, she faltered. As I exited the car, the trunk—territory I was always shooed away from with stern whispers of " You don’t need to see what's in here"—stood open before me. I peered inside. What I saw wasn't just mess; it was my mother's unraveling made visible: cascading piles of unopened bills, straggled receipts and plastic bags, in between, laundry crumpled in twisted strange sculptures. Her eyes caught mine widening, and she slammed the trunk shut with such force the car rocked slightly. Then she rushed to embrace me, as if her arms could erase what I'd seen. I hugged her back fiercely, my small body pressed against hers, and whispered into the hollow of her chest: "Mom, you can't take care of us. We need to go live with dad so you can get better."
In that single sentence, girlhood ended.
The girl who needed mothering became the girl who understood she needed to save her mother from herself—and so the hunger began.
Within a few short weeks I was on a plane to Durban, South Africa and my little brother followed less than a year later.
Moving to South Africa at 11 meant losing consistent physical connection with my mother.
I went from having my maternal needs deeply fulfilled to emotional malnourishment overnight.
From that age until now, nearing 39, our relationship has existed mainly through fragments—annual visits at best, weekly phone calls, handwritten letters, faxes, and now emails or texts. This tenuous connection stretched across continents while I navigated the complexities of post-apartheid South Africa as a Nigerian-American girl in an all girls Anglican school, where I was both hyper-visible and invisible all at once.
This abrupt severance during my formative years created what attachment theorist John Bowlby would recognize as a primal wound, one that would shape all my future relationships. Parentified by circumstance, I became both caregiver to my younger brother and emotional partner to my father. I developed exquisite skills in nurturing others while remaining unable to receive care myself. I often think it’s partially why I became a doula, my ability to care for others being my most accessible skill. My hunger for maternal connection drove me toward intense friendships without discernment, resulting in devastating breakups well into my late twenties, when I finally recognized my patterns and learned to gauge safety in others.
My relationship with my mother has cycled through phases of connection and distance. Her initial doting evolved into attempts at granular control from afar—dictating my clothing choices, scrutinizing my friendships—which forced me to individuate despite my longing for her, or perhaps the idea of her. My dad eventually got sober when I was 16, and despite his rigid Catholicism and mandatory Sunday Mass, he granted me a surprising amount of freedom and self-expression, which I’m grateful for, however as fellow survivors of domestic violence and addiction know, your rubric for gratitude takes strange shapes when filtered through trauma.
The most recent rift in my relationship with my mother—and why I remain in low contact—is her homophobia. Her inability to find even a sliver of accommodation for who I've become has forced me, again, to establish more boundaries. Boundaries that send fresh waves of grief through my body, gripping me at the most unexpected moments because my desire for space is equal to how much I still and will always love her—because how could you not love someone who still drops it down low—at 70, actual footage below:
When I encountered the term Mother Hunger, it named the nameless ache housed beneath my ribs—not quite grief, not quite longing, but something living in the space between. Before these words, I'd labeled it trauma, called it abandonment, categorized it as loss, but none of those words provided alchemy. They felt hollow, clinical—jargon. Mother Hunger, however, felt like an incantation unlocking the exact emptiness I'd carried since that day at the trunk of my mother's car. In naming it, I could finally tend to it properly.
In naming it I could approach this emotional deficit with empathy and compassion instead of evisceration.
In recent years, as I've developed more coherence and the ability to self-soothe, my approach to Mother's Day continues to evolve. On that day, instead of distracting myself, I give myself permission to wallow, to feel deeply sad. Sometimes I forget how vast my grief is until I allow it to ambush me. I cried writing this—many times. For most of my life, tears wouldn't come—by the way—my mother's histrionic crying, born from her own suffering, consumed all the emotional oxygen. The only crying I witnessed was reserved for unspeakable terrors, leaving no model for how to shed tears for everyday sorrows worthy of release.
Wallowing, according to McDaniel, is essential to repairing Mother Hunger. Allowing emotions room to breathe, giving them attention, attempting to metabolize rather than suppress. Writing this essay is wallowing—touching what truly hurts, creating space to witness myself and, through these words, allowing myself to be witnessed by you.
This Mother's Day, if your path includes navigating your own complex terrain of longing, consider leaning into it, observing it, giving it space. I've discovered that acknowledging Mother hunger doesn't make it disappear—it transforms it. It allows it to evolve. Like any primal appetite, it ebbs and flows with the seasons of our lives, but in recognizing it, we develop a different kind of wisdom and grit.
We develop the ability to recognize the texture of absence—to know its heft and to recognize when it’s weighing us down.
We develop the ability to make do with the scars of memory and tend to them with the balm of our imagination.
We develop the ability to hold both identities: the child who needed and the parent we became to survive.
Your hunger is testament to your capacity for love—and in the tender act of witnessing yourself—allowing the grief, embracing the wallowing, honoring the ache—you get one step closer to discerning exactly what you need to be whole and who you are becoming in spite of this void.
If any of this lands for you—please comment and share your experience. I’d love to know how you’re holding and learning to understand this part yourself.
☁️ As always, if this resonated you’d like more folks to discover my words, please tap the heart, restack—etc ♡
I came to Substack after a long time. I avoid reading as much as writing. It's probably because it makes me think about feelings I have suppressed for a long time. Especially feelings regarding my mother. Thank you for your beautiful, beautiful words, and for the courage to listen and heal.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts about these deep rooted wounds that aren’t typically spoken about except in private. Shining light on them helps create space for healing.