Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

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I am also a co-facilitator for early Mother Loss Retreats with Hope Edelman. Hope wrote the book, “Motherless Daughters” and is a New York Times Best Selling Author. Her book and retreats have changed many lives, including mine. I am confident that her guidance, friendship, and leadership aided my work as a trauma therapist. Working with women who had an early Mother loss, I see firsthand how the term, Mother Hunger®, affected many women with an early loss, especially if their mothers couldn’t give them what they needed before they died.

A fridge in Austin, Texas, once went missing. It had been “borrowed” by someone who wanted to keep beers cold for an event at South by Southwest, according to Kellie Stiewert, an organizer at the ATX Free Fridge project. But such shenanigans are rare. That the fridges can be placed with a property owner’s permission just about anywhere—in front of a taqueria, a person’s home, an office building—is what makes the concept “beautiful,” Stiewert said. In Chicago, an artist named Eric Von Haynes co-founded a fridge network called The Love Fridge in 2020. Today, he helps oversee more than 20 love fridges, each decorated with eye-popping colors and phrases like “Free food for all!” According to Von Haynes, the fridges are filled, cleaned, and maintained by hundreds of volunteers. He estimates that thousands of pounds of food move through them each month. Kelly McDaniel has eloquently described the various forms of neglect that can shape our experiences in life and continue to impact us as adult women. In her writing, Kelly explains that it is not about blaming our caregiver, they may have been victims of neglect themselves or had other unmanageable circumstances like an abusive partner. Instead, she helps to shed light on how mother-daughter relationships can become complex when nurturing, guidance and protection are absent. Even a fridge that draws electricity from a coal-powered grid uses less energy each day than a single cell phone, said Dawn King, who researches food waste and policy at Brown University. “Is it worth using greenhouse gas emissions to plug in a refrigerator so people can eat food that otherwise would have gotten wasted? Hell yes it is.”Sound familiar? Trauma psychotherapist Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviours - and are unable to stop.

This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

But community fridges are about as low-key and energy efficient as solutions get. Zauderer didn’t burn any fossil fuels to walk his pizza to the fridge near his apartment. And the Love Fridge, which acquires only used refrigerators, powers two of them with solar panels—a vision that Von Haynes has for more to come. In her book “Mother Hunger,” Kelly McDaniel explores the consequences of growing up in a dysfunctional family system. She describes three crucial necessities to raise an emotionally healthy child: nurturing, protection, and guidance. Were you NURTURED?