Martha is 6 when her mother dies during childbirth. Martha never stops missing her mother. Buoyed by marriage to her college sweetheart, she anticipates becoming a mother herself. But infertility threatens that dream, so she and her husband enter the unfamiliar territory when they adopt infants from South Korea and Guatemala.

Daddy comforts and reassures a very young boy after Mommy dies.

An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships. Does this sound painfully familiar? Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop. Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships. The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.

The last forty years of research have cast new light on the lives of ancient Mediterranean women in the penumbra of our patriarchal sources, including the pervasive risks they faced in becoming mothers. Current demographic models suggest that perhaps as many as one in five children would have lost their mothers by age ten. The inescapable conclusion is that the absence of ancient mothers is not merely an artifact of bias in our sources, but also a fundamental condition of antiquity, with profound implications for ancient family life and the experience of childhood. Missing Mothers: Maternal Absence in Antiquity is the first volume dedicated to studying mother absence as an integrated phenomenon in the ancient Mediterranean, from its obvious manifestation as total absence in the wake of maternal death, to the partial absences of maternal separation brought about by economic necessity, divorce, slavery, social conventions, and occasionally choice. The fifteen essays collected here explore the gaps left by absent mothers and how individuals, families, and societies in the ancient Mediterranean conceptualized, represented, and responded to those gaps, practically, psychologically, artistically, and politically between the 5th century BCE and late antiquity.

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

Missing, dead, disappeared, or otherwise absent mothers haunt us and the stories we tell ourselves. Our literature, from fairytales like Cinderella and The Little Mermaid to popular narratives like Cheryl Strayed's recent book Wild, is peopled with motherless children. The absent mother, whether in literature or life, may force us to forge an independent identity. But she can also leave a mother-shaped hole and a howling loneliness that dogs us through our adult lives. This anthology explores the theme of absent mothers from scholars and creative writers, who tell personal stories and provide the theoretical framework to recognize and begin to understand the impact of motherlessness that ripples through our cultures and our art.

Author Susan Letzler Cole lost her mother, Alice, to colon cancer in 1990. Alice was 78. In this extraordinary journal, Cole explores the ties that bind mothers and daughters: in life, facing death, and during bereavement. The author aptly calls her work “an experimental memoir, the autobiography of two voices.” Here dialogues with her mother, live and late, are spoken in different voices, styles and media, and at divers moments in time. Correspondence and conversation, real and imagined, allow Cole to defy boundaries between child and parent, and the living and the dead. Shunning linear narrative, she favors four literary vantage points: Letters written to her mother three years after Alice died; oral history via taped conversations between mother and daughter during Alice’s illness; excerpted diary entries by the 14-year-old Alice (in 1926) juxtaposed with the author’s adolescent writings. Finally, Cole’s own diary entries (1997) contemplate vital themes of love, time...and loss. Unusual technique and heartfelt subject matter make this book a fine choice for studies in biography, autobiography, and women’s writings, as well as American Jewish and immigrant experiences, oral history/memoir, and grief therapy.