Mothering in Marginalized Contents: Narratives of Women Who Mother In the Domestic Violence by Mcdonald-Harker Caroline;

Author:Mcdonald-Harker, Caroline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.

ABUSED WOMEN’S SUBJECTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF THEIR MOTHERING IDENTITIES

The Influence of the Dominant Ideology of Intensive Motherhood and the Discourse of the ”Good Mother” Versus ”Bad Mother”

I THINK I’M A GOOD MOM. I think I’m a very good mom actually. I think it’s one of my strong points as a person and as a woman that I’m a very good mom. I think about how things will influence her [daughter] and then I don’t let those situations happen, whereas her dad just doesn’t think of the repercussions. At the beginning of this journey, I thought very little of myself as a mother. I still felt like I was doing a good job as a mom, but he would belittle that and cut that on a regular basis and that would affect me. From the time that she’s [daughter] been around, I have been the sole parent, the sole person, the sole adult doing the parenting. He [partner] was off working in BC, and then it became at the pub, and so he wasn’t ever there. So I would be the sole parent doing the parenting, and I felt like I always made good choices and I felt like I was parenting well, but he would cut that down. Maybe because it was the one thing that I did know that I was doing well. So, he would cut that down. That made me sometimes not have the confidence that I needed to parent effectively…. But there’s a difference between a good mother and, um, not necessarily not an effective mother and a bad mother. I guess when I think of a bad mother, there’s not many bad mothers that I can think of. I just think, you know, we all have our journey, we’re at different places in our life, we have different experiences, we have different learning blocks, we make different choices in life, and there are different things we’ve come to terms with and different realizations. Especially going through this process [abuse]. When I think about what I used to think of as a bad mother, I don’t think of as a bad mother anymore. I just think now of a person in a different place in the journey [laughs], at a different level, and they haven’t quite gotten it yet or whatever the case may be. There’s some people it comes faster for and some people it comes slower for, and I don’t think that’s a bad mom because they keep on, they’re still trying, they’re still plugging away at it, and they’re doing the best they can everyday…. Um, so I don’t think of that as a bad mom anymore. I used to, maybe because of societal assumptions, but now I realize how sometimes we get pushed to a certain level that we respond badly and that doesn’t make us a bad mom it just makes us responding badly. But as long as we’re working towards responding well most of the time, I think that makes a good mom.

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