Conclusion
Narratives produced during these early postnatal interviews are both
complex and contradictory. Whilst antenatally, women tentatively construct
and produce narratives of anticipation, the experience of giving
birth and being responsible for a child precipitates both an ontological
shift and a narrative turning point. The narratives produced in this early
postnatal period are grounded in experiences of giving birth and early
mothering. These experiences differ from or challenge previous expectations
and dominant cultural and social ideas which permeate motherhood.
The struggle, then, can be to reconcile individual experiences with
earlier expectations and assumptions, whilst managing a competent performance
as a coping mother, a performance which is highly gendered,
embodied and contingent on dominant representations of mothers’
responsibilities and meeting children’s needs, and essentialist notions of
women’s capacities to mother. The act of giving birth did not necessarily,
or often, lead the women to identify themselves as ‘natural’ mothers or
chi ldcare expert s. Rather, m ost expe rienced confusi on and stru ggled to
produce recognisable narratives of mothering when they had not yet had
time to deve lop a ‘motheri ng voice’ (Ribbe ns, 1998 ). A sense of who the y
now were and had been, and the connections between the two, had to be
made sense of: a shifting and tenuous self eventually becoming integrated
int o an alte red ‘schem a of self unders tanding’ (La wler, 2000 :57–8) .
Almost overnight they were expected to become experts on their children.
And whilst over the early weeks the women felt able to fulfil the practical
aspects of mothering, many did not recognise themselves as mothers.
Normal ‘difficulties’ associated with early mothering were compounded
by confusion, as professional support was reduced: the experts and the
new mothers worked with competing frames of reference around coping
and a return to normal. One was task-based and normative and the other
grounded in the everyday experiences of mothering and motherhood.
Narratives of early mothering, then, draw on, and are shaped by,
dominant moral discourses of maternal responsibilities and intensive
mothering, and representations of children’s needs, which must be met.
There is risk involved in not being seen to achieve these maternal
demands. So, if normal difficulties are voiced it is always in the context
of things now being better, ‘fabulous’ and under control. When narratives
contain experiences that challenge or resist these dominant constructions
of motherhood, more publicly recognisable ways of talking about being
a mother are also interwoven. Narrating experiences of early mothering
and motherhood involve reconciling unanticipated experiences
and potent ideologies. As reflexive social actors the women employ
techniques of resistance and self-governance, in order to conceal
unhappy or difficult experiences, which ironically only serve to perpetuate
the myths that surround transition to motherhood. As we shall see in
the following chapter, it is only when the women have moved through and
survived this early and intense period of mothering and motherhood that
they feel able to retrospectively and safely voice contradictory accounts of
their experiences.