1 The storied human life: a narrative approach
I’m doing all the practical things of a mother. But it hasn’t actually sunk
in, it’s like I’m living this part in a play and in fact I’m going through all of
the motions, but is it actually reality and is this what motherhood is all
about? (Abigail, interviewed eight weeks after the birth of her first child)
This book explores women’s journeys into motherhood in late modernity.
It brings together research carried out in the UK and fieldwork observations
from Bangladesh and the Solomon Islands in order to illuminate
women’s experiences of becoming mothers and motherhood. In many
Western societies patterns of reproduction discernible in previous generations,
and practices associated with childbearing, have changed.
Increasingly, if women choose to become mothers at all, they come to
motherhood either much earlier in their lives as teenage mothers, or later
once careers have been established, in partnerships or alone. These
changes in timing and frequency of childbearing have been mirrored by
changes in the meanings ascribed to, and women’s experiences of,
motherhood. Becoming a mother changes lives in all sorts of ways. It
has major significance for individual biographies, yet expectations and
experiences will be shaped by the social and cultural contexts in which
women live their lives. Indeed there is some irony that women becoming
mothers can experience their transition as confusingly uncertain and risky
at a time when biomedical, expert knowledge has apparently provided
greater scientific certainty than at any time before. By focusing on
women’s experiences of transition to motherhood in contemporary
society we can see the ways in which the biological is overlaid by the
social and cultural in the Western world: and how motherhood is differently
patterned and shaped in different contexts. In addition, by taking a
narrative approach, the ways in which women make sense of and narrate
their experiences of transition to motherhood in late modern society can
also be explored. The particular social, cultural and, importantly, moral
contexts which underpin contemporary motherhood simultaneously
shape what can and cannot be voiced in relation to experiences of being
a mother and associated responsibilities. This chapter will provide the
theoretical, conceptual andmethodological framework for the book. This
will involve engaging with contemporary debates on how human life is
storied and selves constituted and maintained. In relation to mothering
and motherhood this requires us to tread a tricky path that on the one
hand engages with ‘fleshy, sensate bodies’ and at the same time avoids the
ever-present risk of falling ‘back into essentialism’ (Jackson and Scott,
2001 :9).