Conclusion: On sustaining mothering performance

The concluding chapter of the book is written in an epistolary form. The authors discuss the maternal nature of exchange and reciprocity inherent in the reading, writing, and editing of a collection of essays. They locate themselves within their middle age, beyond the visceral shock of pregnancy, birth, and the early years with a baby. They, furthermore, reflect on what it means to continue to mother, be mothered, and engaged with maternal scholarship and performance practice into middle age, and how this more contemplative stage of maternal life might be positioned as active, powerful, and disruptive. Šimić and Underwood-Lee remain concerned with the figure of an impossible mother, not only lost to us in the hazy past when the children were little, but also in their present reality made up of an array of possible maternal relations. Reflexively they recognise a desire for and an enactment of collective maternal action thorough this editing or networking work, through writing and highlighting examples of maternal performance which are explicitly political and engaged in the building of a more compassionate and just world.