Thinking Back through Our Mothers

For women identifying as mothers, the caregiving imperatives conditioning the lived experience of the role are typically its most compelling aspects. It can be hard to redirect the reflective process backwards; towards the generations of women whose experiences preceded, pre-empted, and were models (or not) for the daughters who m/other in their wake; to review and reflect on the women who gave birth amid the exigencies and of a different cultural-historical moment, who m/othered the complexities of not only those they themselves birthed, and successive generations. This interview with editors of the book, Šimić and Underwood-Lee, considers the effects and influences of their own mothers’ performance of the maternal role and identity. How far might inheritance – in all its many guises and forms of expression – be understood to feed into, or underlie, the tangled strands of habit, ideal, cultural-historical expectation, convention, and improvisation comprising the blend of practices we think of as mothering, as maternal, as motherhood?