Radical Psychology
Volume Nine, Issue 2
Transforming ‘non-normative’
motherhood: Retrospective accounts of
transnational motherhood in serial migration
Introduction
Mothering has long been a feminist issue. In The Second Sex, for
example, Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
identified motherhood as one of the
main factors in the oppression of women. Three main issues have
repeatedly been identified as central to the relevance of mothering to
feminism. First, there is a contradiction between the idealisation of
the institution of motherhood and the demanding, and isolated, work it
often entails in affluent northern countries (Oakley,
1979; Rich,
1976). Motherhood is, therefore, often experienced as both
difficult
and stressful as well as emotionally fulfilling and joyous (Elliott,
Gunaratnam, Hollway, and Phoenix, 2009). Second, responsibility for
childcare and upbringing is gender differentiated, so that mothers, and
not fathers, continue to do the major work of childcare (Daniel et al,
2005). Mothering is thus a major site for the intensification of
gendered inequalities (Craig, 2005) and so
for feminist analyses and
politics. Third, while parenting is now on the political agenda,
mothers are frequently held responsible for their children’s behaviour
and development (Gillies, 2007). One
consequence of this is that there
are strong normative prescriptions about the circumstances into which
children should be born and raised. Women are thus stigmatised for
having children ‘too early’, ‘too late’, as lone mothers, or in
circumstances where they cannot make independent economic provision for
their children or are deemed not to nurture the correct educational or
emotional outcomes (Chase et
al, 2009; Duncan et al,
2010; Visick,
2009).
The now substantial feminist literature on motherhood indicates that
there are many implicit prescriptions that blame women for
mothering in ways constructed as less than optimal (Jackson and Mannix,
2004). As a result, numerous groups of mothers who are mothering in
circumstances constructed as ‘non-normative’, are subject to public
censure and can be said to be ’mothering on the margins’. A
Google search produces more than 33,000 results for ‘mothering on the
margins’, suggesting that it is a readily-available discursive
formation and self definition. A wide range of ‘margins’ are
identified in the literature, including racialisation (e.g. black
mothers and mothers from other minoritised ethnic groups); having
children who have disabilities; living in poverty; being working class;
raising children without living with their fathers; not having custody
of children and being subjects of child protection services (Gillies,
2007; O'Reilly, 2006; Romero, 1997). Lorelei Carpenter and Helena
Austin (2007) use the metaphor of the ’text and the margin’, where
the
text may be said to describe constructions of good mothering and the
margin is the space beyond the text where mothers are not recognized
and so are silenced and, as a result, segregated and isolated.
It is not only that certain categories of mothers are constructed as
better suited than others to motherhood; what mothers do with their
children is also subject to public scrutiny. As a discipline,
psychology has been particularly influential in producing normative
prescriptions about the practices that constitute good mothering. In
particular, attachment theory constructs mothers and the relationships
they forge with their young children as central to identities and
mental health (Barrett, 2006).
Although fathers are now more
commonly discussed as important to their children’s lives, the work of
mothering continues to be constructed as crucial to children’s
educational, behavioural and mental health outcomes (Burman, 2008). In
psychoanalytic work, children’s identification with their mothers is
seen as important to development. In later life, it is
particularly central to mother-daughter relationships (Hollway, 2009).
In northern cultures, it is taken for granted that mothers and children
should live together and that mothers should devote themselves
selflessly to their children. In focusing on motherhood as social and
political, rather than private and non-political, feminism has
undoubtedly contributed to transformations in both the conditions and
constructions of motherhood (Green, 2009).
However, feminist work has
long pointed out that there is a tension between idealised versions of
motherhood and many mothers’ experiences of tedium, stress and hard,
repetitive work that is socially undervalued and often anxiety
provoking (Barnard, 1975; Oakley, 1974; Oakley,
1979; Phoenix, Woollett,
and
Lloyd, 1991).
This paper discusses a group of mothers who may be said to be
‘mothering on the margins’, but who do not generally come to public
attention; mothers who are separated from their children through
transnational migration. In recent years, such mothers have begun
to receive some media and academic attention, but have generally not
impinged on public consciousness. Transnational motherhood is, however,
a feminist issue in that mothers (but not fathers) separated from their
children as a result of migration are often subject to censure
for apparently taking insufficient account of their children’s needs.
Yet, mothers in such circumstances frequently work hard to make the
best possible economic and emotional contributions to the wellbeing of
their children and families.
Transnational motherhood
The research available indicates that mothers separated from their
children transnationally face a range of issues relevant to their
positioning as mothers. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila
(2003),
for example, point out that "At the beginning of the 21st century,
transnational mothers and their families are blazing new terrain,
spanning national borders, and improvising strategies for mothering"
(p318).
While this formulation makes transnational mothers seem rather like
fearless pioneers, mothering while simultaneously developing new
lifestyles in a new country can be particularly difficult (Lutz, 2008).
This is borne out in a study of Filipino/a ‘children of migration’,
where Parreñas (2005) found
that the mothers had to work hard,
often in difficult circumstances away from their children. However,
transnational mothers, but not fathers, are disapproved of by both the
Philippine government and the wider society, in ways that exacerbate
the tensions that many Filipino/a migrant families have to negotiate.
The children living in the Philippines while their mothers and/or
fathers worked abroad appreciated the material comforts that resulted
and understood why their parents were away. Yet, they were often
particularly sad about their mothers’ absence. The Philippines are
economically dependent on the remittances the mothers send, but
politicians and public alike often voice their disapproval of the
widespread practice of mothers leaving their children behind when they
take up employment in more affluent countries. To some extent, this is
to be expected since (with notable exceptions such as in Scandinavian
countries) mothers continue to be constructed as predominantly
responsible for childcare and for their children’s development (Azar,
2008; Barrett, 2006; Miller, 2005). Children, as well as
society, are
therefore more likely to hold mothers, rather than fathers, accountable
for children’s emotional wellbeing.
It is possible for transnational families to maintain shared
imaginaries and narratives of belonging through contact and visits in
either direction (Yeoh, Huang, and Lam,
2005) and through ‘virtual
intimacies’ (Wilding, 2006). They are
thus sometimes able to
maintain the simultaneity of family members’ lives across transnational
space through shared activities, routines and institutions (Levitt and
Glick-Schiller, 2004). This geographically-separated simultaneity
takes
effort, resources and organisation to maintain and so is emotionally,
cognitively and financially costly (Orellana, Thorne, Chee, and Lam,
2001). Transnational families thus have to negotiate transnational
circuits of emotion, material goods and financial support. Wolf (2002) coined the term ‘emotional
transnationalism’ to capture the
emotional ties that are evoked, despite migration and geographical
separation. The work of emotional (and often economic) maintenance
across national borders often falls to women (Skrbiš, 2008).
The mothers in ‘global care chains’ (Parreñas,
2001) often have
to rely on other women to look after their children and/or other
relatives while many do care work for other, more affluent women in the
countries to which they have migrated (Lutz,
2008; Yeates, 2005). The
work performed by mothers in global care chains serves to maintain
emotional links and relationships as well as to support different
family members. However, it is managed at enormous cost for many women
in that geographical separation can produce a sense of liminality,
ambiguity, and indeterminacy of identity; a sense of simultaneously
‘being here and there’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo
and
Avila,
2003). Mothers are
often morally beholden to the women who look after their children in
their countries of origins in that they have to ‘repay the gift of
communality’ in economic and other ways (Carling,
2008).
This paper uses a study of serial migration to consider the ways in
which two mothers who came to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean,
leaving behind children who later joined them, account for themselves
as mothers. It considers the contradictions that result when the
mothers recognise that the future visions for their children (e.g. in
terms of educational goals and careers) that fuelled and justified the
process of serial migration are called into question by the ways in
which mothering is viewed in current British society and by their own
children, particularly their daughters. The paper first briefly
describes the study that informs the analyses presented here. It then
considers how two mothers who migrated to the UK and then sent for
their children, retrospectively construct what they aimed to do and
their feelings about it. For both mothers, a key theme was that serial
migration was their attempt to do the best they could for their
children, but both recognised that it had costly effects in terms of
their relationships with their children.
The study
The analyses presented come from interviews with two mothers whose
children had been serial migrants. These interviews formed part of an
ESRC-funded research ‘Transforming Experiences’ project in which 53
adults (39 women and 14 men) were interviewed because they were
‘serial migrants’ from the Caribbean. The participants were asked to
look back on their childhoods with the aim of understanding the ways in
which they re-conceptualise their experiences over time and the impact
of their re-conceptualisation on their identities. All the
parents left the Caribbean at a time when their labour was solicited in
the UK (Bauer and Thompson,
2006), where they hoped to be able to make
a more prosperous life, with better opportunities for their children
than were open to them in their countries of birth. Since serial
migration was common in Caribbean countries at the time, it was not
considered ‘non-normative’ in the countries in which they had been
born, or in their social circles.
Changes to immigration laws over the last thirty years mean that
migration from the Caribbean is much less common than it was. The
experiences reported here were thus different from those in current
‘global care chains’, where Information and Communication Technologies
enable more frequent contact and new ways to manage mother-child
relations (Hondagneu-Sotelo
and
Avila,
2003; Lutz, 2008;
Parreñas, 2005). Serial
migration and long periods of
transnational separation from parents are, however, common across the
globe and so these mothers’ experiences can help to illuminate the
intentions of transnational mothers, the dilemmas they face and their
positioning as women. The impact of serial migration is mostly still
poorly understood (Arnold, 2006). There
is some north American evidence
that many children who have experienced it feel a degree of unhappiness
in childhood, sometimes have difficult relationships with their parents
and attain poorly in education (Smith,
Lalonde,
and
Johnson,
2004;
Vickerman, 2006). The impact on their
mothers, however, has been even
less investigated. This may be partly because mothers are frequently
reluctant to tell their stories about serial migration. Many of the
adults who had been left as children in the Caribbean said that their
parents were reluctant to talk about this and the few who did were
reported to be reluctant to hear their adult children’s viewpoints.
This study set out to interview the adult children, rather than the
parents but, as the study progressed, attempted to recruit the parental
generation. We found, however, that most of the parents did not want to
be interviewed, even when their adult children expected that they
would. In the absence of time and resources to make a concerted effort
to recruit the parental generation, we eventually interviewed only two
mothers, neither of whose children were approached to participate in
the study.
The theoretical resources on which the study draws include the notion
that we 'make ourselves' through our autobiographical narratives
(Bruner, 1990) and that memories do not
simply re-present past events,
but simultaneously construct identities (Lambek and Antze, 1996). What
is remembered is, therefore, dependent on how events fit with
constructed experiences and life stories. Memory allows us "to
creatively refashion ourselves, remembering one
thing and not another, changing the stories we tell ourselves (and
others) about ourselves", in a dialectical relationship between
experience, memory, culture and identity (Lambek and Antze, 1996,
p.xvi). As Polkinghorne (1988)
suggests, we ‘refashion’ ourselves through
narrative and "revise the plot as new events are added to our lives"
(Polkinghorne,1988, p150).
Identities that are unsatisfactory can be
reworked to provide new, more emotionally acceptable versions and new
understandings of difficult stories. This is particularly
important for the mothers in the serial migration study because their
separation from their children means that, in Judith Butler’s (2004)
terms, they are constructed as having ‘unbearable lives’ because they
cannot recognize themselves in the culture’s canonical narratives of
what it is to be a mother. This paper addresses the ways in which the
two mothers have remade their identities decades after their children
have grown up.
Working towards a worthwhile future
Avtar Brah (1996) suggests that diasporas
are paradoxical in both being
about journey and moving, as well as putting down roots in new
countries:
“The word diaspora often invokes the
imagery of traumas of separation
and dislocation, and this is certainly a very important aspect of the
migratory experience. But diasporas are also potentially the sites of
hope and new beginnings. They are contested cultural and political
terrains where individual and collective memories collide, reassemble
and reconfigure.” (p.193)
The two mothers in this study (referred to as Emma and Bertha)
demonstrate the paradox of working to put down roots in a new place as
well as the hopes that attended their new beginnings and their
management of the trauma of separation from their children. Both women
had six children, some of whom were born in the Caribbean and some in
the UK. Both migrated as part of a family project agreed with their
husbands, who also came to the UK. ‘Emma’, left three children behind
when she migrated to the UK. She had three more children in the UK and
sent for all of her Caribbean children, thus reuniting the family. At
some point in their childhoods, her marriage ended. She was interviewed
when she was 70 years old and tells a story that makes clear that she
had been the parent who had major responsibility for her children.
Emma narrates a process of having striven to negotiate creative
solutions to the separation from her children, working hard to have
them with her as soon as possible and revising her initial decision to
return to the Caribbean after five years when she became clear that it
would be better to bring the children to the UK. Nonetheless, her
matter-of-fact clarity about having done the only thing she could do is
accompanied by a story of pain at the time and paying the price of
being emotionally distant from her children after reunion. In the
extracts that follow, (.) indicates a pause and ... that I have
shortened the extract by omitting something.
Q: OK. So I wonder if we could
start by you just telling me your story in terms of your experience of
serial migration from the Caribbean?
Emma: My story
isn’t a very (laughs) good one.
Um. (.) I miss my children terribly when I came and, um,
especially, um, yes, and the first five years in this country, five,
seven years, it was terribly, terrible, you know. Um. One
from missing them, one, um. It was such a different life style from the
happy, free, you know, Jamaica that you leave behind. Um. (.) You
had (.) when you have somewhere rented it was just one room and you
have to do everything in it for a start, ah. And then you had to
personally, you want your children with you and sometimes people didn’t
want you to live there. So the first thing after you start to save to
buy a place and that wasn’t any easy job. /…/ And there’s no way I was
going to get them without a house. However, um, was saving like that
but then it seems as if it was taking forever. And in the meantime you
have to send money back to support them. /…/ So we start to look about
for a flat, leaving the house but still saving. And we got a flat /.../
It was two bedroom. And before the children came we then sub let
one room to help us pay the, um, the rent for the flat. We didn’t
have to give a deposit. /.../
Q: So if you think about
Betsy and Lizzie do you have
a sense of how they felt about you coming to England and being away
from them and then sending for them later?
Emma: Noo.
Nooo. (.) No. You see
when you’re busy working and working and working you haven’t (.) I
didn’t have time to start think about that. You know what I’m
saying? But now sometime when you sit back you think you could
have maybe do some things differently.
The above extract, from the beginning of Emma’s interview immediately
presents what later become clear are key themes for Emma. She asserts
that hers is not a good story and explains two reasons for this;
missing her children terribly and the different, less carefree
lifestyle in Britain, compared with Jamaica. Having oriented the
researcher to this context, which arguably defends her against charges
that she was an irresponsible or uncaring mother, she presents a third
theme, of industriousness and working to make adequate material
provision for her children, ‘no way I was going to get them without a
house’. In response to a question about how the children felt, she
introduces a fourth key theme as an evaluation of her story. She
explains that she had been too busy working (in order to make material
provision for her children) to have time to think about how they felt,
so that it is only sometimes now, when she ‘sits back’ (and presumably
has leisure to reflect), that she thinks she could have done things
differently. Her use of a three-part-list ‘working and working and
working’ serves to emphasise her industriousness as well as how hard
things were for her. Emma’s account presents dilemmas for women that
are central to feminism. In particular, it raises questions about how
best to reconcile material and emotional care for children in a context
where a focus on attachment makes separation from young children
(including for reasons of daily employment) potentially contentious and
blameworthy.
Given that Emma’s second answer presented above is in response to a
question about her children, it functions as prolepsis (i.e. mounting a
defence in anticipation of criticism) (Billig,
1991). She thus defends
herself against potential charges, (not made, but perhaps easily
inferred by Emma in a context where serial migration is not part of the
normative cultural story), that her life was easier than her children’s
or that she knew that they were not happy while they were separated
from her. By acknowledging that now (but not then) she can see that she
could have done things differently, she also gives recognition to the
possibility that she could be blamed for the serial migration, while
simultaneously justifying it from her position as a mother.
The overall
picture produced in the first few minutes of the interview is one of
sadness and a discourse of self-acceptance in that she explains that
she had little choice but to do as she did. Emma and Bertha (who is
discussed below) are both aware that the geographical move from the
Caribbean to the UK, and the historical shift in narratives of
parenting from the 1960s and 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century
call into question their decisions to migrate before their children did
and the length of time they were separated. Popular cultural discourses
of attachment theory and close relationships with children are thus
likely to form the intertextual backdrop to their accounts, implicitly
requiring them to defend themselves against notions that they have not
been good mothers. It is striking that they do not lay open their
husbands to potential blame, suggesting that they take for granted that
mothers are more responsible than fathers for how their children fare.
It becomes evident later in the interview that Emma used to send money
back to the Caribbean for her children’s support, but that she wrote to
her aunt, who was caring for the children (her mother having migrated
to the UK before Emma), rather than to the children. Since there was no
telephone available then, she had no direct communication with the
children and knew little about what was happening to them, including
how they were prepared for coming to Britain. With hindsight, she said
that she felt it would have been good to have written to the children
and that it would be preferable for one parent to stay in the Caribbean
with the children while the other came to the United Kingdom to make a
life for them. She explains that they are not a close family,
suggesting that this explains why it would have been better for one
parent to have stayed with the children (presumably herself since she
had remained with them when her husband migrated).
Many of the adults who had been serial migrants as children, wished
things could have been different and viewed their relationships with
their own children and, often, gradual improvements in their
relationships with their parents as redeeming the difficulties caused
by serial migration. However, while Emma, as a mother, admits that from
her current vantage point she sometimes considers that things could
have been done differently, she does not examine this possibility very
closely. Indeed, in discussing this, she shifts to the second
person, distancing herself from it. One of her key narratives is that
‘It’s done... there is nothing I can
do about it'.
Bertha, the other mother interviewed, was 80 years old at the time of
interview. She left four children in the Caribbean with her mother and
sister and had a further two in the UK. As did Emma, she
emphasised the theme of pain on leaving the children, the hard work she
and her husband had to do to provide for them and the difficulty of
getting, adequate accommodation for them in a context where racism made
it difficult for Caribbeans to get any accommodation.
Bertha: After coming (.) after that, he [her
husband] send for me two years after (.) I find it very, very
difficult, also leave the kids then (.) but I want a better life for
them so therefore I make up my mind. I book the fare to bring the
first one over, which is elder son but unfortunate he couldn’t come
along with me at the time because there was no place really suitable
for me and him and the children and so- and my son. Anyway, after
coming over, my mum took care of (.) the four children that left behind
(.) along with one sister that I really grew (.) and we sought to work
together very hard. It wasn’t very easy. It was really hard.
Leave a nice home, hot country and come over here and have to be living
into one small room, I find it really difficult, I cry night and
day. But God also good, he help- you know, he helps me out and we
move along, work together and find big … bigger place and send for the
first son. When he came he was 8 year old, (.) he went to school,
which was a little difficulty but still, he cry also want to go back
home to grandma (.) but we encouraged him that we want better life for
him, that’s why we brought him over. It was very, very hard at
that time (.), you couldn’t even get anywhere for yourself much more to
have children in the…in the home. Anyway, we work together and
things sort of build up very good and we send for the other three
children, together, a few years after. When (.) um Mark was [7
[slower]] when he came (.) and the other one, uh he was, I don’t quite
remember if he was (.) a- 5 a- and the girl, she came when she was 4,
those three. Life begin to get really, really hard, having to
looked after 4 children, living in one big room (laughs) (.) but we
fight it all really you know, we manage, I work very hard.
/…/ I really work hard, I work from one … actually, one day to
the other. I hardly know when there is a day to rest, also my
husband. /…/But still, God is good, we get this one here and the
children then be contented. The children, they wasn’t very settled when
they came from Jamaica (.), they always a problem, not with the elder
boy but with the three that came together (.) especially my
daughter. I had a hard time (laughs) with her that’s … you know,
because she wasn’t really settled, she want to go back to stay with her
grandma and I determined that you’re not going back, you are staying
here to get a better life which, thank God, she do get a better life.
Bertha‘s response to the first question has striking commonalities with
Emma’s. In particular, she highlights her reluctance to leave the
children as well as how hard she and her husband worked to find
accommodation for them and to be able to bring them to Britain. The
back story she creates (not included above for reasons of space) was
consistent with Emma’s story in explaining that she had not
communicated directly with her children, but wrote to her sister and to
a ‘local lady’, asking how they looked. Additional themes for Bertha
(in contradistinction from Emma) are how difficult it was for some of
the children to settle into living with their parents again and how
hard it was to persuade them that they would have a better life in the
UK. In relation to her older daughter in particular (who she left when
aged six months), Bertha expressed sadness that she only developed a
loving relationship with her a few years ago because that daughter was
much more attached to Bertha‘s sister. (‘I say “I’m your mother“. She
say, “No"'). Bertha’s daughter’s refusal to accept Bertha as her
mother
provides an indication that children actively construct notions of
mothering and motherhood that need not be based on birth mothering.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Bertha reported that she had a much better
relationship with the daughter born in Britain, who lived with her
throughout her childhood.
Bertha’s Christian faith (expressed frequently as ‘thank God‘, ‘God is
good‘ etc.) gives her account an optimistic and consoling feel despite
the sorrow she expresses at various points about leaving the children,
later poor relationships with some and the drudgery involved in
providing for them. Nonetheless, five of her six children have done
well educationally and so have benefited materially from coming to
Britain in the way that she and her husband intended. Emma too
expressed pride that most of her children had good jobs and were
respectable citizens.
In a Swedish interview study asking parents of four-year-olds about
their ideas on child development, Halldén,
(1991) found that
contemporary parents have contrasting images of children. She used the
metaphors ‘child as being’ (which emphasises the need for parents to
protect their children and recognise their individuality) and ‘child as
project’ (which focuses on what children can become). Halldén
suggests that these contrasting ideas result because parents have to
deal with conflicting demands of parenthood. Parents formulate an
everyday psychology that acts as frames of reference for what they do
in relation to their children. According to Halldén (1991), these
frames of reference are historically and culturally specific in that
they are interpretations of what society demands of its citizens.
For Bertha and Emma, the justification of serial migration in terms of
its material benefits is an indication that they viewed their children
as educational and economic future ‘projects’. This may be particularly
the case since, when separated from their children, they have limited
opportunities to focus on Halldén’s ‘child as being, but can
continue maternal work and caring by treating their children as future
projects.
For both Bertha and Emma, a ‘child as project’ approach had been
successful for most of their children in terms of material success, but
unsuccessful in terms of their relationships and emotions.
Looking back and evaluating
Despite these shared features of their experiences, Bertha and Emma
come to somewhat different overall evaluations of serial migration. For
Bertha, it was to be regretted:
Bertha: I tell you … I would like nobody to leave
their children behind anymore you know. It’s really, it’s
heartbreaking, it’s really heartbreaking you know, I would never
encourage no one to leave their children behind so far (.) without
seeing them for one or two day as much more, two or three year.
It’s really tough, it’s … it’s … it’s not easy. When I see
daylight and I look on my children you know, well gradually they take
time … time to break into the life (.)… the boys, they was fine, I must
be honest, they was fine, really fine. And then having these two
you know, they was fine, they … I can tell you the truth, … sometimes I
say I should have fewer boy, the boys, them are fine. But me,
that mishap with my daughter was like a nightmare…as time goes on,
things start to get better.
Bertha’s account differentiates between the impact on her sons and
daughter, who found it harder to be reconciled to Bertha as her mother.
From the vantage point of several years later, Emma wished she had
worked less hard at her employment out of the house and can now imagine
what had been unimaginable for her in earlier years: that she might for
a period have relied on state support so that she could spend more time
with her children than was possible at the time. As discussed above,
she also thought that it might be better for one parent to stay with
the children in the Caribbean. However, while Bertha does not focus on
regret because she takes an optimistic stance, Emma rejects the very
possibility of regret for herself, on the grounds that it is futile
since there is no point in regretting what cannot be changed.
Q: Do you think there’s a relationship
between the
fact that you and Betsy don’t have a good relationship and the fact
that you were away from her for a period of time?
Emma: Could
be. Could be. But you (laugh) can’t
do nothing about it, can you? And..
I: You say “could
be” – what, what might the
connection be?
Emma: I don’t
know. You can’t do anything about
it. And you know one thing, I tell you what – it’s, it’s like
this, I do what I did the way I did it and it’s done, it’s gone, there
is nothing I can do about it – because I know people that left children
back home and they don’t get them here until they’re, you know, and
they still have a good relationship. And there’s children,
parents that have children here and they never leave them, they don’t
have a good relationship… You know, so you can’t keep, ah, I can’t keep
looking back coz it, it’s done, it’s gone and there’s nothing I can do
about it… I haven’t (.) got a choice now.
/../
Q: So how do you
feel about the decision that you
made back then?
Emma: Well I make
it whether it was right or wrong. I
made it .hh and, um, (.) I made it (.) and as I said I keep repeating,
it’s behind now. I can’t say I wish I hadn’t made it. I did what
I have to, had to do whether it be wrong or right I wouldn’t and I
don’t know… But I’m proud of the fact that we left them there and (.)
we, as I say, say five years would go back to them. We feel that was
the wrong thing to do and we change it and we worked towards it and we
got them here when they was still young… and have the opportunity to do
things instead of going back to them and don’t know where a job coming
from to give them their next.
There was a great feeling of sadness from Emma’s interview. Her
acceptance that she had little choice about what to do with regard to
her children protected her from believing that her efforts and
sacrifices might have been less worthwhile than she had supposed they
would be. Unlike Bertha, her marriage had ended, one of her children
had died and she was estranged from another. However, once she retired
from paid employment, she had put her energies into community service
in ways that allowed her to resist normative constructions of what
Butler (2004) calls a ‘culturally
legible’, worthwhile or ‘liveable
life’, which requires mothers to have close attachments with
children and grandchildren. From her point of view, her community
contributions and the fact that her children were all employed
and ‘good parents’ also allowed her to produce the kind of
redemptive narrative common from midlife onwards (McAdams, 2006).
As a mother in a serial migration relationship, Emma kept her vision
fixed on the future and avoided dwelling on the pain she experienced in
the present in order to work towards providing a home in the UK for her
children. In Hondagneu-Sotelo
and
Avila’s
(2003) terms, she appeared to
have been ‘neither here, nor there’ in that her account suggests that
while away from her children, she barely allowed herself to experience
the present in order to be able to provide a better future for her
children. This seems to be a psychosocially defensive strategy in that
Emma seems to be both enduring painful circumstances and protecting
herself from them for reasons that can be viewed as deferred
gratification. Bertha, who also reported a strong future vision for her
children, seemed less defensive about evaluating her experience of
serial migration as having deeply problematic consequences for some of
her children. She used the extreme case formulation ‘heartbreaking’ in
her retrospective evaluation. It is not surprising then that
Emma, unlike Bertha, was somewhat impatient with questions that
appeared to try to make her reflect on the possibility that she may
have made mistakes in engaging in the process of serial migration.
In conclusion
It might be argued that Bertha and Emma’s mothering was a reflection of
the historical period in which their children were young, rather than
their transnational status. Indeed, the women serial migrants in the
study frequently said that they themselves would not leave their
children in order to migrate and drew attention to intergenerational
differences between their own and their mothers’ mothering. This can,
however, only be part of the story in that many also considered that
they had been mothered differently from the ways in which their
British-born siblings had been mothered. As a mother, Bertha also
explains that she got on much better with the daughter who was born in
the UK and from whom she was never separated, than with the children
who were serial migrants, particularly her daughter.
Both mothers produced full accounts of their families’ serial migration
suggesting that, as Catherine Riessman
(2002; 2008) argues, narratives
are most likely to be developed when there is a rupture of canonical
expectations. That is, when lives develop in ways that run counter to
what would be expected in the culture. Emma’s experience as a mother is
consistent with Helma Lutz’s finding (personal communication) that
Surinamese mothers who went to the Netherlands as serial migrant
mothers were only able to do so because they refused to anticipate that
it would be painful for them and for their children. They had to be
‘hard’ in order to leave at all. When interviewed, however, they had
been living for decades in the Netherlands and seen how views of
childrearing had changed as well as the difficulties they faced in
their relationships with their children. As a result, the stories they
told Lutz in their research interviews identified serial migration as
an emotionally difficult, complex and contradictory process (Lutz,
1995). These findings fit with those in the ‘Transforming
Experience’
study where time and later experiences served to transform
understanding of experience for the children involved as well as for
Emma and Bertha, the two mothers interviewed. It could be argued that
Emma and Bertha’s decisions fit with notions of feminist mothering in
seeking to do the best they could for their children through their and
their husbands’ employment. This in itself, however, put them in
contradictory positions as mothers in that they not only had lengthy
periods of separation from their children, but were employed for long
hours away from home when the children joined them. Both mothers were
aware that this potentially subjected them to censure as mothers
(unlike their husbands who, as fathers, were central to decisions about
serial migration). Both women’s accounts foreground pain and difficulty
on leaving their children. However, while Bertha regrets the serial
migration because the negative effects lasted for decades (until only
five years ago according to her account), she also constructs an
optimistic worldview by drawing on her Christian faith. In contrast, a
psychosocial reading suggests that Emma’s defences against regretting
the serial migration entail a fatalistic worldview which refuses to
acknowledge the difficulties of the past, or her part in it, on the
grounds that the past cannot be changed and she had ‘had to do’ what
she had done.
Neither Emma nor Bertha managed to maintain shared imaginaries,
‘simultaneity’ and narratives of belonging with their families while
separated (c.f. Levitt
and Glick-Schiller, 2004), although they did
negotiate ‘transnational circuits’ of emotion, material goods and
financial support (Yeoh et al, 2005)
which were economically and
emotionally costly for them (Orellana
et
al,
2001). For both, future
visions for their children were central to the decisions that they and
their husbands made to take the opportunity to migrate and then to send
for their children once they could afford to do so. The process of
serial migration was made possible because, in Gunilla Halldén’s
(1991) terms, they viewed their children as 'projects',
educationally
and economically. From their accounts, they struggled to develop shared
imaginaries, simultaneity and narratives of belonging once they were
reunited with their children, particularly their daughters. It is
arguable that, once reunited, they could not view their ‘child[ren] as
‘being’ in that facing their children’s misery may well have been
unbearably painful for them. For both, the children’s experiences and
reactions meant that they were ‘mothering on the margins‘, not just
because they were separated for some years from some of their children,
but because they were then marginalised by some of their children as a
result of the painful emotions evoked for the children in leaving
carers to whom they were deeply attached in order to rejoin mothers who
were strangers to them. The notion that children can marginalise their
mothers is not generally addressed in the literature and challenges a
unidirectional conceptualisation that mothers ‘harm’ their children if
secure attachment is not established; that is the literature does not
theorise the possibility of children hurting their mothers by remaining
distant from, and resistant to, them. A transactional approach helps to
illuminate the ways in which mothering is a relational process in which
both parties (mothers and children) are agents who produce effects and
are themselves affected as they act on the world. The contradictions
Bertha and Emma faced, and their recognition that they were potentially
subject to blame for having been transnational mothers, illustrate the
ways in which motherhood (but not fatherhood) is overdetermined by
requirements for emotional provision and physical co-presence, while
economic provision is downplayed. This makes transnational motherhood a
feminist issue in that it penalises women for making what they consider
to be the best arrangements for their families, constructing mothers,
but not fathers, as responsible for putting co-residence with their
children above what they view as the children’s long-term best
interests. Yet, as the mothers discussed above illustrate, mothers have
to face circumstances where conceptualisations of ‘child as being’
conflict with those of ‘child as project’ (Halldén,
1991) and
mothers, across the globe, frequently make difficult assessments of how
best to manage the process of migrating in order to forge better lives
while providing care for their children. Bertha and Emma’s narratives
retrospectively find ways of reconciling these conflicting interests
(Ryan and Webster, 2008).
The analyses presented so far demonstrate the long-lasting impact of
the mothers’ experiences as
serial migrants on their feelings about themselves.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those who took part in the ‘Transforming
Experiences’ study for giving so generously of their time and
narratives. It is a truism to say that the paper would not have been
possible without them. However, their reflexivity has greatly enriched
my understanding of the issues discussed here. Thanks also to Elaine
Bauer, Leandra Box, Stephanie Davis and Pat Petrie for their work on
the project and to the project advisory group and the ESRC-funded
Making of Modern Motherhoods research team who discussed interview
transcripts and analytic ideas with us. None of this work would have
been conducted without the generosity of the ESRC and the panel who
considered the project worthy of funding. Grateful thanks to them and
to the two anonymous referees and the editors of the special issue who
made time to give full and constructive comments.
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Ann Phoenix is Professor and Co-Director at Thomas Coram Research Unit,
Institute of Education, University of London. Her research focuses on
psychosocial identities. She currently co-directs the Childhood
Wellbeing Research Centre funded by the Department for Education and is
writing up findings from an ESRC Professorial fellowship: ‘Transforming
experiences: Re-conceptualising identities and ‘non-normative’
childhoods’. She is the Principal Investigator on an ESRC National
Centre for Research Methods node (October 2011 to 2014).