Main description:

This edited collection provides a distinctive contribution to motherhood studies by addressing how becoming a mother is influenced not just by place and space but also by time and temporality. It explores the complexity and multiple temporalities that surround mothering, such as dreaming about, predicting and planning birth, delays in a baby arriving into the world, waiting and anticipating birth, labouring for periods of time that become blurred, and raising a child. Through maternal bodies it can be seen that time is not linear but stretched and punctuated in embodied ways. The book brings together research from a range of disciplinary and country contexts with contributions from scholars, visual artists and a fiction writer.

Contents:

1. Introduction Part I: Planning/preparing 2. '"You will live to regret it" Familial sentimentality and the affective construction of the biological clock 3. One of the greatest fears among women is the fear of failing at being a mother 4. "Children, children everywhere not a single for me": Adoption as an unpopular option for Bangladeshi childless women Part II: Birthing as event 5. Giving Birth to the Clock 6. Waiting and watching, a welcome and a lament: a narrative tryptic of ambivalence at the birth of a daughter/granddaughter/niece 7. Telling Stories of Birth across the Decades Part III: The 'postnatal' 8. Perambulator 9. Getting better? The complex temporalities of experiencing and recovering from post-natal depression 10. Mamamilk: a visual exploration of becoming a mother 11. The Politics of Potential in Khayelitsha, South Africa 12. Friday Records: A Document of Maternity Leave Part IV: Mothering as enduring 13. Intergenerational Echoes: Fraught Temporalities and Pregnancy Loss 14. Presence through absence: Experiences of motherhood through political action in Argentina 15. The Art of Reminiscing 16. Mothering and Mentoring: Transnational Dialogues