Price: $34.95
Page Count: 284
Publication Date: June 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77258-159-1
“This powerful collection of essays explores the timely and important topic of mothering and midlife. One of the strengths of this collection is the variety of voices and genres, including scholarly chapters, personal reflections, and graphic narratives. Women today face professional responsibilities and caregiving pressures from multiple directions, and the chapters of Middle Grounds: Essays on Midlife Mothering offer scholars important insights and reassuring narratives to those working to reconcile competing demands. As the contributors poignantly demonstrate, mothering from the middle poses challenges as well as exciting possibilities.”
—Abigail L. Palko, co-editor of Mothers, Mothering and Globalization and Cul- tural Representations of Breastfeeding
“Middle Grounds opens up the possibilities that so much transpires in the middle of mothering between joy, suffering, tensions and limits. In reading these authors from diverse perspectives and forms, we are beckoned to conscious mothering, as their tales dance us between light, shadow, dark and colours. This is a book that calls forth a turning from scared to sacred, reaffirming the connection between the personal and universal. These authors caress the details with depth, nuance and wisdom and sing into the world; shifting midlife out of the doldrums of predictability. Packed with insights and wisdom, artfully crafted, I am beckoned to once again honour every moment.”
—Celeste Snowber, author of Embodied Inquiry and Wild Tourist
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Kathy Mantas and Lorinda Peterson
On a Collision Course? Feminist Ideals and the
Mothering Professional in Middle Age
Kerri S. Kearney
Falling Back, Springing Forward:
An Older First-Time Mother’s Experience of Time
Kathy Mantas
Balancing Motherhood, Work, and Mental Health in Midlife:
One Mother’s Personal Struggles
Amy Leisenring
Beyond Grasping for Straws in the Dark: Hospice as a Model for a Team-Oriented Approach to Mothering in Midlife
Pamela K. Coke
Into and Out of the Fire: A Retrospective Journal
Cara L. Preuss
Institutional Mothering:
Middling between University, Home, and Jail
Tobi Jacobi
Parenting through the Fog
Niki Kaiser
Lilia’s World
Suzanne Kamata
Grief
Catherine Moeller
Mothering Myself: A Journey with/to the Inner Child
Amy Lee
The Benefits and Injuries of Midlife Mothering through an Autoethnographic Lens:
Or, Don’t Call Me Grandma
Nicole Willey
Midlife Burnout: Mothering, Multiple Roles,
and Multiple Losses
Victoria Team
Failure Is Not an Option: Learning to Succeed at Parenting in Midlife
Erin Doering
Rock-a-Bye Baby: Mothering in Midlife
Elisabeth Hanscombe
Mother Unmoored:
Letting Myself Be Lost, I Got Found
Sheila Martel
My Mother’s Mother
Margaret Kent Bass
Caricaturing Single, Midlife Motherhood in
Vanity’s Brief Encounters
Penelope Mendonça
Taking Custody
Lorinda Peterson
Home Economicus:
Some Disjunctures in Midlife Mothering
Lois Klassen
When Story Time Is Over:
Mothering Adult Children by Practising Productive Silence
Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers
About the Contributors
Kathy Mantas is an associate professor of Education at Nipissing University. Kathy’s research interests include: ongoing teacher development, knowledge and identity; arts education; creativity in teaching-learning contexts and in women educators; artful and creative inquiry; holistic and wellness education; and motherhood and mothering studies. She is the editor of Mothering Multiples: Complexities and Possibilities (Demeter Press).
Lorinda Peterson is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies and a Teaching Fellow in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her research explores motherhood at the intersection of theory and practice, focused on trauma and memory. She creates comics, other sequential work, and poetry in an art-based praxis for understanding and representing embodied experience. She publishes and exhibits her work regularly.
