When the call for papers for this anthology went out, the leading questions were, "Is there a right or wrong way to be a mother?" "What about those who do it differently?" What emerged from these inquiries was a collection of texts that affirm authenticity and non-normativity against some of the pressures and ideals of motherhood in the Western world. This collection of stories examine various perspectives of
mothers, mothers-to-be, daughters, and grandmothers. How the women had mothered, or been mothered, and what they learned from their experiences are portrayed in very different ways. Some are more academic in nature; others are not. All are intriguing. The essays written in a true narrative form feel more like a conversation and less like a university research paper. These pieces better reflect the laughter and tears that come with being a mother, or wanting to be a certain kind of mother—one who stays within the lines, following the path set out by other mothers in their circle of family or friends, or ones who don't. For Jennifer Mehlenbacher, there are no lines. Her essay, "On Children: Forever is Unconditional" starts with Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children." Mehlenbacher writes how this poem came to mean so much to her, in its telling of love and understanding of our children, especially when her daughter first comes out as lesbian, then bisexual, then non-binary, and finally, as a trans man. Mehlenbacher learned what it means to unconditionally love your children. Another boundary-busting mother, Kate Rossiter, writes in her essay "Maternal Expectations," that she didn't expect to have to take on the role of caregiver when her mother developed early onset dementia. At the time, Rossiter expected that her mother would be giving guidance as she raised her babies. Instead, it was Rossiter who had to mother both her children and her mother. In the postscript, it is noted that mothers need each other's stories, from whatever perspective they are written. Mothering Outside the Lines delivers them with compassion and understanding.

- Christine Peets

Mothering Outside the Lines is a portal to m/otherworlds, worlds both beyond and hidden within the uncontainable spaces, the crevices and cracks between the lines scripted through patriarchal motherhood. In addition to the feminist sensibility of sharing our stories through vulnerable and intimate writing, chapter after chapter animates the variety of ways we learn to mother and learn about mother-work—from our own mothers, from mothering children, from feminist theory, from media and popular culture. The collection illustrates the multifaceted ways in which patriarchal motherhood proliferates across time and space, but also how it is always-already being refused thus re-agentizing mothering on our own terms. This is not a singular story of mothering, but together weaves a carrier bag that can hold us and our various desires to embrace mothering while challenging motherhood, to collectively imagine otherwise and craft worlds our children, ancestors, and non-human kin deserve.

- Mairi McDermott, Phd, Associate Professor in Curriculum and Learning, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary

Within the engaging pages of this book you will find stories that are testament to, and observation and memory of, mothers, mothering and motherhood that resist, examine, redefine and gloriously flout boundaries. The chapters that make up this collection are potent; they prompt profound reflection on the societal, familial and personal boundaries we conceptualize, realize and encounter, and the spaces in between. Life and love, critique and celebration, are woven into this text by distinct voices creating a work that is both powerful and insightful, while its style remains open and candid.

- Victoria Bailey, Co-editor of Coming Into Being: Mothers on Finding and Realizing Feminism.

In Mothering Outside the Lines: Tales of Boundary Busting Mamas, editors Michelann Parr and Betty Ann Martin stage a powerful intervention of the normative boundaries of motherhood – limit points that appear to hold things together but too often suffocate the joyous potential of mothering relationality. Transforming imposed, arbitrary, and malicious rules for mothering into self/relationally made boundaries that can enhance and empower, the collection offers an essential reimaging of repressive forms of being and becoming. Explorations across the essays on the fluctuating edges of mothering that demand constant renegotiation affirm the critical importance of matricentric cultures to the mental health of individual mothers. Without a supportive matricentric culture that recognizes the dynamism of mothering across the lifespan, those who mother suffer the unbounded demands of undefined expectations: the torture of giving too much while wondering if they’ve done enough. Rather than teaching those in our care to over-give and under-appreciate, or to accept arbitrary boundaries without reflection, redrawing the lines of mothering engages the much broader social and political work of ethical relationality. Negotiating such dynamics by “mothering outside the lines” not only empowers those who mother but rightfully places mothering at the center of what it means to build vibrant democratic societies.

- Renée Valiquette, PhD, Interdisciplinary Studies, Nipissing University