Mothering Outside the Lines: Tales of Boundary Busting Mamas





Price: $39.95

Page Count: 200

Publication Date: October 2023

ISBN: 978-1-77258-464-6

In this collection, authors transgress and uphold their maternal integrity as they dance at the edge of comfort and take up the challenge of exploring the boundaries of maternal practice– their own, their mothers, and those found in literature, media, or popular culture. These mothers assume a hopeful stance; actively choose courage over comfort; push through what is fun, fast, or easy, and show how they come to mother outside the lines in all its simplicity and complexity. As they bust outdated, tired, and ambiguous boundaries, they find and (re)set new boundaries that restore dignity and self-respect for themselves, their children, their families, and for the matricentric feminist collective, particularly those whose voices may continue to be silenced and marginalized by structures and limits beyond their control. Thirteen stories are threaded together to form a compelling tale showing how and why some mothers, when faced with ambiguous and untenable boundaries, resist the urge to accept the assumed, the unpredictable, even the demanded–whether they be internal or external, visible or invisible, real or imaginary.

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

Introduction
(Re)Setting Boundaries: An Invitation to Mother Outside the Lines
Michelann Parr and BettyAnn Martin
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Part 1: Becoming at the Edge of Our Internal Boundaries

Breaking the Silence of My Motherhood: Rabbit Holes, False Starts, (Un)Finished Fragments, Hopeful Connections
Michelann Parr
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My (Paren)theses; My Theses
Tanya L’Heureux
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On Children: Forever is Unconditional
Jenn Mehlenbacher
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Maternal Expectations
Kate Ross
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Beyond the Edges of Order: A Framework for the Motherhood of Becoming
Drisana McDaniel
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Part 2: Honouring Our Boundary-Busting Foremothers

My Mother’s Legacy: Recovering the Gifts of Irreverence
BettyAnn Martin
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The House that Built Me
Darlene Tetzlaff
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The Whole Story
Susan Picard
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Resilent Independence: A Single-Lone Mom Reflects on Her Mother’s Legacy
Natasha Steer
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I Hope You Dance
Zoe Oliveira
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Part 3: Paying Homage to Our Literary and Popular Culture
Boundary-Busting Mamas

““They both begin with blood, pain, and terror:” Transgressing Normative Motherhood in and through the Contemporary Psychological Thriller, The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy, Little Voices by Vanessa Lillie, and Little Disasters by Sarah Vaughan
Andrea O’Reilly
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Creating a Champion for Women
Valerie Palmer-Mehta
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Mothering with Cancer
Suzanne Edwards
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Postscript
Threads of Continuity
Michelann Parr and BettyAnn Martin
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BettyAnn Martin is a narrative scholar interested in the reconstruction of experience through story, and the manner in which creative engagement with memory transforms individual consciousness. She re-discovered the therapeutic aspects of storytelling and writing while completing her PhD in Educational Sustainability from Nipissing University. Edited collections include Writing Mothers: Narrative Acts of Care, Redemption, and Transformation (2020) and Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood and Social Media (2016). BettyAnn continues to research and write about motherhood and its implications for identity and healing.

Michelann Parr is mother to three children and nana to two. As full professor in the Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University, research interests include narrative inquiry, autoethnography, identity as lifework, sustainability as relationship with self, other, and all our relations, and family engagement. Recent and upcoming edited collections include Writing Mothers: Narrative Acts of Care, Redemption, and Solidarity (2020) and What the Pain of Mothers Must Never Expose (pending).