Paper short abstract:

Analysing the situation of single mothers who came with their children to Germany to seek asylum, I suggest that the struggle of holding a precarious legal status has several direct and indirect effects on how motherhood is practiced and experienced

Paper long abstract:

I analyse the plights of two single mothers who fled to Berlin with their children during the so-called European 'refugee crisis' to seek asylum. Since both women come from 'safe' countries of origin, their chances to stay in Germany with a stable, long-term legal status are minimal. Hence, they live from one short-term legal status to the next with deportation and illegality always looming on the horizon. The analysis I present in this paper is informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork with numerous mothers who came (mainly from the Middle East) to Germany in the past years to seek asylum.

Holding an insecure legal status translates into restrictions and different forms of exclusion in the everyday life in Germany and thus shapes the ways in which these women can enact relationships with their children. I trace the strategies they employ to deal with these restrictions, analyse how they create a daily routine for their children in times of utmost uncertainty, and look at their aspirations for the future.

Struggling with legal precarity without an end in sight, the relationships both women experience with their children have different meanings: they are small zones of "familiarity, comfort, meaning, and safety" (Willen 2014: 86); they are the reasons why they keep on going, strategise, and invest immense energy in their fights for legal stability. At the same time, however, both women had to realise that under the conditions they faced, their abilities to be the 'good' mothers they wished to be were severely restrained.