Paper short abstract:

Becoming a mother can be an isolating and lonely experience. This paper explores some of the strategies women use to unwork, skirt around, disrupt or otherwise reconfigure their structured loneliness in an effort to (re)weave and (re)imagine more deeply entangled and supported mothering lifeworlds.

Paper long abstract:

For women living in Euro-American societies, becoming a mother can be an isolating and lonely rite of passage. And for many of the women who participated in my research, this was compounded by their experience of mothering as a stigmatising and marginalising practice because they were mothering in non-normative ways. They critiqued the individualisation of their mothering roles and their separation from broader society, insisting that mothering should be more of a collective project and way of being, and that they did not want to do it on their own. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Australia with women who identified their style of mothering as natural or holistic, this paper explores how some of the women attempted to transform their solitary mothering lives by experimenting with ways to feel more emotionally connected and supported by like-minded (m)others, where their overarching strategy was to not mother alone. It examines the pressing need that women have to mother together in spite of the challenges they face, and how they go about connecting with other mothers in an increasingly fragmented society. It analyses the strategies they deployed in their attempts to unwork, skirt around, disrupt or otherwise reconfigure their structured loneliness in an effort to (re)weave and (re)imagine more deeply entangled and supported mothering lifeworlds. Where, in contesting the separations that structurally configure family life in Australia, they were striving to create alternative, less separate futures by mothering together.