Middle Grounds

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.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionKathy Mantas and Lorinda PetersonOn a Collision Course? Feminist Ideals and the Mothering Professional in Middle Age Kerri S. KearneyFalling Back, Springing Forward:An Older First-Time Mother’s Experience of Time Kathy MantasBalancing Motherhood, Work, and Mental Health in Midlife: One Mother’s Personal StrugglesAmy Leisenring Beyond Grasping for Straws in the Dark: Hospice as a Model for a Team-Oriented Approach to Mothering in MidlifePamela K. Coke Into and Out of the Fire: A Retrospective JournalCara L. Preuss Institutional Mothering:Middling between University, Home, and Jail Tobi Jacobi Parenting through the FogNiki Kaiser Lilia’s WorldSuzanne Kamata GriefCatherine Moeller Mothering Myself: A Journey with/to the Inner ChildAmy Lee The Benefits and Injuries of Midlife Mothering through an Autoethnographic Lens:Or, Don’t Call Me GrandmaNicole 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 MidlifeElisabeth Hanscombe Mother Unmoored:Letting Myself Be Lost, I Got Found Sheila Martel My Mother’s MotherMargaret Kent Bass Caricaturing Single, Midlife Motherhood inVanity’s Brief Encounters Penelope Mendonça Taking CustodyLorinda 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

“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