AustLit

'The sociocultural narratives available to mothers of children with disabilities exhort them to resist the impacts of their exclusion from mainstream discourses of motherhood, perform resilience, and re-interpret their marginalisation as a ‘different kind’ of mothering: a re-location. Such narratives function to suppress the complex emotions associated with the profound sense of dislocation experienced by these mothers. Two short pieces of writing are discussed, both of which use geographical metaphors to represent the competing themes of emotional containment versus disruption; the first is a tale widely circulated among families of children with disabilities, and the second is a memoir piece by the author. This discussion draws on the emergent literature by mothers of children with disability and academic research on families of children with disabilities, as well as on insights from Friedman’s work on the geographics of identity. The mother who seeks to write about her own dislocation must be prepared to speak against the dominant scripts that work to deny her emotional responses, while her own entitlement to self-represent is challenged by the compounded impacts of the discourses surrounding motherhood and disability. '  (Publication abstract)