Becoming Maddie's mother: An autoethnography on learning to mother with birth trauma

This autoethnographic study on my transformative experiences as a mother living with birth trauma offers important contributions to existing feminist literature by further complexifying mothering narratives and adding to mothering-as-educative scholarship. Autoethnography uses reflexive, analytic, creative and iterative approaches to create new insights into cultural experiences through analyzing personal experiences (Ellis, 2004). I examined my mothering experiences through both an internal and external gaze, holding them up against social norms about motherhood, my own photographic interpretations, my medical records and transcripts of therapy appointments, and myriad other theoretical touchstones to analyze my self-in-culture. Self-reflections about my experiences led to new personal awareness as I did sensemaking work about my early matrescence (auto-). My analysis also amplified my understanding of the ways sociocultural gender and mothering norms shaped my experiences, and the broader ways learning during matrescence is represented, ignored, and mis/understood (ethno-), especially following a traumatic birth. Since most birth trauma and NICU scholarship is in the field of nursing rather than education, I chose not to focus on the ways my experiences aligned with the prevailing trends in existing research. Instead, I analyzed how my trauma and healing manifested in ongoing, embodied ways as I considered my inquiry into the intersections of learning, social positioning, mothering and trauma, using my inquiry questions of “How did I live, mother, and survive following Maddie’s early birth?” and “How did I learn and choose what was best for me after a traumatic birth?” Through writing to inquire (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) as a method, I was able to surface and affirm invisible aspects of my experiences that I struggled to make understood, even to myself, and begin to heal from the embodied consequences. I encountered structural dynamics at work about how mothers might go about their healing and sensemaking as I did, but more importantly my work affirms what all mothers deserve: the space to heal, bear witness to, and validate their own trauma and healing as a process that occurs over time, and for others to see and understand matrescence that includes birth trauma in multidimensional ways.