“Who Am I Now as a Mother?” Maternal Identity Negotiation During Children’s College Transition

This study employs narrative positioning analysis to examine how two Chinese mothers in transnational contexts discursively negotiate their maternal identities during their children’s transition to college. Drawing on longitudinal narrative interviews, the analysis advances three interrelated theoretical propositions. First, maternal identity work is revealed as a process of selective cultural bricolage, wherein mothers strategically blend elements from competing scripts of child-centered sacrifice, filial reciprocity, and autonomous individualism to construct a hybrid, workable parental logic. Second, the liminality of this transition precipitates a crucial recentering of the self, a core psychological process as intensive child-focused demands recede. Third, the transnational context is reframed as a constitutive condition that intensifies cultural contradictions and uniquely patterns the resources and constraints for identity negotiation, rather than a mere backdrop. By tracing narrative reauthoring across time, the study moves beyond static models of motherhood. It contributes a process-oriented, culturally situated framework for understanding how maternal identity is continually negotiated and constructed at the intersection of personal, familial, and transnational change, thereby advancing both positioning theory and the literature on immigrant family development.