The story of motherhood is told through many voices and in many contexts. When honoured with the task of composing a collective story from our authors’ experiences, we gestured toward the function and power of story to transform. The collection is organized in three movements that mirror the interdependent narrative acts of reflecting, re-imagining, and re-writing. By reflecting, we refer to conscious engagement with experience that makes meaningful connections between past, present, and potential futures, provides context for who we understand ourselves to be, and guides our awareness of the narratives shaping our lives. Only after we become conscious of tired narratives and ontological frameworks that no longer serve, can we be free to re-imagine our experiences: to re-create and reconstruct the very foundations of meaning on which the emplotment of our lives is based. Finally, by re-imagining, we create opportunities to re-write all dimensions of experience (temporal, personal, and cultural) in ways that reclaim and redeem the narrative composition of our lives. When these narrative acts are engaged, we write alternate realities and open futures into existence. Each narrative act is illustrated in the collection by stories that most exemplify its function and power. Stories in the first movement, demonstrate authors’ engagement with the process of reflecting through memory and over time to make sense of experience, in particular, the reality of change and trauma. In the second movement, the act of re-imagining is illustrated as writers challenge limited definitions of care and explore futures beyond convention. Finally, the third movement is dedicated to the act of re-writing in which our authors demonstrate how changes in perspective, and faith in possibility, can be written into our being in ways that transform both the meaning of experience and the evolution of self.

BettyAnn Martin is a narrative scholar interested in the reconstruction of experience through story, and the ways in which creative engagement with memory transforms individual consciousness. She graduated with an MA in English from McMaster University. She went on to complete a bachelor of education from Western, after which she began to teach and raise a family. She is currently enjoying a long hiatus from teaching, but continues to participate in the growth and education of her five children. She returned to academia in 2012, and recently completed a PhD in Educational Sustainability from Nipissing University. In addition to several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, her most recent publication is a co-edited book entitled Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood and Social Media (2016). Through her own experiences of mothering and through a growing literature theorizing motherhood, BettyAnn continues to research and write about motherhood and its implications for identity. She currently resides in Brantford Ontario, with her husband and three school-aged children. Contact: thenarrativeconnection@gmail.com

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Michelann Parr is Professor in the Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University. She holds a BA, BEd, and MEd from Nipissing University; her PhD work was completed at McGill University. As the first-born Italian granddaughter of immigrants, she learned how the world worked in a large extended family and consistently had maternal models to guide her through childhood, support her through the successes and struggles of being mom to three, and celebrate the wondrous moments of being nana to two healthy grandkids. In the spaces between actively and intensively parenting and grandparenting, Parr is the Elizabeth Thorn Chair in Literacy, focusing on literacy-based community outreach and family engagement; she also teaches and supervises at the graduate level. While not new to mothering and academia, she is relatively new to motherhood studies, first exploring the reciprocal relationship between motherhood and academia in “Baby Steps: That Was the Way To Do It!” which appeared in The Parent-Track: Timing, Balance, and Choice within Academia (2016).

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