Content Note

Dee Marco and Kathleen Ebersohn come at the project of mothering with mutual curiosity, but with different modalities and approaches. This is celebrated in their podcast, Mamas with Attitude (MWA) where there are many intersecting elements, themes and positions, yet they muse about mothering and the project of mothering in its multitude of capacities, differently. The podcast can be described as a meandering documentation and contribution to a dialogue of the complexities, joys and violence of the project of mothering. Notably, the way in which Dee and Kathleen have put together this playlist for the Lesser Violence Reading Group is reflective of this approach in the podcast. They have put together two distinctive playlists that speak to our respective current thoughts on community and motherhood. 

Kathleen is currently interested in the ways in which motherhood can be experienced as a trauma or a wound, especially in matrescence, the transition in becoming a mother, and whether stories can be used as a balm for trauma. In thinking through stories as vehicles in which one makes continued renewed meaning, Kathleen has been engaging with the multitude of ways that familial lineage, ancestry and matriarchs act as cornerstones of the mother’s community and the repositories for personal stories and meaning-making. In a way, these can be seen through the lens of inheritance or the provision of a foundation and somewhat of a blueprint.

We use stories to understand our lives and to make meaning. If matrescence is experienced as a trauma or a violence, can familial and ancestral stories assist in playing a fundamental communal support? Who does the work of familial and ancestral story keeping and relaying? The work of story-keeping and meaning-making can assist in containing, encasing, binding and bonding the new mother. This can provide a sense of safety and belonging but it can also be a constraint, it can also act as an additional violence. What happens if the link to one’s generational or ancestral stories is broken through death, distance, alienation or ambivalence? What happens when one doesn’t have access to these stories, for whatever reason? 

Kathleen’s texts speak to these thoughts. No Disclaimers Needed was the first MWA podcast with explicit conversations on postpartum care and community. This podcast took place 8 weeks after the birth of her second son, and as a result, resonated deeply with Kathleen. Megan Ross’ poem and Molly Caro May’s chapter on labour speak to matrescence as traumatic, complex and difficult where there is much to mourn and to celebrate. Kathleen has included a chapter written by Cedric Nunn, her father, on Madhlawu, her great grandmother. This chapter highlights the importance of story-making but also alludes to Madhlawu as a keeper of stories and the grief of this with her passing. Rebecca Solnit’s chapter, Mirrors, is also an interesting examination of one’s relationship to mothers in personal story-making. 

Dee’s interest in the broad topic of motherhood centers on motherhood as performance and as action. This action, best described as motherhood as verb and action, takes on various forms of radical and everyday care seen in experiences and practices. Her interest in thinking about motherhood as a verb is to combine two elements Dee has found repeatedly in personal and anecdotal experiences of motherhood. The first is methods for life and the other is the self. Both, method and self, intersect in the style of writing and visual representation seen in auto-ethnographic material and in the affective experiences of self in critical writing, reading, performance. Dee has chosen three texts. The first is the first two episodes of the first season of The Letdown, an Australian television comedy series. The second is an excerpt from The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and the third an excerpt from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist life.

In each of these texts Dee considers the complexity of viewing oneself as mother, performing radical care and reflecting on a mothering (feminist) life – one that through a post-feminist lens allows for much humour and a middle class sense of self disparity. The texts each intersect with the theme of community in one way or another, something inherent in any discussion about motherhood. We are all familiar with epithets like, “It takes a village to raise a child,” implied is that the village supports the mother and the work of mothering. In the discussion, Dee will touch on each of these texts and how community figures in them.